Holiday dinners.

Madison.

Ah, the winter holidays: time for eating way too much. Unless you're me, spending a week and a half visiting parents and in-laws, where skipping a meal is sometimes preferable to actually eating. When the breakfast choice hangs between heavily-processed packaged foods¹ and nothing, I'll wait until lunch.

Or dinner. Whatever.

Toss in a general disinterest in sweets - late-December holiday sweets being among the most sugar-intense of the year - and it's no wonder I'm itching to cook a meal for anyone who's around at any given time. Even something simple - like omelettes with bacon, caramelized onions and cheddar cheese - tends to go over well with the various folks who either don't cook or don't have time to cook.²

No surprise, then, that we cooked up a few grand meals to keep everyone happy. The first one, a last-minute menu before my brother and his fiancée left for Wisconsin, was a simple affair: a small salad of beets, beet greens and purple carrots; a cream of purple potato soup; a seared and roasted tri-tip steak from Fountain Prairie;³ whole-wheat and ricotta gnocchi; green beans with fresh lemon juice; and a braise of mushrooms and sweet onions in red wine. Then, for dessert, we had whole-wheat crepes, stuffed with fresh ricotta, strawberry jam and goat cheese, and topped with a rich lemon-egg sauce.⁴

The big meal, though, was the Christmas gift from Sharon and I to her parents, as well as a group of their friends - 9 in total. This was complicated by the following:

• Sharon's mom is really limited in what she can eat, texture-wise, to avoid the risk of her either choking or being unable to chew and swallow things. This meal was primarily for her, since she's unable to go out anymore, so it wasn't fair to prepare a nice meal for the others, then do something different for her.
  
  
• Sharon's parents' kitchen is well, kind of bare-bones. Most of the pots and pans are really thin metal, and just about everything is non-stick. It's better by my folks, but you still end up without the occasional thing you'd consider standard, like a cheese grater.
  
  
• My parents were invited to the dinner, as well as a number of people I didn't know at all. I know my mom's dietary restrictions, so those were easy to dance around, but everything needed to be simple enough to eliminate potentially unwanted ingredients at the last possible moment.
  
  
• We wanted the meal to highlight those things that Sharon's parents really like, but they're not particularly helpful in that regard. Asking them directly results in responses like "Oh, I'm sure anything you make will be fine."

With all of that in mind, I put together a tentative menu to run past them for approval, which became the final menu without any significant changes.⁵ Though it was pretty funny when they thought that the second course was the main course, and we had to explain that there were still plenty more to go. Here's the menu we finally served:

amuse-bouche
asparagus, mushroom and lemon risotto

first course: soup
carrot and ginger soup, with spinach and roasted garlic puree, yogurt and fried onions

second course: seafood
seared scallops with bacon, orange and mustard cream sauce, and fresh asparagus

third course: pasta
blue cheese gnocchi with pear-white wine sauce, port wine reduction and toasted walnuts

fourth course: meat
braised beef with butternut squash spaetzle, and fresh green beans with lemon vinaigrette

fifth course: dessert
fresh ricotta with blackberry-port sauce and roasted apples

mignardises
rosemary-scented shortbread cookies
chocolate truffles

It went over extremely well, and I'm quite happy about that. A few notes on the food details:

• I had really wanted to find some good, southeast-Asian fried shallots for the soup, but the Asian food selection in Downingtown is pretty limited. So I went with good, old, French's fried onions. The kind you usually find atop a cream-of-[insert vegetable here]-based casserole. Worked just fine.
  
  
• The bacon that accompanied the scallops was also in the package from Fountain Prairie. And, damn, was it ever a fine pairing with those scallops. As was the cream sauce, with consisted entirely of heavy cream, blood orange juice, dijon mustard and a little salt.
  
  
• Blue cheese works pretty well for gnocchi. I replaced half of the ricotta with a soft blue, and it lent a subtle flavor to the finished pasta. I also finally figured out the trick for properly rolling gnocchi off a fork to get that football-ish ridged shape, but haven't figured out how to explain it just yet.
  
  
• The pear-white wine sauce was really just a chunky applesauce, made with ripe anjou pears and a lot of riesling. I was going for the the classic combination of blue cheese pairings of port, pears and walnuts.
  
  
• I didn't actually toast the walnuts. I over-toasted the first batch, and didn't have time enough to get more ready to send out. In an open kitchen, where every move is visible from the dining room, I had to be really sneaky to get the burnt tray of nuts into the garage, out of the range of sight and smell.
  
  
• The braised beef was a beef cheek from, of course, Fountain Prairie. Sharon's parents have been making fun of us for eating it, though I don't see why it's any weirder than eating any other cow muscle. So we didn't tell them until afterwards, when her dad said something about how amazingly good it was. He no longer seemed creeped out by it.⁶
  
  
• The blackberry-port sauce was pretty much just that. A bag of frozen blackberries, a third of a bottle of port, and a cup of sugar or so. Simmer for half an hour and strain to get all the seeds out. A little pectin'd make it into a mighty fine jam.
  
  
• The chocolate truffles were another Wisconsin special, from Gail Ambrosius. All I want to know is this: Doesn't anyone other than me appreciate the goodness of chocolate and Indian curry? At least my dad'll eat the chilli-chocolate truffle.

* * * * *

¹Such as frozen "French toast sticks" or other high-fructose corn syrup-based food products.

²That'd be our families, especially around the holidays, when just keeping the house tidy is a full-time job.

³Sent via FedEx, along with a boxful of other goodies intended for Christmas gifts. It was alarming to have regular, supermarket, corn-fed beef another night, and to taste the difference. The supermarket stuff was almost flavorless, by contrast.

⁴Kind of like a thinner version of lemon curd. I think the Joy called it "Rich Hot Lemon Sauce".

⁵Any changes were based on what we could find at the grocery store.

⁶It was just in a simple braise of whatever lager was in the fridge with onions, carrots, rosemary and sundried tomatoes.

On Coffee.

Madison.

I love coffee. But my particular style of coffee appreciation doesn't encompass massive, or even necessarily frequent, consumption. Caffeine makes me, for lack of a better term, wiggy. And besides, I'm more than willing to shell out a fair price for good coffee, which is harder to find than you'd think. Primary reason: most folks have probably never had good coffee. After all, when less than 2% of world coffee production is really top-grade, it's not the easiest thing to find.

I've been thinking about coffee, of late, especially as I've had the time to brew some in the lazy mornings of my end-of-the-year vacation. So, in case you ever wondered about where coffee comes from, here's more information than you ever wanted to know. (I used to work for Johnson Brothers Coffee Roasters, here in Madison, so I like to pretend I know what I'm talking about.) Check the links below for a series of digressions.

* * * * *

Coffee: Production.
Coffee: Roasting.
Coffee: Brewing.
Coffee: Flavors.

Coffee: Production.

Madison.

Coffee: from the tree to the cup. In brief, here's a rundown¹ on modern coffee production:

1. Coffee grows on bushy trees native to east Africa, though they've since spread around the world. The red berries are still prized in certain regions, such as Yemen, and are gaining ground in some trendy processed foods, but chances are that most of us will never see one. Until the 14^th century, when someone discovered the magic of the roasted seeds, the berries were the only reason anyone was interested in the trees.
   
   
2. There are two primary types of coffee trees. Coffea arabica - with its two subspecies, var. typica and var. bourbon - is responsible for the good, well-balanced coffees of the world. These trees grow best at high altitudes, generally producing higher quality beans at higher elevations, ideally 5,000 to 7,500 feet above sea level. They're low-volume producers - sometimes as little as a pound per tree per year once mature - that prefer shade, regular rainfall, and warm, steady year-round temperatures.
   
   Coffea canephora, or robusta, on the other hand, is a hardy, disease-resistant tree that produces large quantities of beans, doesn't mind full sun, and makes for a bitter, terrible coffee. The dominant flavors of robusta beans are burnt rubber and wet cardboard.
   
   
3. To produce coffee, the berries are harvested from the trees all at once. Defects - including varying degrees of ripeness, insect damage, mold, etc. - are dealt with through later processing. The berry skins are removed, then the mucilage - the fruity matter - is fermented off. What remains is a pair² of seeds, called beans. At this stage, they're called 'green' beans.
   
   
4. Traditionally, the processors float the beans through a series of channels filled with flowing water to separate them into three (or more) general groups. Denser beans are more desirable than lighter beans, and floaters are completely worthless. This process, though simple, does a pretty good job of sorting out defective beans; better producers and processors will be more careful here, eliminating more beans that they could potentially sell in exchange for a higher quality (and a higher price). The sorted beans are then dried, either on concrete patios in the sun or in mechanical dryers.
   
   
5. This is where the coffee brokers step in. Through a bizarre series of commodities-trading shenanigans³, the Big Four coffee roasters have managed to drive the price of coffee beans very low, but it's still a wild market. In order to get good beans - you can't make bad coffee beans taste good - you have to know the right green brokers. You have to be someone with influence, or hire a person like that in order to even have a chance to taste and buy the best beans.⁴ Roasters purchase green beans by the bag - roughly 60 to 70 kg.⁵ Large quantities of them, usually - at least 10 to 20 bags. Futures are sold in containers, meaning 250 bags, or about 37,500 pounds of coffee beans.
   
   
6. This is when your friendly, neighborhood roaster takes over. A good roaster - i.e., not Starbucks⁶ - will take care to roast beans regularly, providing them to you (or your favorite coffee shop or restaurant) while still fresh. Roasting's a complicated process, if you want to get it right, and takes a lot of skill and practice. A good roaster adjusts the roast profile for each different type of bean, further adjusting to respond to moisture loss as the beans age, aiming to emphasize the best qualities of each particular coffee. There are a great variety of ways to roast coffee, beyond just medium vs. dark roast, and it pays to find a good roaster who can consistently produce the characteristics that you like.
   
   
7. Then, you brew. Coffee brewing has many, many different forms, and I won't pretend to be familiar with all of them. Each tries, in some way, to extract the good parts of the coffee bean in water - about 20% of the bean's weight - while leaving behind the extractible-but-unpleasant bits - another 10% of the bean. (There are a few methods - mostly ancient ones around the Middle East - that leave all of the bean in the cup.)

* * * * *

¹As I understand it. As a former professional coffee roaster, I've got the notes (and memories) from my former job, as well as Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking for references. That said, a lot of folks disagree over a lot of things when it comes to coffee, in no small part because the professionals - roasters, brokers, etc. - tend to keep their secrets close. For example, out of respect for my former boss, I won't be divulging any of his roasting secrets here.

²Some older trees will start to produce a single seed, called a peaberry. A number of Tanzanian coffees are marketed this way, though it doesn't really mean anything in terms of quality.

³About half of the world's coffee production is bought up by the Big Four: Sara Lee, Kraft, Procter & Gamble and Nestlé. These companies managed to crash the price of coffee by storing large amounts of nigh-undrinkable robusta beans in their warehouses, building it up so that supply exceeded demand.^a Down came the price of coffee futures, destroying the lives of coffee growers around the world. Coffee prices have yet to recover.

^aNote: green coffee beans don't have an exceptional shelf life. Under controlled temperature and humidity, you've got a year or so until they start to lose their good qualities. Not that these beans they withheld - stuff like Vietnamese robusta, which tastes like burnt rubber - had much going for them, but the commodities market didn't care. Those same beans sat in warehouses for years, entirely unusable, serving primarily to increase profits for the Big Four at the expense of the world's coffee growers. Who, it should be noted, are among some of the poorest farmers on the planet.

⁴Brokers are salesmen. They will tell you that the sample of beans that they sent you is the best stuff they have, even if it's the worst. Most small roasters aren't aware that they're never seeing the sort of beans they ought to be roasting; most of them aren't aware that there's anything better than what they're able to get.

⁵You really learn to appreciate how heavy a bag is when you're doing the monthly inventory, weighing bag after bag. A newly opened bag, used for just a few pounds before the end of the month rolled around, was the bane of my existence.

⁶Man, I could rant against Starbucks for days, but I'll limit it to one anecdote:

When I was roasting coffee, we got a shipment of some really great Colombian coffee, called La Florencia. Except that Florencia, in Caquetá, doesn't produce coffee. It was actually a batch of top-notch coffee from Nariño, a nearby department.

Starbucks, in its effort to maximize profits, decided that it would purchase the entire Nariño coffee crop, and made a deal with the processors to lower the price in exchange for buying in bulk. Nariño, like much of Colombia, was already producing coffee for lower prices than beans of similar quality elsewhere, so this represented a serious loss of income, particularly for the high-quality growers. One farmer was so incensed by this that he smuggled his crop to Florencia, selling it there for a price he could afford to live on.

If I recall correctly, we were paying $1.32 per pound for that coffee, and it was a steal. Starbucks was paying less than $1.10 per pound. (Significantly less than a living wage.) So whenever they make some sort of claim about supporting coffee farmers, I know they're lying. Starbucks, as a corporation, doesn't care about the quality of life of coffee growers, unless it can somehow boost their bottom line.

(Here's a map of Colombia, if you're interested.)

Coffee: Roasting.

Madison.

Coffee: the roasting process. You could, conceivably, find an alternate use for green coffee beans,¹ but, as Harold McGee writes: "Raw green coffee beans are as hard as unpopped popcorn, and about as tasty."

Coffee roasting turns these little green BBs into brown, brittle packages, developing their flavors through a careful application of heat. Anyone can do it at home, though a frying pan or a modified popcorn air-popper does lack some of the subtle control that the professional drum roaster offers. In general, the process goes like this, regardless of your choice of roasting apparatus:

1. The roaster heats the green beans over a fairly high heat. They're endothermic at this point, absorbing heat as their temperature increases. Slowly, they'll begin to change color from gray-green to a dull yellow and take on a faint aroma of hay, around three minutes².
   
   
2. The beans continue to change color and aroma, from yellow/hay (three to five minutes) to gray-brown/bread (six minutes) to cinnamon/coffee (eight minutes) - and they begin to expand as the remaining moisture vaporizes, puffing up the beans. Throughout this process, an experienced roaster can smell the beans to gain an sense of the flavors that will be present in the final roast. In the even you're considering this as something to try at home, beware that the beans will start smoking here. A lot. All of the bean's proteins, sugars, phenols, etc., start to break down, producing all of the great variety of coffee flavors and aromas, while giving off lots and lots of smoke. (Invest in a really good ventilation system, or do it outside.)
   
   
3. At about nine minutes, the beans reach the "first crack", which is the point where the chemical breakdown becomes self-sustaining and the beans become exothermic (about 320°F). Since they're putting off energy, the roaster needs to reduce the heat to avoid burning the beans, which will give them a harsh, unpleasant flavor. The first crack is where the steam pressure inside the beans causes them to pop, with a sound a lot like popcorn, starting with a few sporadic beans before it suddenly erupts in a wave of popping sounds.
   
   
4. Depending on the hardness of the bean, which is primarily a function of altitude - beans from lower altitudes are considered "soft", and can't take as much heat without burning - the roaster may then choose to apply extra heat to finish the roasting. At about twelve to thirteen minutes, the beans will enter the "second crack", which is where the natural sugars begin to caramelize. It sounds very much like a series of small cracks, as the beans themselves deform enough to produce small cracks or, in some cases, break pieces off.
   
   
5. When the beans have reached the desired level of roast, the roaster cools them down with a flow of cold air, usually stirring the beans to bring them down to room temperature as quickly as possible to stop the roasting process.

There are an unbelievable variety of final roast levels, and no one really seems to have agreed on what "dark roast" and "espresso roast" mean, exactly. Part of that is due to the fact that different styles of roasting - the subtleties not mentioned in the above that give each roaster their signature flavors - give varying end results within the "medium-dark-French" roast range. Here's one approximate breakdown of some typical roast levels you might see:

• Light roast. This would be any roast that never made it to the second crack, and you don't see them often. The aromas are often underdeveloped at this point; the coffee's natural sweetness is subdued; and the coffee's acidity is very high and often unpleasant.
  
  
• Medium roast. A medium roast should be the best expression of a coffee's character, with the roasting stopped just as it reaches the second crack. At this point, the aromas and flavors that are part of the bean itself - as opposed to the flavors of the roast - are fully expressed, and haven't been driven off by further roasting. A high-quality coffee will be naturally sweet at this point, but coffees with defects - meaning 98% of the coffee out there - will have varying degrees of bitterness that make them unpleasant.
  
  
• Dark roast. A dark roast coffee has usually been roasted until the second crack is nearly complete,³ but not quite. The Maillard reactions produce more sugars, resulting in a sweeter coffee that can disguise the bitterness of mid-grade beans. It also produces more flavors of the roast, such as toast, cooked beef, and roast coffee.⁴ The downside is that many of the delicate, complex aromas have already started to disappear, though there are some coffees that benefit from a darker roast. A small amount of natural oils may appear on the surface of the beans.
  
  
• French roast. This roast has pushed all of the way through the second crack, resulting in a coffee with intense roast flavors and very little, if any, of the bean's aromas remaining. The telltale aroma of a French roast is maple syrup, though there are often notes of toast and smoke, especially as the coffee runs the risk of burning by this point. Ruptured cells start leaking oils to the surface of the beans, giving them a definite gloss. There is also a significant amount of caramelized sugar⁵, as well as the creation of new, harsh flavors from the Maillard reactions. The high sugar content of French roasts makes them good candidates for the high-pressure, short-time extraction used in making espresso.
  
  
• Italian roast. Just short of completely burnt, this is a roast sometimes used for espresso. There are no real aromas left, and the development of harsh, bitter flavors overwhelms any developed sugars. The distinct aroma of an Italian roast? Fish.

In addition to roast level, roast date is a critical piece of information in finding good beans. The roasting process develops enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, which the beans expel over the next several days. Enough that it's all but impossible to keep them in a completely closed container; any sealed bag of coffee will have a small, one-way air valve to let the excess gas escape, pre-explosion. Though this does prevent staling due to oxygen, the production of carbon dioxide helps volatilize the delicate oils that give the coffee its distinct aroma, so its quality begins to fade away quickly.

Coffee is best when made one or two days after roasting, when the aromas are still present. It'll still be good, without any noticeable stale flavor, for at least ten days after roasting. Grinding, however, greatly accelerates the staling process, and you can notice a definite loss of flavor in just a few hours. Ground coffee will stale in just a few days.

In case you're interested in home-roasting, you can give it a go with anything from a cast-iron skillet to a countertop roaster, which is like a miniature version of the gas-fired drum roasters used by professionals. Check out Sweet Maria's for a good selection of high-quality stuff, including better green beans than you'll find just about anywhere else.⁶ Just want to buy some good beans? Get 'em from Sweet Maria's or Johnson Brothers Coffee Roasters.

* * * * *

¹Like in Brazil in the '70s, when they were strongly considering the use of low-grade beans - most of Brazil's crop makes harsh, thin coffee - as fuel for steam locomotives.

²The times here are estimates, assuming you want to finish the roasting process in about twelve to fifteen minutes. Less than ten minutes produces sour flavors, while longer than twenty gives the coffee a baked aroma. A good roaster adjusts the heat applied throughout the process to, ideally, bring in every medium-roast batch at the same time.

³Better sorted - i.e., more uniform - beans will tend to reach the first and second cracks as a group, relatively close together, but it's still a period that stretches over thirty seconds or a minute, depending. Less uniform batches of beans run the risk of over- or under-roasting portions of the coffee, resulting in a mess of off-flavors.

⁴This is not a joke. Roast coffee is a standard aroma in coffee, and is present in all roast levels, but at different amounts. It also tends to be one that remains in coffee over time, after all of the other aromas have dissipated.

⁵The reason this roast was developed and is so frequently used is that the high development of sugars covers the natural bitterness of coffee defects. It also allows larger roasters - particularly the big corporations - to maintain a more consistent product, since variations among French roasts are far less than among medium roasts.

⁶You're paying well above normal green bean prices, for the privilege of having access to Tom Owen's pre-approved selections. Every coffee he'd sell you is one that he's already roasting and selling, himself.

Coffee: Brewing.

Madison.

Coffee: how to brew it. There are a lot of methods for brewing coffee, each with their ups and downs. A sampling:

• The drip brewer, the American standard. Water drains through a bed of grounds, passing through a fine mesh filter of either paper or metal. Generally has a light body, with the possibility for good flavor,¹ and it keeps well if you don't drink it all at once. One of the biggest drawbacks of most drip brewers is that you have very little control over the brewing process.
  
  
• The percolator, the worst idea ever. Ever notice how a coffee percolator fills the kitchen with the wonderful aroma of coffee? That's because it's no longer in the coffee. Percolators often end up boiling the grounds, and passing the water through the grounds repeatedly, resulting in overextraction and bitterness. If you like how it makes the house smell like coffee, go ahead and do it, but make sure you brew up another batch via some other method for actual consumption.
  
  
• The French press, which was actually developed by an Italian. Go figure. This is my preferred method, because it permits the fullest range of control over all of the brewing variables, resulting in a consistent cup every time. It produces a full-bodied cup, with lots of flavor, but the resulting tiny bits of ground coffee mean it continues to extract, becoming bitter over time. It's good while it's still hot, but you might as well toss it after it's reached room temperature; it's best to make only as much as you want at the moment, then another pot later.
  
  
• Espresso, which is all but impossible to do (well) at home. Given the fine grind necessary, as well as the necessary water temperature and pressure, it's all but impossible to make a good cup of espresso at home. Espresso relies on forcing steam through well-packed, finely ground coffee to extract the readily available sugars in a short period of time. Even more than in other brewing methods, freshness is absolutely critical for espresso, in order to get the highly desirable crema.

If you want to make the best possible cup of coffee, I'd recommend going with the French press. It allows you control over the greatest number of variables, though it does require some serious thought and experimentation to get the process right. Here's what you need to keep in mind:

1. You'll need to have the following equipment handy:
   
   • A French press.
     
   • A kettle for boiling water. Electric or stovetop is fine.
     
   • An adjustable burr grinder. (More on grinders below.)
     
   • A timer.
     
   • A scale capable of weighing in one-gram increments.
     
   • A spoon.
   
   
2. Start by weighing out your coffee. For a one-liter French press, I've settled on sixty grams of coffee, but that may vary, depending on your water quality, preferred grind, steeping time, etc. You'll want to weigh it, because different coffees - especially at different roast levels² - have different densities. You may want to test it several times with varying amounts until you get a cup that's not overextracted (bitter) or underextracted (thin).
   
   
3. Grind the coffee beans; you'll want it coarse. Exactly how coarse depends on your taste and the limitations of your grinder, but it may take several batches to fine-tune everything. Start with a coarser grind than you might expect, and get it progressively finer with each test batch. Keep making it finer until you begin to get a bit of bitterness in the cup, then back up the grind a little.
   
   
4. Boil your water. If you don't like the taste of your tap water, run it through a carbon filter.³ You'll want it just off the boil, at about 190°-195°F.
   
   
5. Set your timer for four and a half minutes. The ideal extraction time is usually between four and five minutes for most brewing methods.
   
   
6. Put the ground coffee in the carafe, then pour the hot water over top, being sure to wet all of the grounds evenly. You can stir it, briefly, if need be. Be sure to start your timer as soon as the first grounds are wet. Fresh coffee will bubble as the carbon dioxide in the beans escapes, hastened by the heat, so you may need to tap the carafe to settle things down.
   
   
7. When the timer goes off, break the crust on top with the spoon. As you do this, get your nose in there as close as you can, and take a whiff just as the crust breaks. You'll get the best, most intense aroma at this moment, as the volatile molecules have been trapped just beneath the grounds. Give it all a quick stir, then place the plunger on top, pushing down in one fluid motion to strain the grounds from the coffee.
   
   
8. Pour immediately into cups. Proper etiquette for pouring is to only pour a half cup in the first, second, etc., until filling the last cup, then going backwards to top off. The full body of French press coffee is due to tiny, suspended particles, and there are more of them at the end of the pour than at the beginning. By staggering the pours, everyone ends up with the same cup. If you have extra coffee, pour it off of the grounds; it will only continue to get bitter as it sits on them.

If you'd still prefer to work with a drip brewer, it's worth looking into a burr grinder and a scale to ensure a consistent grind and quantity of coffee per pot. Do remember, though, that a half pot will take more than half the coffee to produce the same-tasting coffee, due to the way the water drains through the bed of grounds.

As for grinders, there are several options, depending on what you like. Some common options include:

• The mortar and pestle. If you're making coffee the ancient Ethiopian/Middle Eastern way, this is how to do it. Unless, of course, you'd prefer to do it between two flat stones. Granted, this isn't a common option, but it is authentic. Making coffee like this involves adding the finely ground beans into a pot with sugar, then boiled two or three times before serving. Don't forget the sugar; it's pretty much unpalatable without.
  
  
• The grinder inside the coffee maker. This sounds like a terrible idea, but I'll wager they're selling like hotcakes for gifts this season. Not only do you have no control over grind size or quantity, but what happens when just one little piece of the expensive all-in-one coffee maker breaks?
  
  
• The electric blade grinder. Most everyone has one of these, but they're not great. It's impossible to get a consistent grind, especially for something like a French press, that wants it coarse; there's invariably a lot of fine dust to make the coffee more bitter. In addition, they can also produce a lot of heat during grinding, which can volatilize some of the coffee's aroma away before it even gets in the pot.
  
  
• The burr grinder. They come in electric or manual versions.⁴ Rather than a chopping propeller blade, burr grinders use a pair of interlocking gears that shear the bean into pieces that only pass through when they're small enough to fit between the gears - the grind dimension that you set. In addition, the beans are only in contact with the gears for a brief time, and so don't end up pulverized or overheated in the process.

* * * * *

¹Assuming you have a good drip brewer. Top-grade professional models - since there are plenty of sub-par ones out there - take care to get the right brew temperature, extraction time, and an even wetting of the grounds. Home models run the gamut from "not bad" to "genuinely awful".

²Coffee beans expand as they roast longer, so a dark roast takes up more volume than a medium roast. Also, if you're working by volume, you're running into the issue of how the coffee bean fragments pack and settle in the scoop. A 2-tablespoon scoop can hold anywhere from 8 to 12g of ground coffee, which is too much leeway to make a consistent cup.

³If it's still nasty, you may want to use bottled spring water. Overly hard water will prevent the coffee from properly extracting - as will distilled water - and any taints, such as chlorine, will result in funky off-flavors.

⁴Mine's a manual grinder from Zassenhaus, a German company. Sweet Maria's carries (or, well used to) a full line of their grinders, which feature smooth adjustability, enabling you to get the perfect grind, every time. The downside of a manual mill is the amount of time and effort it takes. A coarse grind for the French press is quick and easy, but a fine grind for espresso can take forever, and is probably better left to an electric version.

Coffee: Flavors.

Madison.

Coffee: because it tastes so good.

Ever wonder why coffee has such intriguingly complex flavors and aromas? Here are a few nuggets of information from Harold McGee:

"As the bean's color becomes darker than medium brown, the distinctive aromas characteristic of prized beans become overwhelmed by the more generic roasted flavors - or, conversely, the flavor of second-rate beans become less obvious."

...and...

"More than 800 aroma compounds have been identified, and they supply notes that are described as nutty, chocolate-like, cinnamon, tea, honeyed, caramel, bready, roasty, spicy, even winy and gamy.

If you're really feeling it, check out these two flavor wheels created by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). It's well worth noting that not all of the possible flavors are good things. Some - like, say, skunky - are hideous, hideous faults.

You can also splurge and purchase the professional coffee aroma kit, Le Nez du Cafe. It's a collection of the most typical aromas in fine coffees, as concentrated, volatile essences. You can probably imagine most of them, but it definitely helps to have a specific aroma available to jog your memory when trying to identify a specific aroma. The kit includes 36 aromas, arranged in groups that correspond to the chemical processes that produce them:

• Enzymatic
  
  • Flowery
    
    • Coffee Blossom
      
    • Tea Rose
      
    • Honeyed
    
    
  • Fruity
    
    • Lemon
      
    • Apple
      
    • Apricot
    
    
  • Herbal
    
    • Garden Peas
      
    • Potato
      
    • Cucumber
  
  
• Sugar Browning
  
  • Caramelly
    
    • Caramel
      
    • Fresh Butter
      
    • Roasted Peanuts
    
    
  • Nutty
    
    • Roasted Hazelnuts
      
    • Roasted Almonds
      
    • Walnuts
    
    
  • Chocolatey
    
    • Dark Chocolate
      
    • Vanilla
      
    • Toast
  
  
• Dry Distillation
  
  • Spicy
    
    • Pepper
      
    • Clove-like
      
    • Coriander Seed
    
    
  • Resinous
    
    • Maple Syrup
      
    • Black Currant-like
      
    • Cedar
    
    
  • Pyrolitic
    
    • Malt
      
    • Roasted Coffee
      
    • Pipe Tobacco
  
  
• Aromatic Taints¹
  
  • Earthy
    
    • Earth
      
    • Leather
      
    • Straw
    
    
  • Fermented
    
    • Coffee Pulp
      
    • Basmati Rice
      
    • Medicinal
    
    
  • Phenolic
    
    • Rubber
      
    • Cooked Beef
      
    • Smoke

* * * * *

¹Despite the fact that they're referred to as "taints", these aren't all bad things. Some, like medicinal and cooked beef aromas, lend structure to the other aromas when present in small amounts.

Brakhage.

Madison.

I've completed watching what I believe to be the most bizarre collection of film I've ever seen: By Brakhage: An Anthology, a selection of Stan Brakhage's films released on DVD by The Criterion Collection. It contains, in total, twenty-six films running 243 minutes, but it took me nearly eight hours to make it through all. Every so often - sometimes in the middle of a film - I'd have to take a break. It's intense.

Just to give a brief overview of Brakhage and his work, as I understand things:

• Brakhage's work is grounded more in poetry than cinema. Though he notes, on the DVD, that he greatly enjoys Hollywood movies, it doesn't appear that he ever made a film even remotely close to Hollywood's aesthetic. He made films, yes, but more analogous to paintings than to any sort of narrative medium.
  
  
• His early films are primarily shots of actual things, though scenes are cut up, overlaid on top of each other - up to four different reels in the case of Dog Star Man - and otherwise garbled. Later, he began painting and scratching the film itself, sometimes over exposed images, sometimes on blank or fully exposed film. In essence, he began creating films without a camera.
  
  
• Most of his films have no sound; he explains that he feels any sound would be a distraction from what's on screen. Sometimes, especially during his longer pieces, I found myself wishing there were something to listen to, but couldn't possibly imagine what would fit with the images I was watching. Some sort of hyper-frenetic John Zorn composition, maybe.
  
  
• Brakhage's films explore, in his words, "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," and he had no qualms about showing deeply disturbing images. Dog Star Man features snippets from the birth of his daughter, overlaid with solar flares and shots of the Colorado wilderness; Window Water Baby Moving is much of the same footage, no longer obscured by other imagery. Then there's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, which the DVD prefaces with this warning:
  

  PLEASE BE ADVISED: This film consists
  entirely of footage of actual autopsies.

  It does. It's both disturbing¹ and fascinating. Like when the coroner's thumbprint leaves a dent in flesh, where a living person's body would have sprung back. Or when slicing open the skin produces no blood, just a layer of skin and subcutaneous fat that's drawn back for... whatever they're doing, exactly. With no sound, and a constant shifting from one autopsy to the next, you're left without the sort of context that might let you linger on one, specific corpse for too long. It's eerily disengaging.
  
  
• An experimental icon, Brakhage even took to taping objects to film to see what would happen. The most famous of these is Mothlight, which, like many of his hand-painted films, is as fascinating frame-by-frame as it is at 24 fps. You can see individual frames from a number of his works on Fred Camper's Brakhage website. Seeing them in this format, with frames laid out as they were during the painting process, gives another level of understanding and appreciation for the work.
  
  
• Regardless of what you think of the overall craziness of Brakhage's work - and there's craziness aplenty - it's worth noting the amount of effort and craft that went into this. When working directly on (usually 16mm) film, he could only complete one quarter- to one half-second's worth of film in a day. Some of his later works were several minutes long, representing a phenomenal amount of work for something that, until the creation of this DVD,² flitted past in a barely-recognizable instant. Some of them, particularly those in Nightmusic, are absolutely beautiful.

Suffice to say, it's a lot collected onto two DVDs. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to watch over and over again, but I'm glad to have seen it. I'm still not sure what to make of it all.

If you'd like to see an example, YouTube has a few Brakhage films. They're a little lackluster - the digital compression makes a blurry mess of the frantic eruptions of color - but it's enough to get an idea. See The Garden of Earthly Delight for a series of montane flora taped to a reel of film; The Dante Quartet is a good example of his painting technique.

And, speaking of abstract, modern art, I went to see the current exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday, Alyson Shotz: Topologies. The artist was there to discuss her work, and a group of math grad students went over to check it out. (Then we went out for drinks.)

The exhibit had good and bad. It's contemporary art, which, free from the rigorous forms and styles of traditional arts, means it's open to a wide range of interpretation. Ms. Schotz admitted this much herself, explaining that she often creates a piece, then tries to determine what it means to her. Okay. Works for me.

Except that she sometimes had extra layers of meaning that weren't apparent, which she used as the crux in understanding the work. My general thought is that if, say, you need to know that the work consists of hyperbolic paraboloids that may or may not represent the shape of the universe in order to see it as more than a pretty pile of crumpled paper, perhaps that ought to be noted beside the little plaque bearing the work's title. It's one thing to be able to seek out a deeper, multilayered, more personal appreciation of a work of art, but I'm less than thrilled by art that's intentionally obscure.

Even that I can look past, brushing it off as plain pretension, a sort of myopia imposed by focusing on one's own work all day, every day.³ But there were two specific things that dug under my skin at the exhibit.

One: Ms. Shotz admitted to having an assistant who helps put together a lot of her work; on at least one piece, she said, her assistant had done all of the work. The assistant's name was not noted anywhere.

Two: The level of craft on most of the works was shoddy, at best. Regardless of the artistic merit, several of the pieces were just... poorly made. I'd be embarrassed to have my name on a piece like Cocoon. (Detail here.) Given the delicacy and translucency of the materials used to construct it - glass beads and fresnel lenses - she chose to use staples to hold it all together. Metal staples. The sort you might use to hold together your construction paper projects in elementary school. And the Forced Bloom series, while interesting enough in concept, are examples of genuinely poor computer graphics skills.⁴

Allusion of Gravity was nice, though. Note: it's more impressive at a distance.

* * * * *

¹Not the most disturbing film I've ever seen. I've been mulling over this, and I think the award - at least, of the films I've seen - goes to The Battle of Algiers. Not Cronenberg's most visceral work, or George Romero's zombie films, or anything that looks like a movie. The Battle of Algiers looks almost like a documentary, which is why the vicious scenes of torture - brief, not bloody, but looking entirely real - turn my stomach. Even more so is the scene, just before the torture, where FLN bombs explode in the bleachers at the horse races, a place filled with wealthy French spectators. An enraged mob converges on a small Algerian boy selling concessions, beating him unconscious until the police lift him out. You don't see any of the explicit violence, as it's hidden by the bodies of the mob, but the scene is so stark and brutal that I find it extremely difficult to watch.

²As near as I can tell, the Criterion DVD is the first time Brakhage's work has been made available digitally. The greatest benefit of this is that you can step through it, frame by frame, examining each as you would a painting in a gallery. Indeed, it's very much like a collection of thousands upon thousands of unique works of abstract art.

³This is a special talent that many architects (and related designers) have, in my experience. It most often occurs when they begin to think they're designing spaces for aesthetics first, and practicality second.

⁴I refuse to send out any graphics work that looks as choppy about the edges as those pieces do. She's a professional, in a field that should have a finer attention to detail than mine.

O I Sleep.

Madison.

I've been on a serious Mogwai kick of late. Just about any day, at any time, I'd be happy putting some Mogwai on in the background, but it's been really ramped up for the past several weeks. I think a good bit of it had to do with NaNoWriMo. Their dynamic soundscapes and general atmosphere of desolation fit right in with the Western/horror mix,¹ especially without the distraction of comprehensible lyrics. Plus, I've been obsessed with their music since... '98? Before Come On Die Young, but after the Kicking A Dead Pig + Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes double-disc release.

Recently, I've particularly been enjoying listening to "My Father My King", their interpretation of a traditional Rosh Hashanah hymn, while hunting out John Zorn's Masada² stuff on YouTube. Seth's really gotten me turned on to Zorn's stuff, and though I can't pretend to like all of it - if you're making experimental music,³ some of it's going to fall flat, or just not work for some folks - I'm enjoying much more of it than I'd expected. Mogwai don't have the lively unpredictability of Zorn's free jazz-inspired work - or the maddening blur of complexity-bleeding-into-confusion that entails - but they benefit greatly from the more rigorous form and composition of their songs. Each song has an overarching wholeness, a uniting theme under which they operate. It lets them do what they do best, better than anyone else I've ever heard: explore a massive dynamic range.

You can get a good sense of this from their albums, particularly Young Team. Though, for perhaps their finest recording, try "Like Herod" from Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996 - 2003, which is darker and more intense than the Young Team version. "Like Herod", simply put, is their finest work.

Should you really wish to experience Mogwai's music, you need to see them live. Or get a stereo system that you can get so loud - without losing the music quality, of course - that you can feel your insides twisting and shaking.⁴ Seth and I were discussing loud music, and he commented that there were certain sensations he'd only ever heard described, never felt, until he caught a Mogwai show. There may be other bands as loud, but not many. You can't watch Mogwai play without earplugs, but part of the necessary experience is the near-painful whole-body vibrations that accompany a sudden explosion of sound.⁵ At the first show of theirs I caught,⁶ they were extraordinarily loud, to a level I've not again experienced. They were playing the TLA in Philadelphia, and hadn't yet started selling earplugs at their shows, though my friends and I had the good sense to pick some up on the way.

I clearly remember the loudest moment of the show. At one point, late into "Like Herod", the music gets about as quiet as can be, with just Stuart delicately plinking on one or two very high-pitched guitar strings. Then, without warning, both guitarists and the bassist leap into the air, landing on their effects pedals and hitting the strings at the same instant. The girl standing directly in front of me - we were maybe four or five back from the stage - clapped her hands over her ears and dropped to the ground.

Brilliant.

Since then, I've been collecting almost all of their stuff, excepting a few releases that are too difficult to find without resorting to eBay.⁷ Even their cover of Link's "Arcadian" on the Warp Records 10th Annniversary remix compilation. Technically, it's a cover, since their "remix" doesn't include a single bit of the original Link track, but it's excellent. It's a lot like Juno's cover of DJ Shadow's "High Noon", the translation of an electronic/sample track to electric guitars and drums. Best song on the Warp compilation, though? Labradford's remix of LFO's⁸ "Freeze", overlaid with a constant, piercing tone that I adore but drives everyone else I know completely batty, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

So, yes, they're good loud. But Mogwai also have a delicate and lovely side, as seen in tunes like "Christmas Song".⁹ It's from one of those songs - "O I Sleep", one with lyrics, even - that I took the name of this blog. Actually, I used it as the name of last year's NaNoWriMo effort first, and liked it enough to use it again. The song is less than a minute long, highly unusual for a band that likes to use time to build layers of music.¹⁰ The lyrics go like this:

I wanted to see
if fire would burn me
you'd think I would know
if four walls could hold me
I wanted to see
if fire would burn me

There's even a video for it on YouTube:



I'm electing not to embed them here, but also worth watching are the two videos - each beautifully animated - for "Hunted By A Freak" and "Travel Is Dangerous". The first is disturbing. The latter, animated by Monkmus, is especially gorgeous.

* * * * *

¹Think "Ex-cowboy" from Come On Die Young, for example.

²Masada's various forms include the Masada String Trio, Electric Masada, Bar Kokhba, and probably some others, but they're all variations on Zorn's explorations of what he calls "Radical Jewish Culture". It's essentially incorporating some of the forms and rules of traditional Jewish music into the avant-garde scene, and most of what I've heard is genuinely fantastic. Check Zorn's label, Tzadik, for the massive catalog of his Masada (and other) recordings.

³And John Zorn is nothing if not truly experimental. Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like a great idea... conceptually, but fails to resonate with me on the level of actually listening to the music. Like when Yamataka Eye starts shrieking. Just... not working for me. Which is a shame, because sometimes I'm really digging the rest of the music beneath it. (Like some of the Naked City craziness.)

⁴I'm entirely serious about this. The back of the Flaming Lips album Transmissions From The Satellite Heart states: "Please play all tracks at maximum volume." For them, it's a recommendation, and a funny, sort of tongue in cheek one at that; the Flaming Lips don't need loud. Mogwai's music suffers without its dynamic intensity.

⁵There is no point to watching a Mogwai concert video. As a general rule, videos of live performances are lacking. I guess it's not as ill-advised as trying to get the feeling of a Flaming Lips Boom Box Experiment from a recording, but it's close.

⁶With godspeed you black emperor!, nonetheless, who were in spectacular form. This was before they changed their name to godspeed you! black emperor, for whatever oblique reason.

⁷Like the Travels in Constants series, which you could only get by purchasing the whole series for some too-large sum. (Since I wasn't jumping for the rest of them.)

⁸Low Frequency Oscillator, the British electronica guys, not Lyte Funky Ones, the American boy band. Though a Labradford remix of boy band cheese-pop would be well worth listening to.

⁹Not to be confused with "Christmas Steps" from Come On Die Young. (Or, as it's referred to on the No Education = No Future (Fuck The Curfew) EP,^a "Xmas Steps".) "Christmas Song": Soft, pretty, delicate. "Christmas Steps": Best played so loud that the walls shake.

^aThe EP takes its name from a youth curfew that was imposed in Glasgow to address kids getting into trouble. The band, with a number of others, protested the action, arguing that providing education opportunities for kids was a more appropriate solution, whereas a curfew would do little but punish (and upset) the vast majority of innocent kids. I have the non-recalled version, which features "Xmas Steps", "Rollerball", and "Small Children In The Background". "Small Children..." replaces the original version of "Helps Both Ways", which later appeared, modified, on Come On Die Young.

The original version - which is superior to the one eventually released - featured the music overlaid with an excerpt of John Madden's football commentary, which it matched eerily well. Madden, however, refused to give permission to release it, so the EP had to be recalled, and the track replaced with the intense, static-filled soundscape that is "Small Children...". They kept the title, though, which comes from Madden's last words on the track: "...you know, it really helps both ways."

¹⁰"Like Herod": 11:44. "Mogwai Fear Satan": 16:18. "Ex-cowboy": 9:09. "Christmas Steps": 10:39. "My Father My King": 20:12.

NaNoWriMo 2006 success.

Madison.

National Novel Writing Month is over. As of last night. For me. I even have the purple bar to prove it.

I ran into a minor snag in this year's novel, the sort of thing I'd never had trouble with before: the novel ended early.¹ Previous efforts, with the exception of 2004,² were sprawling, endless messes that were even less resolved at the end of the month than they were when I'd started. It may sound interesting, but there's a deadening quality to it, an inertia to the whole story that's maddeningly difficult to overcome after the inevitable December writing rest. I haven't bothered to re-read the earlier semi-novels, let alone make any real effort at continuing from where I left off. I should, just to clip out the good bits, but...

Finding the worthwhile parts requires slogging, hip-deep or worse, through the rest of it. And there's a lot of the rest of it. Since I do it all on the typewriter, it's rife with spelling errors. As a stickler for spelling, it's tough to read, but when my fingers hit two keys in the wrong order,³ I just decide to live with it. Only the most gut-wrenching mistakes end up covered in a series of quickly-tapped xs.

Last year's novel took until midway through the fourth line before I hit a typo. This year, it's the eighth word.

That same spelling-error-retaining quality also prevents me from making use of a popular NaNoWriMo padding technique: going back to a part you've previously written and expanding upon it. Add some extra description or dialogue, or even an entirely new chapter. I can't do that. What's written is written, nearly set in stone, if you will. So, when the novel ended, and I counted up the last of the words, I needed to do something new.

I wrote a short story. It has nothing to do with the novel. It's its own, entirely self-contained entity, eight pages of refreshing change.

This year's novel is titled "Red Hawk Cemetery", changed from the original working title of "Ghost Town". It's a Western horror story, about a group of train robbers on the run from bounty hunters who end up in an isolated village in the Rockies. They all end up trapped in this halfway-abandoned village, hunted by grave-robbing monsters that lurk in the shadows. You know, pretty regular stuff. Guys try resolving violence with more violence, and end up done in by it. Pretty brutally, at that, but, hey, it's horror.

The short story, the extra words, is titled "Tin Robot". It's just a little story, not much more than a nugget of an idea, about a robot who moves in next door to a young couple. A big, boxy robot named, appropriately enough, Tin Robot.

Sharon commented that I must really like robots.⁴ I don't know that I do. I'm really more fascinated by them, as a handy symbol of technological dependence and omnipresence. Think Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick or Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's film adaptation. Or even better, find a copy of Dick's "The Electric Ant". It's a bizarre and wonderful short story about a man who discovers he's a robot and starts experimenting with himself. By monkeying with the input tape that controls his senses - this was back during computer punch-card days - he ends up warping (and destroying) reality.

I do know that I really like typewriters. One downside of using mine all month long is that I end up really confused about the locations of certain keys.⁵ Curious how mine stacks up against your regular keyboard layout? Here it is:



* * * * *

¹48,246 words, to be precise.

²I only made it about halfway that year, to somewhere just over 25,000 words.

³But not too close together, so that they get stuck. Sometimes, usually when I'm trying to type by, the force of the y key colliding with the returning b creates a ghost of a b beside the original. It's happened so many times that I'm starting to like it.

⁴The previous two novels both featured robots. 2004 had little robots as the gimmicky, halfway-pointless technology that consumer culture surrounds itself with, the equivalent of mobile phones and iPods; the main character's job was repairing them when they broke down. 2005's main character was a robot himself, but only realized this after a messy motorcycle crash. With no known precedent for it - no more robots around than we're used to today - he becomes obsessed, to the point of cutting himself open to study his robot-ness further.

⁵The same thing happens with foreign computer keyboards, when you're traveling. If you're gone for a long enough stint, you get the fun of being confused again when you travel home.

Thank you for smoking.

Madison.

It's been some months since I first cobbled together my homemade cold-smoker, and I'm realizing that, despite putting it to good use on several occasions, I've never taken the time to explain it in detail. First, the distinction between the two primary forms of smoking food:

• Hot-smoking
  This means simultaneously cooking and smoking food. In their book, Charcuterie, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn make an addition distinction of "smoke-roasting", by which they mean smoking at moderate temperatures, around 350°F; when their recipes note "hot-smoking", they mean to use a temperature of approximately 200°F. In essence, the result is the same, with the cooking temperature determining the length of time that the the food stays in contact with the smoke.
  
  The options for hot-smokers are pretty wide-open. I tend to rely on my charcoal grill, which is about as simple and straightforward as it can be. A large roasting pan or wok, with a tight-fitting lid - and a pretty serious exhaust system - could do the trick inside the kitchen. For gadget-lovers, there's always the Bradley Smoker, which has temperature controls, several racks to handle large quantities at one time, and several different sizes and options to choose from. Then again, the standard model's $350, plus shipping, and you need the space to put a refrigerator-sized smokebox.
  
  Oh, and it requires the manufacturer's hockey-puck-looking¹ "bisquettes" as smoking material. Sure, they're available in a variety of hardwoods, but that's still awkward and limiting.
  
  
• Cold-smoking
  This means smoking food without cooking it, which requires temperatures below 100°F - preferably in the 60° to 80°F range. It's not easy to do. Creating smoke takes a lot of heat, and you need to dissipate that while still getting the smoke where you want it.
  
  The Bradley folks claim that their machines can do this², but Ruhlman and Polcyn found it difficult to do. They had to place a pan full of ice between the smokebox and the food, and that takes a fair bit of maintenance effort over time. Still, they note that "professional smokehouses that include some sort of refrigeration device and do all the work for you cost as much as a car."
  
  What other options does the home cook have? The authors note that Bruce Aidells, a San Francisco sausage maker, has a method of placing a few burning coals into a pie pan full of sawdust, then setting it in a covered grill. It's really labor-intensive, requiring regular replacement of the coals as they burn out, but sounds like it works well.
  
  Or you can just build your own setup.

Which is what I did.

The biggest part of my decision to do this was to save money, but there are a few other aspects of the homemade system that have been bonuses. Ease of modification is one; the ability to use a full range of smokable materials is another. When I have the time for a more permanent setup, there are some modifications I plan to make to this design, but I'm quite happy with it for now.

In essence, the smoker is a two-box setup. Smoke is produced in one box, and fed to another, unheated box containing the food. Below is a schematic diagram, as it currently exists. (Click on the picture for a larger version.)


Key:

1. This is the connector between the two smoker boxes. I've used some 4-inch, flexible, aluminum dryer vent ducting, which is good for two things: I can set up the two smoker boxes wherever I want³; and I can compress or extend the duct to adjust the amount of exposed surface area - and hence heat loss - the smoke has before it reaches the food. It hooks to the smoker boxes via some 4-inch duct adapters, so the duct can be removed and collapsed inside its box when it's not in use.
   
   
2. The tops of the boxes open. (There's nothing on the bottom, and hence nothing to contact the heating element or to be dripped on.) I'd toyed with the idea of side doors, to limit the amount of smoke lost while checking on things, but they required laying on the ground to use, and smoke pours out of every possible crack, anyhow. As long as you remember to keep your face back while the first puff of smoke pours out, the operable lid's the way to go.
   
   
3. Wood. I've used hardwood chips, hardwood sawdust, and hickory nut shells. I've heard of people using fist-sized chunks of fruitwood. Other possibilities include coffee beans, herb branches (such as rosemary), hops and tea leaves. If it smells good, and you think it'll make food taste good, it'll probably work. A major exception are softwoods, such as pine. The resins in softwoods produce a foul smoke that'll make the food taste like tar.
   
   To minimize the need for significant cleanup, I wrap the stuff-to-be-burned in a layer of aluminum foil, seal it tightly and puncture the top about a dozen times with a pencil tip. I find that 1-½ cups of stuff will give me about half an hour of smoke, and that two of those packets will fit side by side an 8-inch cast iron skillet, so that one can finish up as the next one warms up.
   
   
4. A cast iron skillet. The indispensable, indestructible kitchen tool. Also: cheap at your neighborhood hardware store. Here, it functions as a barrier between the heating element and the wood to be smoked.
   
   
5. The intake fan. I've built a cardboard funnel that attaches to the front of a cheap, square 120V fan to push air into the smoker box. By keeping the intake and exit openings from aligning, the low-volume displacement pushes smoky air from the smoking chamber to the food chamber.
   
   
6. A hot plate. Though this has an adjustable temperature control, it remains at full for the length of the smoking process. It's just a simple electric cooking element that plugs into the same power source as the intake fan. Note that the box is significantly larger than the fan to keep things from unexpectedly igniting.⁴
   
   
7. The smoker box. Hot smoke is produced in here, far away from the food. It's a cardboard box, roughly 18"x18"x24", assembled with duct tape.⁵ In order to keep it from being blown about by any sudden gusts of wind, I place a concrete block tight up against it on two opposite sides. My current design is not collapsible, which is a worthwhile consideration for future versions.
   
   
8. A cooling rack. In order to get the most smoke on the food, it needs to have as much airflow around it as possible. To keep it simple, I use an old cooling rack propped up on some ramekins.
   
   
9. The food. Whatever it is, it just sits there. As long as it's safe to leave in a warm, low-oxygen environment for several hours, you could use pretty much anything you like.
   
   
10. The food box. It's a lot like the smoker box, except with only the smoke intake opening. Technically, I suppose you need to provide some ventilation to allow some smoke to escape, but there are enough open seams to accomplish that. When the duct is fully extended, the interior of this box lingers at just about ambient temperature.

Successes thus far include tomatoes, which make for excellent soups and salsas, among other possibilities. They add a smoky dimension that can range from subtle to intense, depending on how long they've been smoked and how prominently they feature in the final dish. Thus far, I've been happy with two hours in the smoker, then adding just enough smoky tomato to get beyond the "subtle hint" stage.

The most recent use of the smoker was to create my own bacon⁶, flavored with maple syrup, brown sugar, and lots of smoke. I used hickory nut shells for four hours, which gives it a very intense woodsmoke flavor that softens as it cooks. There's a definite difference between this and, say, an applewood bacon, and I'm more inclined to use less to keep the flavors in a dish balanced. That said, a few slices are great with eggs and toast.

I still haven't smoked fish, salmon or otherwise, which I'd thought would be one of the first things in the box. Also on the to-smoke list: scallops or shrimp; fresh ricotta or another fresh cheese; pork and other fresh sausages; cured duck or chicken breast; and whatever else seems like it'd taste good. Someday, maybe I'll even try cold-smoking some pale malt for a homemade rauchbier.

* * * * *

¹They're Canadian.

²Subject to ambient temperature, but you can't hold that against them.

³Such as out of the direct sun, which is a necessity in the summer.

⁴As with grilling, a handy fire extinguisher is always a sensible idea, as are a pair of large, heat-resistant gloves.

⁵Duct tape is unreliable, from an adhesive standpoint, so I'd caution against using this unless no other options are available. Know what duct tape is good for? Removing warts. I'm completely serious.

⁶Nearly five pounds of it, which is in addition to an equal amount of pancetta. That's a lot of cured pork belly, no matter how you look at it.

NaNoWriMo wordcount.

Madison.

Ah, NaNoWriMo. That marginally sane November writing extravaganza that's going to keep me from posting much to this blog. For those who're interested, you can watch my progress on this little wordcounting widget:



Keep in mind that I'm writing this year's novel - as I did for the last two years - on my traveling typewriter. (Yes, that's a picture of my typewriter to the right.) That means that I count my words one by one, by hand with a red pen. I'm not always able to update the wordcount on the website on a regular basis, so the wordcount may jump forward in big chunks.

So far, so good.

Cocktails. In pie form.

Madison.

There's always good stuff at Star Liquor. Last night, after a quick stop for some essentials at the Willy Street Co-op, we picked up the following goodies:

• A bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon. I was down to the last little bit of Knob Creek, and needed to make sure I had some whiskey¹ around. I had a little of each last night, for comparison. The Maker's Mark has more of the caramel and vanilla-type flavors that I associate with barrel aging, and less of the distinct bourbony corn flavor than the Knob Creek. That said, I'd be quite happy drinking either.
  
  
• Dry vermouth. Since it gets used as a cooking wine regularly around here, I haven't been able to make a dry martini in quite some time. And this after John Neely emailed me about his discovery that pickled ginger - the pink kind that comes with sushi - makes for a fine martini garnish. John, I should note, is a man who knows how to appreciate a true gin martini.
  
  
• Godiva and Kahlua liqueurs. Sharon uses these, not just for White Russians and spiked hot chocolate², but also for flavoring cookies and other baked goods. Instead of using vanilla extract, she'll make cookies with a subtle coffee of enhanced chocolate flavor. The orange-flavored liqueurs also make for fantastic chocolate chip cookies.
  
  
• New Glarus's Unplugged Enigma beer. I haven't opened one yet, but it looks interesting. This is another in a series of one-off beers that Dan Carey's been brewing from time to time, indulging whatever unusual ideas pop into his head. This appears to be a mash-up between the previous Unplugged Sour Brown Ale and the regular Wisconsin Belgian Red.

The guys at Star also handed me a flyer for an upcoming whiskey tasting, which is very tempting. I don't know anything more than what's on the flyer, so I'll simply include the text right here:

Single Malt Scotch
& Bourbon Whiskey
Tasting

A benefit for Madison's Urban Open
Space Foundation (Central Park)

Thursday, Jan 25, 2007
6:30 - 9:30
Fyfe's Corner Bistro
$40 per ticket

available at
Star Liquor
Specialty appetizers will
accompany the tasting.

sponsored in part by Union Cab

Good thing they're upfront about the taxi connection. Perhaps that's a hint that I should plan to take the following day off of work.

Speaking of interesting booze-related stuff I've noticed recently, there was a fascinating recipe in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine for Dick Taeuber’s Cordial Pie. It is, in essence, a sliceable cocktail in a crust. The best part of this recipe, in my opinion, is that it's so flexible. You can flavor it as any sort of cocktail you like, though it seems that creamier drinks would fare better. (Irish coffee is a notable exception.) And as the Miette Cakes recipe notes, you can tweak the presentation as you please. Ice cream sandwiches? Sure! Why not a grown-up parfait, or a sophisticated replacement for ice cream alongside cake or pie?

But as Amanda Hesser puts it: "Calling it a cordial pie doesn’t quite capture its punch or proof. Booze pie would be more fitting. It’s not the kind of thing you want to serve for a children’s birthday party."

* * * * *

¹As opposed to whisky, with no 'e', which is the proper spelling for Scotch whisky, single-malt and otherwise. That, of course, is also a necessary standard in my liquor cabinet. The Scotch of the moment is a lovely small-batch, cask-strength, non-chill-filtered whisky called A'bunadh from the Aberlour distillery in Speyside.

²In college, my roommates and I liked to use peppermint schnapps in our hot chocolate. If for no other reason than we had a bottle and found that was one of the few ways it was actually pleasant.

A movie not recommended for that first date.

Madison.

It's nearly November - meaning the start of NaNoWriMo is nigh - and I'm struggling to select a concept. I'd come up with four ideas around mid-October, with the intention of fleshing them out so that I could select one to pursue. It's slower going than expected. I've eliminated two of the initial four options, leaving me to choose between a western-inflected horror story and a Cronenbergian¹ story about people seeking thrills through amateur surgery and self-mutilation.

I'm leaning toward the western, because it lends itself to plugging in simple cliches when necessary. The second story, in order to keep it from being thoroughly unreadable dreck, needs some serious thought and, potentially, time-intensive research. NaNoWriMo doesn't offer that sort of time luxury. That said, the half-formed parts that've been dancing in my head for some time are really the most fascinating of all of the noveling options. Perhaps it's best that I give them a more serious opportunity at a later date.

Alone for the weekend, and without much to fill my schedule, I decided to rent some movies and stay home.² I hadn't really thought too much about it ahead of time, except that I knew I wanted to watch at least one disturbing film. Just about all of the good³ horror films were out - Night of the Living Dead was high on my list - as expected. I ended up with Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa, Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone (a Spaghetti Western remake of Kurosawa's film), and Crash by David Cronenberg⁴. Without intending to, I had selected three films that could be quite influential on the upcoming novel.

Also: auteur central.

Yojimbo looks like a Western⁵ in samurai togs; Kurosawa readily expressed the influence John Ford, among others, had on his films. The plot, in brief: Sanjuro, a ronin played by Toshiro Mifune, arrives in a small village controlled by two competing gangs who gamble and fight constantly. The only honest man who can make a living is the cooper who builds coffins. Sanjuro plays both gangs against each other in an escalating series of deadly battles. Full of action, beautifully composed shots - as though one would expect anything else from a Kurosawa film - and humor, it's about as free of complicated morality as any Kurosawa film could ever be. Basically, it's a well-made popcorn film. Note: most of what we now consider cliches, like the wise-cracking action hero in Yojimbo, or pretty much everything about Seven Samurai, was clever and original to Kurosawa's films. (Or else archetypes.)

Sergio Leone, another great director with a love for all things Americana, remade Yojimbo as one of his antihero-based Westerns. The US marketing sold this film - along with For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly - as one about "The Man With No Name", played by Clint Eastwood. He has a name, actually. And is a different character - though he dresses the same, and has many of the same characteristics - in each of the three films. First Joe, then Monco, then Blondie, even though he's got mid-range brown hair. Beats me.

The camera angles - including the juxtapositions of wide-angle landscapes with extreme close-ups - in Fistful of Dollars are pure Leone. Ennio Morricone⁶ did the score, which was his first time working with Leone, and it's fun, even though it's not as memorable⁷ as the themes to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in The West. As usual, Leone picked actors with very distinctive features; you'd never expect to see faces like those in this movie working in Hollywood today. He also, like in all of his films, had his actors deliver their lines in their native language, then dubbed over it as necessary for different releases. It can make following the dialogue a bit difficult at times, but I've got to believe he did that to get better performances from actors selected, in some cases, more for their wrinkled, sun-toughened looks than their dramatic chops. If nothing else, the films of Sergio Leone can be appreciated purely for their style, long before Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene.⁸

Crash has nothing to do with those films. Okay, there's a brief moment where we see a videotape of a pornographic film titled A Fistful of Bimbos on the floor of James Ballard's car, but that's just Cronenberg humor.⁹

Promotional posters for the film prominently featured the phrase "sex and car crashes" from a critic's review, and that covers the plot territory pretty well. In short, a car crash draws a man suffering from a sort of sexual burnout into an underground group that fetishizes and recreates famous car crashes. James Ballard and his wife, Catherine, can't drum up the interest for sex anymore without telling each other about their extramarital affairs. After the crash, James and Dr. Helen Remington - the other driver, whose husband is killed in the accident - discover Vaughan, the mastermind of the car crash recreators and a man deeply obsessed with celebrities, cars, and death. Also sex: all of this car crashing is very sexually charged, but filmed in such a way - a cool, metallic color palette; an aloofness from the characters that borders on clinical detachment; Howard Shore's creepy score¹⁰; and it's a sexual fetish that's just too far out there to be real - that it's like pornography that's arousing intellectually, but not physically. If you don't feel weirdly conflicted by that while watching, it's probably because you're having a hard time actually looking at the screen. (Or you're focusing on exposed flesh while ignoring the story itself.)

That wouldn't be unusual. Crash was given an NC-17 rating, and it's definitely not the sort of film you'd want to bring your kids to.¹¹ Among other things, it includes: realistic (i.e., not Hollywood-type stylized) car crashes, complete with steady shots of the bloody aftermath; full frontal nudity; and sex - lots of it - both heterosexual and homosexual. And, unlike just about every other film ever made,¹² the sex scenes are integral both to the narrative and to the flow of the film. They're not simply separate scenes that act as a pause or break in the story arc; they're necessary and need to be in the film in their entirety, graphic sexuality and all. And, boy, are they not a turn-on.

I think this film requires that you bring a lot to it; as a result, reviews cover a wide range of emotional ground. You can't watch it without being affected by your own visceral¹³ response, and the film is so detached from its characters that you need to bring some of your own baggage along to start interpreting. At least, that's what I did. Granted, I need some serious digestion time before I can get around to writing up my own impressions of the film, but I can say that I think I actually liked it. I definitely respect it, and would recommend it to anyone not immediately turned off by the premise.

Just don't expect it to go over real well in a crowd.

* * * * *

¹Cronenbergesque? Anyhow, the idea's based on what little I know of David Cronenberg's abandoned script, Painkillers, as well as his film of J.G. Ballard's novel, Crash.

²The riot-inducing Madison Halloween festivities are another good reason to lounge on the couch. I'm guessing that the "tickets-only" restrictions kept the shenanigans to a minimum this year, but it's still not my scene.

³Meaning straight-up horror. Nothing ironic, regardless of quality.

⁴Not the more recent movie that used the same name, which is officially not cool. Really, couldn't they come up with an original name? It's one thing to title a film like an un- or tangentially-related book/song/whatever, but swiping it from another movie? And one that took a Special Jury Prize at Cannes? Cheap.

⁵It was based on a detective novel - Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammet - which is a genre equally as rooted in American individualism, machismo, and the notion that you don't really need to follow up on the bloody aftermath of gunfights.

⁶I just noticed, next to Monday's New York Times crossword puzzle, a brief Arts article noting that Morricone will be directing his first American concert at Radio City Music Hall in February. The program is drawn from his film scores, and features a 200-piece orchestra and choir. So, who'd they get to play the mouth harp?

⁷As in the way Morricone's best stuff just burrows deep into your brain and refuses to leave.

⁸Tarantino has noted Sergio Leone as a strong influence on his films, and it shows, particularly in Kill Bill.

⁹Yes, Cronenberg's full of humor. It's what prevents his films from being unwatchably disturbing.

¹⁰This isn't about Howard Shore, but it occurs to me now. Shore has written the score for just about all of Cronenberg's films; the key exception is The Dead Zone, for which he was unavailable due to other work. Instead, Cronenberg hired Michael Kamen. While writing the piano score in his London apartment, Kamen's neighbors begged him to stop playing it because it was giving them nightmares.

¹¹I say this because, when seeing Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, a zombie film with no shortage of graphic violence, Sharon and I watched with surprise as a young mother came into the theater with her two children, the older of whom couldn't have been more than five or six.

¹²Excepting pornography, of course, which is about sex for the sake of sex. Roger Ebert described Crash as "anything but pornographic" and "a dissection of the mechanics of pornography".

¹³Matthew Dessem makes a good point about the use of the term "visceral" in his review of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma. His blog, The Criterion Contraption, an attempt to review the Criterion Collection DVD releases in spine number order, is worth reading if you're into, well, the sorts of films that Criterion likes to release. Salò is the sort of film that I'd like to have seen; I'm not sure I'd actually like to see it. (My apologies to Mark Twain.)

DCFM pictures - 7 October 2006

Chicago.

Not owning a digital camera (or my own computer, for that matter) is a bit of a hindrance to posting pictures on a blog. It's not an insurmountable hurdle, though. It just takes me a while to develop, scan, retouch in Photoshop, etc. Thus, I present a small selection of photos from the Dane County Farmers' Market from October 7th, 2006. I took these pictures after I'd done my shopping for the morning, at around 9 am. Most of the pictures that came out well were in direct sunlight, without overly large crowds at the stands.


Apples from Ela Orchard


The potato selection from Butter Mountain


Butter Mountain's roast/grill/stew potato mix


Shallots from Blue Skies Farm


Late-season hoophouse tomatoes from Blue Skies Farm


Brussels sprouts from JenEhr Family Farm


One of many fall pumpkin vendors at the DCFM


All-blue potatoes from Driftless Organics


Driftless Organics' sweet mini bell peppers


Maitake (hen-of-the-woods) mushrooms from Blue Valley Gardens


Butler Farms' aged sheep's milk cheeses

Ricotta and spätzle recipes.

Madison.

Ask for recipes, and I'll post them.¹ Melissa asked, so here are a few that I developed for last night's dinner.

Spiced ricotta
Makes about a pint. Adapted from a recipe by Deborah Madison.

You can also make this recipe with skim milk, but whole milk definitely tastes better. Infusing the milk with spices gives the ricotta a subtle flavor, as the whey carries away a lot of it. If you'd like something more intense, flavor after the fact, to taste. You can also save the whey for use in baking.

Ingredients

• ½ gallon whole milk
  
• 2 3-inch cinnamon sticks
  
• 6 whole cloves
  
• 10 whole black peppercorns
  
• 3-4 Tbsp. vinegar
  
• ½ tsp. salt

Directions

1. Add the milk and spices to a large saucepan. Heat slowly to 160°F, then cover and remove from the heat. Allow to steep for 30 minutes, then remove the spices.
   
   
2. Add 3 tablespoons of vinegar to the milk. Slowly heat until 180°F, then reduce heat to lowest level possible and allow to rest for 30 minutes. If possible, keep temperature at about 180°F.
   
   
3. At this point, the milk solids should have separated from the whey, which should be a pale green color. If this is not the case, add another tablespoon of vinegar and gently stir.
   
   
4. Carefully ladle the curds into a colander lined with several layers of cheesecloth. Once the majority of the whey has drained away, mix in the salt. The ricotta is now ready to be used; you can also hang the cheesecloth bundle until all of the liquid has drained away for a firmer cheese.
   
   
5. For individual servings, line a mini-muffin pan with plastic wrap and spoon in the still-warm and -soft ricotta. Refrigerate to allow them to firm into shape.

Winter squash spätzle
Makes five or six servings. Adapted from The Joy of Cooking.

These little dumplings will have a subtle squash/pumpkin flavor; it depends in part on what sort of winter squash you have available. To best show off the flavor, simply toss the finished spätzle in a skillet with some metled butter until just lightly browned.

Note: After roasting the squash, pass the flesh through a potato ricer to smooth out the texture. Then you can intensify the flavor by tossing in a dry pan over medium heat, stirring constantly to evaporate moisture without burning.

Ingredients

• ¾ c. roasted squash puree (see note above)
  
• 1¼ c. all-purpose flour
  
• ½ tsp. baking powder
  
• 1 tsp. salt
  
• Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
  
• 2 large eggs
  
• ½ c. milk

Directions

1. Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg until well combined. Stir in the squash puree to make a uniform paste.
   
   
2. In a separate container, beat the eggs with the milk until smooth. Add this to the dry ingredients and beat with a spoon to create a smooth, elastic batter.
   
   
3. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Using a spätzle maker, colander or potato ricer, drop the batter into the water in small bits. The spätzle will float the surface and swell slightly; at this point, they are done. Remove with a slotted spoon.

* * * * *

¹Those that I actually have recipes for, that is. Most of the time, I'm just winging it, and as a result have no idea how to convey ingredients quantities to someone else.

Saturday dinner: the new beer makes a showing.

Madison.

I've decided to throw a small, celebratory dinner for the latest batch of homebrew. It's fully drinkable - even if the hops are a bit stronger than I'd intended - and two cases is more than I should be consuming all by myself. As Sharon'll be gone for the weekend, it's also a chance to cook up a meal featuring some of the fine beef and pork that's been filling up the freezer. Not that I can't normally enjoy that sort of thing, but big pieces like the beef cheek - not to mention the ten-pound pork belly - work best with a few carnivorous friends.

After tossing around a few ideas, I've settled on a menu for five for Saturday. Some of this is simply to clear out the freezer; some is to test out some new ideas I've had. Plus, meals with separate courses are something I do so rarely at home. They're more of a "nice dinner out" sort of thing, but there's no reason it can't be done.

The preliminary menu (as it's written on the kitchen chalkboard):

amuse-bouche
Spiced fresh ricotta with hickory nuts and cranberry-blood orange sauce

salad
Mixed greens salad with mustard vinaigrette, poached egg and crouton

main course
Braised beef cheek with winter squash spätzle, parsley pesto and brussels sprouts with bacon

dessert
Apple pie with cheddar cheese

Amuses-bouche aren't a necessary part of a dinner party, but they can really set the tone. Okay, yes, we'll be drinking beer with Futurama labels, and I'll probably be wearing jeans with holes in them,¹ but this is meant to be a little fancier than burgers and brats on the grill. It also says helps explain that dinner may take a little longer than the usual family-style arrangement, without having to say so directly.

Which is a good thing, since our entertainment options for the evening consist primarily of conversation and Scrabble. Maybe cards.

I haven't made ricotta in a little while, so I've had a hankering for it. Especially now that I've discovered the glories of local, non-homogenized milk from Blue Marble Family Farm.² I plan on infusing it with some cloves and cinnamon, curdling out the solids with vinegar, draining off the liquid and shaping it into molds. It's amazingly simple, and my method always seems to give me a very firm curd, which I'm hoping'll hold its shape. Then I should be able to plate it with some hickory nuts - toasted to bring out the flavor - and a sauce made from fresh cranberries, apple cider and blood oranges to contrast the ricotta's richness. At least it'll look sharp on a white plate.

Sharon and I have been enjoying a lot of poached eggs of late, mostly as a followup to the L'Etoile vegetarian dinner. I prefer a fried egg, sunny side up, cooked just about as lightly as a poached egg, but that only works on toast. Soups and salads need the all-around delicacy of poaching to really shine. Fortunately, the fresh, flavorful eggs we've been getting from Blue Valley Gardens hold together really well.³ Until you break open that yolk, that is: instant salad dressing.

The beef cheek and spätzle is just another variation on a regular meal for Sharon and I, where we cook up some noodles and vegetable-filled broth separately, then ladle together into bowls for a warming dinner. (This sometimes gets an egg, too.) I've had a beef cheek in the freezer for quite some time, since my tolerance for braising - and the accompanying warm kitchen - is pretty low in the summertime. John and Dorothy had convinced me to try it, as it's one of their favorite cuts. Though it'll take hours of moist cooking to break down the connective tissue, the constant use this muscle's been through makes it one of the most flavorful parts of the cow. A braise ought to result in fork-tender meat and a rich liquid to spoon over noodles. With a little luck, I'll be able to use some roasted squash as a noodle base, for color and flavor, and a parsley pesto should give some brightness and contrast to the other rich items.

For the brussels sprouts, I'm going to use Tory Miller's recipe, as noted in this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article. (Scroll to the bottom.) I love brussels sprouts, and I figure bacon can only enhance them.

Now that we're fully into apple season, I'm ready for pie. I'd considered a tarte tatin, but I'd rather go with something I've done before. More or less, at least - I'm planning to give a lard crust a try this time. Vegetable shortening's not doing me any favors, health-wise, and I've only heard good things about lard. So why not give it a shot?

* * * * *

¹Not fashionably so. (Is that still fashionable? I don't really pay any attention.) They're simply jeans that I've been wearing for so long that they're wearing out. Which means they're pretty much at their peak comfort level.

²And I don't even drink milk. I'm trying to learn to like it, but it's just not happening.

³Best poached egg ever was one of Matt Smith's turkey eggs, though I haven't seen one of those for quite some time. They have a richness you just can't get with chicken eggs alone. An even better use for them, if you can find any, is to use them for scrambled eggs; their innate creaminess really shines.