Hops!

Chicago.

Sweet. The Victory Brewing Company gets a nice mention in the New York Times this week, in an article on hops for beginners¹. As the hometown brewery - I grew up in Downingtown, Pennsylvania - I'm quite pleased whenever they get a good mention. The beer's top-notch, and the brewmasters turn out some exceptionally good versions of classic beer styles. This is in some contrast to Dogfish Head, which offers up some wacky yet delicious brews like their "Midas Touch" and "Raison D'Etre", which make use of unusual ingredients like saffron and raisins.

Not that I don't love the breweries out in Wisconsin, and appreciate them being both local and high-quality. But the Victory guys know hops. I adore hops. I'm trying to figure out how to use the leftovers from my homebrew batches in food.

Although the bitterness of hops is a wonderful and necessary counterpoint to the malty sweetness of beer, it's more of a limitation in food. Besides, I'd rather make use of the citrusy, piney aromas of a good aroma hop². I found that you can get a good extraction by making a "tea" from hops and water, simply by mixing them together and letting them sit in the fridge for a day. The aroma's there, along with a little bitterness, but I'll admit that I'm not sure where to go from there.

I'm thinking vinaigrette, once fresh greens are back at the market. And brines for chicken and pork, to see if I can get that fresh hop quality to survive the cooking process.

Another idea is to try using the dried hops to flavor some dry-cured meats. The duck prosciutto has been a roaring success, enough that I'm emboldened to try a chicken version next. Or two versions, to compare them side-by-side. The duck was delicious on its own, with only salt and pepper to flavor it, but I think chicken breasts will turn out better with some additional flavors. Juniper, bay and sage seems like a safe, first-time bet, and I think hops - plus something I haven't quite figured out yet - should work, too.

* * * * *

¹Or those who're only familiar with the fizzy, bland "beer" coming from the American megabreweries.

²As opposed to a bittering hop. It's a fuzzy distinction. Bittering hops are high in alpha acids, which, through boiling the wort, produce the bitterness. Their aromas tend to be coarse. Aroma hops tend to be low in alpha acids, with much more pleasant and complex aromas, which are lost through the boil. Mixing the two types - not to mention different varieties - helps build the flavor profile of a beer.

Something's fishy 'bout these pigs.

Chicago.

Damn. Just noticed this article on genetically-modified pigs producing Omega-3 fatty acids. Setting aside the concerns regarding GMO¹ food, it's dangerous to have this sort of sound-bite information out there. The most alarming quote in the whole article:

"People can continue to eat their junk food," Dr. Leaf said. "You won't have to change your diet, but you will be getting what you need."

No. That's just irresponsible of him to say. This is the sort of half-baked logic behind fad diets. Say this kind of garbage, and your average, ever-vigilant, think-things-through American consumer² is going to take it at face value. A pound of bacon for breakfast? Sure! The newspaper says it's good for my heart!

Honestly, I love the pig. It's a truly wonderful animal³, especially as far as food goes, able to be converted into all sorts of deliciousness. But consumed in moderation, damn it. First, industrial farming practices stripped the pig of its fat and real flavor⁴, and now this.

For contrast, check out this excerpt from Michael Pollan's upcoming book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. It's a meditation on food and killing, and understanding the difficult bond between hunter and hunted. It's a much more intelligent approach to understanding food, where it comes from, and what it means to eat. Pollan approaches the root of the issue, while Leaf⁵ takes the merest glance at the surface.

* * * * *

¹Genetically modified organism. The problem with GMO is that we don't know what the long-term - or even medium-term - ramifications of this might be. Problems could range anywhere from zero ecological impact, to loss of biodiversity through interbreeding and competition with existing organisms, to crazy George Romero-style zombie infestation. You never know, but it's fiddling with complex and poorly-understood systems, often promoting industrial-scale food production and monocropping, which aren't particularly kind to the environment as is.

²Yes. Sarcasm.

³Or "magical animal", if you're Homer Simpson.

⁴And dignity. Feedlots, cages and the like are just cruel. Truly horrific pratices, like child-labor sweatshops for animals.

⁵The guy's an emeritus professor of clinical medicine at Harvard. I realize that the Car Talk guys went to M.I.T., but they pretend to be dumb in a self-effacing, funny way. This guy's just a complete idiot.

The first bike ride of the season.

Chicago.

Whoah. Nice weather this past weekend, to the point where the temptation to get the bike out was too much. Warm (relatively), sunny, and all-around pleasant. Valuable lesson: one cannot go for a bike ride in the spring and expect it to be like last fall. I'm out of shape, but at least now's a good time to start correcting that. Did last spring's rides make me feel like this?

The other critical lesson to be learned from this, I think, is that I should continue my riding beyond my normal comfort zone of temperature and daylight. Ice, snow and heavy rain are still perfectly good reasons to stay inside and do the crossword puzzle, as far as I'm concerned. I'm in this for my health, so avoiding dangerous riding situations seems right in line. I've got a headlight - and I generally ride on very low-traffic roads - and know the routes well at this point. And I've ridden after dark, so it's really not much of a stretch to think I can make a go of it before the sun's quite up.

And avoiding a workout because I haven't gotten around to picking up some long johns, well, that's just me being lazy. No other excuses.

These, of course, aren't immediate concerns. With the days growing longer and warmer, I won't be worried about cold and dark until October hits. Getting out before the bugs and humidity get unbearable, though, will be much more pressing.

Especially this year. Winter in Wisconsin never really arrived. The only two seriously cold days came immediately after several inches of snow, so the ground's never gotten terribly cold. My fear is that we haven't had sufficient cold to kill off the insect larvae, so it'll be a very buggy year. Bad news for the garden, and for just being outside. Not that that's a good enough reason to stay inside. Rather, it's a perfect reason for grilling.

Bugs don't like smoke. And a beer or two means I'll care about the mosquitos just that much less.

Cover songs.

Madison.

The latest Cat Power album, The Greatest, doesn't feature a single cover song. I find this strange. Every other album has had at least one cover or rendition of something traditional, in addition to the regular Chan Marshall-penned offerings. While it's not a strike against the album, it's a regular piece that I miss. A quick rundown of the previous covers:

• Dear Sir - "Yesterday Is Here" (Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits); "The Sleepwalker" (Chris Matthews)
  
• Myra Lee - a charming, twangy "Still In Love" (Hank Williams)
  
• What Would The Community Think - a wonderful "Bathysphere" (Bill Callahan); "Fate of the Human Carbine" (Peter Jeffries)
  
• Moon Pix - "Moonshiner" (traditional, but noted as "inspired by The Bob Dylan")
  
• You Are Free - "Werewolf" (Michael Hurley); "Keep On Runnin'" (John Lee Hooker)

There's also, of course, The Covers Record, which is all cover songs. Though they're all quite wonderful, I think the most significant is actually a cover of a Cat Power tune, "In This Hole". It may not technically be a cover, since Chan Marshall wrote it, but it's so much more sparse and delicate than the original version that it's not much of a stretch to think of it that way. And I can't think of anyone else who's done something quite like this.

So, I think I'm allowed to be a little disappointed.

Other excellent cover tunes? Built To Spill's take on Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy". The Flaming Lips's brilliant, heartfelt version of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", which I think they've only ever done live. The Dismemberment Plan's complete revision of Jennifer Paige's "Crush", which appears on the same EP as Juno's guitar-driven cover of DJ Shadow's "High Noon". Mogwai's 'remix' of Link's "Arcadian", which goes so far as to eliminate any trace of the original recording.

And so on.

Blue garlic?

Madison.

In preparation for having a bunch of folks over for food tomorrow night, I started making some pickles. They've been a consistent hit around here, particularly the garlicky dill cucumbers, so I figured I'd try something like that again this time, only with the sort of vegetables that look good this time of year: onions, carrots and fennel. A quick taste test tells me they're a might heavy-handed on the fennel, since everything's taken on a distinctly anise-like quality, but it's not too bad. Good to make a mental note for next time, though.

What's weird, and why I bring this up, is that the garlic cloves have turned blue. I think this may have happened before, but I'm not sure. And, since I don't usually think of bright blue as a naturally-occuring food color, I felt obligated to check up on this. According to Harold McGee's oh-so-handy On Food And Cooking:

Red-Purple Anthocyanins and Pale Anthoxanins
The usually reddish anthocyanins and their pale yellow cousins, the anthoxanins, are chlorophyll's opposites. They're naturally water-soluble, so they always bleed into the cooking water. They too are sensitive to pH and to the presence of metal ions, but acidity is good for them, metals bad. And where chlorophyll just gets duller or brighter according to these conditions, the anthocyanins change color completely! This is why we occasionally see red cabbage turn blue when braised, blueberries turn green in pancakes and muffins, and garlic turn green or blue when pickled.

He goes on to explain a few other interesting tricks with color-changing anthocyanins:

• Adding alkaline substances to red wine will turn it into white wine.¹
  
• Quinces and other pale-colored, very tannic fruits can be cooked to produce anthocyanins. As the aggregate phenolic chemicals break down, they become anthocyanins, rendering the fruit both gentler on the tongue and bright red.
  
• Trace amounts of metals in the cooking liquid can turn different anthocyanins all sorts of different colors.

These same chemicals are the ones that turn some kinds of asparagus, snap beans and carrots purple. Since they're only present on the outside, they usually end up diluted in cooking water or interact with the other plant cell chemicals, losing their color.

* * * * *

¹McGee points to Marcus Gavius Apicius, the author of the only known surviving Roman cookbook. Apicius suggested:

To make white wine out of red wine. Put bean-meal or three egg whites into the flask and stir for a very long time. The next day the wine will be white. The ashes of white grape vines have the same effect.

Neat party trick, especially for someone you really loathe. I can't imagine it tasting anything other than awful.

Red Cars.

Madison.

I can't recall what, exactly, I was looking for when I stumbled across a brief article about David Cronenberg in the Toronto Star. But there it is.

I usually ignore films that are merely "announced", since they're unlikely to ever make it to the screen¹, so I wasn't aware of Painkillers². Should it ever be made, I'd be very interested to check it out. Not crossing my fingers, though. As engaging as his science fiction (and whatever genre Naked Lunch falls into) films are, it no longer appears to be a necessary element for him to be able to make a film, and I'm thrilled that his less fantastical work is gaining more mainstream approval. That way, I stand a reasonable chance of catching it in the theaters. As near as I can tell, it doesn't appear to have softened his edge.

If nothing else, without the buffer of unreal sci-fi elements, the films become even more disturbing.

I'm also fascinated by Cronenberg's book, Red Cars. Though I've never been remotely interested in auto racing, since it seems synonymous with NASCAR. And I can't imagine why anyone would want to sit and watch cars drive around a track all day long. Drag racing? Yes, I can see the excitement. Auto racing on actual roads, with trees and mountains and scenery? Yes, I can see where that'd be neat, like watching a marathon or a bike race. But hours and hours around a track?

Not that I'm a huge fan of brightly-colored corporate sponsorship, either.

And, like ice fishing: if you're just doing it because it's a way to hang out and drink alarming quantities of beer, wouldn't you be more comfortable at home? Or barbecuing in a park? At least, if you're ice fishing, you could conceivably come home with something for dinner.

Red Cars, though, is from back in the day when people had heard of the Mille Miglia³. And it (being a script, in addition to a coffee table book) is also really about the personal conflicts between the racers, the car owners, their lovers, etc. Like Cronenberg's fiction, but deeply rooted in fact. Due to the Ferrari family's opposition, it's unlikely to be made into a film, but at least the book exists.

Too bad there're only a thousand of 'em, and they're (I'm guessing) unbelievably expensive. You need to contact the publisher directly, and I can only assume that means it's well out of my price range. Oh, well.

* * * * *

Entirely unrelated, but... funniest spam email name yet: Coincides Q. Dizziness.

* * * * *

¹Exception: Harold Ramis has announced he'll direct a film starring Owen Wilson. There're no guarantees it'll be great, but I have to believe it'll be worth the price of a movie ticket. No idea about any details, but I'm intrigued.

²Cronenberg wrote the script himself. As near as I can determine, it's about a detective pursuing people who get painful surgery for their own perverse pleasure.

³Means "thousand miles". The original race was declared over in 1957, but has been resurrected for antique racing cars buffs. It's a thousand-mile auto race through Italy, a lot like the Tour de France with cars. Cars have to be authentic from 1927-1957, with all original parts. The race itself is broken into several stages, over three days, but the actual record, in the 1955 race, was about ten hours. Stirling Moss, a British racer, drove across Italy for ten hours at an average speed of a hundred miles per hour. Now that's auto racing.

Once, when I was sailing 'round the Arctic Circle...

Madison.

It's the equinox today, and I notice that the solar altitude's nearly high enough to reach through the apartment's skylight well, down to the floor below. When there's a clear patch of sky, at any rate. Higher sun, longer days. And with that, all the reason necessary to look forward to spending a lot more time outdoors, biking, grilling, gardening, taking photographs. When the weather cooperates, that is. I must say, though, that I have a soft spot for vicious thunderstorms, with brilliant bolts of lightning and the sort of staticky, stuttering crack preceding the rumble-umble-umble that means the bolt was close. And for the light, warm rainshowers that are a true pleasure to walk in, too.

By the time the solstice rolls around, I'll be up in Washington Island, north of Green Bay. The day here in Madison should be pretty long - roughly fifteen hours and twenty minutes from sunrise to sunet. By heading north and east, it should tack on another ten minutes of sunlight, mostly to the beginning of the day. I doubt that little addition'll be noticeable, especially in different settings, but I'm still intrigued enough to be on the lookout for it.

It reminds me of when I was studying at Leeds, in a British autumn slipping into winter. Leeds is significantly further north than Pennsylvania, where I'd been previously, but the climate is much milder, to the point where the Brits can't handle a truly hot or cold day here in the continental US.¹ Even though winter was settling in, and the days were becoming alarmingly short under perpetually gray skies, it never really felt that way.

Then, one day, we were watching The Simpsons on Jack's TV.² "Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part 1." Burns strides into the town hall, and, just before blocking out the sun, calls out, "Have you ever seen the sun set at three pm?" About three in the afternoon in Leeds. The sun had nearly set. Seemed a little less funny that day, though much more so now.

Our reaction, I'm sure, was to head over the Brickies pub for a few beers.

* * * * *

¹Several days' worth of 80°F weather in Brighton qualified as a heat wave. Not that I'm enamored of 100°F-plus with high humidity, but I can deal with it.

²Jack was our Korean roommate. Excitable, impressionable, and deeply in love with his newfound freedoms in the West. He even had a contraband TV that he'd haul into the kitchen sometimes. Contraband because he'd never registered it, never paid fees on it, which you're required to do for each TV you own in the UK. (You pay a reduced fee if it's only black and white.) Suffice to say, the reception was always poor, enough that lines would wiggle their way across the screen and the color would come and go. But, hey, Simpsons is Simpsons.

Very slow food.

Madison.

Been thinking a lot on slow cooking lately. As in, the sort of cooking that takes hours upon hours, if not days, to do. The key difficulties with this, currently, are:

• A lack of fancy, high-priced equipment. Those big smoker-grills, with the sidecar fireboxes? A few hundred bucks, and even the smallest ones weigh 200 lbs. and up. Not the sort of thing I've really got storage space for. Even pricier are the chemistry-lab-type water baths for sous vide cooking, at roughly fifteen-hundred a pop. (Plus the hundred-dollar vacuum-sealer to go along with.) Since the oven won't hang out below 200°F, and a stovetop water bath can't manage a bare 135°F, I'll need to be more creative.
  
• Storage space. It's not something I've got just lying around, so to speak. The charcoal grill already takes up most of the space in the coat closet. Homebrewing, canning and gardening equipment (plus the bicycles) have taken up all of the available space in the basement. Any new equipment has to be small.
  
• Time, of course. In addition to having a job that actually requires me to show up and do stuff, five days a week, some of that has to happen in Chicago. Really throws a monkey wrench into some things, and makes planning a lot more critical.

Still, that's not going to stop me. Not if I can do anything about it. I think the solution, or at least the key part of it, is an electric hotplate. Being a little more low-powered than the stovetop burners, it ought to be able to maintain a very low-temperature simmer. I think. At any rate, since they rarely cost more than twenty dollars, I won't feel too bad if it's not what I'm expecting.

The real benefit of the hotplate, though, is that I ought to be able to use it for outdoor smoking, a la Alton Brown. I could probably use the charcoal grill, combined with a Saturday's worth of vigilant coal-watching, but I haven't yet mastered charcoal. And with the charcoal grill limitations here in Madison - gotta keep it 10 feet from the building, which means it's off the patio and onto the grass - keeping a constant supply of hot coals can be a pain. A hotplate, though, should provide the reliable, constant heat to smolder hardwood sawdust for as long as necessary.

Of course, even a hotplate may produce too much heat for effective cold-smoking. Maybe even hot-smoking, though that'll need to be tested. I'm thinking I need to build a series of smoking chambers to create a more effective system, as in:

• The smoke-producing chamber. Probably a cardboard box, with the hotplate, a pie pan full of sawdust, and a fan-powered exit tube. Plus a small door for replacing sawdust from time to time. This should, at least, eliminate any problems with radiant heat. The key difficulty here is finding an appropriate fan; my initial guess is that a computer fan ought to be the right size for the job.
  One side benefit: since the heat source is electric, I can build this setup on the concrete patio. No concerns about fire too close to the apartment building.
  
• The cooling chamber. I'm still a bit fuzzy on this one, since I don't know what sort of temperatures I'm dealing with. The simplest version is to make the smoke tubing long enough that it'll cool the smoke through extended contact with the air, like a really low-tech heat exchanger. I could beef it up by running it through another chamber (read: cardboard box) with a tray loaded with ice at the bottom, to get a little more cooling power. Or, to take it a step further, run the whole shebang through a cooler filled with cold water. That sounds like it's reaching into difficult territory, though, requiring more money and storage space that I haven't got.
  
• The food-smoking chamber. Another box, with a pair of wooden dowels to support a cooling rack right in the middle. The tubing enters from one side to fill it with smoke, presumably at the temperature I'm looking for. A tray of ice, if necessary, to cool things down a little more. Just leave the food in here for as long as necessary, and then it's off to the next step in the process.

That seems to make the most sense to me, though I've yet to work out all of the details. Like, how do I get power out there? I'm hoping to be able to rig up a medium-base socket to a three-prong outlet so I can plug into the porch's light fixture, rather than running an extension cord out the door. (If that's what I need to do, then I'll have to rig up a bug screen to seal up the door.) And how do I determine the best way to build the cooling chamber(s)? Without too many iterations, at least. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of, as well.

In the end, I'm confident that the results of this'll be entirely worth the effort.

Crackheads and assassins.

Chicago.

I've got a song in my head. "Grace Beneath The Pines" by The For Carnation, off the Fight Songs EP. Particularly the last verse:

Don't go.
What's so great about there?
It's all damp tunnels,
Newspapers and skin.
And meanwhile, you know
I'll be here and you there
With crackheads
And assassins
And burn victims
And millionaires' sons.

In particular, it's the "crackheads and assassins and burn victims" bit. For the longest time, that was the only part I could remember, since most of the lyrics are so soft as to be nearly inaudible. It's an addictive and lovely song, funny and charming, in contrast to their more sinister eponymous album.

On Menus.

Chicago.

I love restaurants with short, simple menus. Especially when they change frequently.

I'm sure that this is due, in part, to my complete inability to make a quick decision as the what I want to eat. Fewer choices means less to agonize over, so I'm not making my selection at the last possible instant. With the vast menu you typically get at diners or Americanized Asian restaurants, I'm trying desperately to remember all of the various, nearly identical permutations of the dish I'm hungry for.

What becomes aggravating is the choice of what to include in the description of each item. At Asian restaurants, in particular. So often, it seems that they list the vegetables (plus your choice of meat, of course), but with no mention of the actual flavors involved. That's great that it has two kinds of eggplant. But what's in the sauce? That'll dominate the dish and eventually determine whether I like it. If there are two options with the same listing of vegetables, which sometimes happens, how am I to tell the difference? Though a multi-year backpacking excursion through southeast Asia would certainly be informative and a hell of a lot of fun, it's more than a little impractical.

Despite the wealth of choices, I think these menus prevent people from branching out to try new things. If the pad thai's good, and it's always on the menu, why risk something else? And with dozens of choices, how great can any of it be? If the cooks have to keep mental tabs on seventy-plus different dishes, their attention to detail on any one has to suffer, usually to the point where everything tastes pretty much the same.

Small menus, though, mean that the kitchen staff can focus more closely on details. They can make a point to use only what's fresh, what's seasonal, what's local. The menu can actually reflect everything that's used in the meal, if it wants to, and it's a good bet that the servers have actually tasted everything. Plus, you're almost guaranteed to have to try something new every time you go, which has to be a good thing for most of us.

Elegant, expensive restaurants do this all the time, but there's no reason a tiny, cheap place can't. Case in point: Natt Spil. Though you can always get the three-cup chicken or Dave's roast pork sammie, the rest of the menu rotates regularly, to accommodate whatever's fresh. Plus, the beer on tap's reasonably local and seasonal. And it doesn't need to cost a lot to eat a good meal. (Unless you're having multiple drinks. But good alcohol ain't cheap anywhere.)

The two exceptions for the short menu:

1. A good pizza joint, like the Roman Candle, where you pick your pizza toppings. The menu is actually very limited - sometimes, all you can get is pizza. But you can fine-tune your meal in the same way you might ask to have an ingredient left off a salad.

2. A good breakfast/brunch place, the kind with an assemble-it-yourself kind of menu. There are a million different variations, with a few key building blocks: eggs, pancakes, bacon, etc. Though they may have it organized into typical breakfasts, a good place'll let you swap stuff in and out, exchanging fruit for toast, or whatever. You just need to know how you like your eggs cooked.

I may be indecisive, but I can handle that much.

On The Road.

Chicago.

Since Sharon's using her Spring Break to visit her folks back in Downingtown, I took the opportunity to drive down to Chicago while I had the available daylight. With a bunch of storms moving through, the day was flat and gray. Not ideal driving weather, but far better than two and a half hours of glaring headlights. With warm days of late, the snow's melted away to reveal the earth ready to awaken from winter. Farmers' fields, mostly contours of cornstalk stubs, and pockets of woods slowly give way to suburbs and office parks as the highway slides closer to Chicago, at roughly the same rate that traffic increases. By the time you can't afford to take your eyes off the road, there isn't much worth looking at anymore.

Not that the Interstate system lends itself to scenic drives - certainly not if you're behind the wheel - but I've come to like the gentle hills and farmland of southern Wisconsin. Illinois, being essentially flat, seems so much less interesting, not much different than the haul across Indiana. I've heard horror stories about Kansas, describing it as like eight or more hours of brain death. These weren't Kansans telling me this, of course, so I'm sure there's a little inherent bias. Can't say I'm anxious to find out for myself, though.

Living in southern Wisconsin, and working in an architectural field, in Chicago, I end up hearing mention of Frank Lloyd Wright from time to time. I'd imagine he's probably the most recognized architect, at least in this country, but his architectural designs are the second thing that occurs to me on hearing his name. What really fascinates me about him is his annual cross-country drives from Taliesin, in southern Wisconsin, to Taliesin West, in southern Arizona. I'm sure that this was a typical sort of activity for the well-to-do, back before the automobile was an American crutch, but Wright's the only one I know any details of.

Even today, with multi-lane superhighways, with speed limits of 65 mph and up, it's a hell of a long drive. Must've taken him days, weaving through the small towns, struggling over the Rockies, moving at, what? 35 mph, maybe? Something that seems interminably slow to us, I'm sure. The scenery must have been phenomenal, though, as the world shifted from northern Midwest autumn to the semi-arid winter of the Southwest. An experience not unlike what Robert Pirsig describes in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, winding along the back roads of the Dakotas and Montana on a motorcycle. Watching the red-winged blackbirds. Feeling so insignificant, so happily lost beneath the Big Sky.

Bill Bryson did something like that road trip, which he describes in his book, The Lost Continent. It's an altogether different experience for him, I think. It's a trip on the back roads of America, to the El Dorado that is small-town America. Of course, he approaches it from a much different tack than the other writers of the road experience. Pirsig uses it as a serious philosophical exploration. Kerouac and the beat generation - and their ideals and experiences - have long passed. The old roads of Wright's era are broken and buried under the expansion of the Interstate system. For Bryson, using it as a chance to mourn his father's death, to reconnect with the cross-country travels of his childhood, it's something else entirely. His curious humor and cynicism make it yet another unique take on the American road.

Would any of these mirror my experiences, if I ever had the time, the opportunity to undertake the same sort of thing myself? I doubt it. For now, I really only experience the road as a void between destinations. Granted, the Madison-to-Downingtown drive is long enough that I'd just as soon not drag it out any longer than necessary. Twelve or thirteen hours, with just the minimum of stops for gas, food and toilets. Usually with a limited window, such as the last few vacation days from work, so I'd rather have quality time with family than with the land in between us. I wonder what I'm missing.

There was a time, in college, when Sharon and I drove from Downingtown to the Catskills for a long weekend. Rather than take the highways through New Jersey, around New York City, we opted to take smaller highways through the Poconos, drifting along the Appalachians. We took every excuse to pull over for scenic views, to see the waterfalls tumbling down the mountains, to enjoy driving at slow speeds with windows down. They're purely good memories, spending the bulk of a day enjoying the travel, postponing the destination. I imagine a grand road trip to be like that day, drawn out over weeks and all sorts of places.

It's the road trip I'll likely never take, but I think I'm okay with that.

Crazy people.

Madison.

It's 60°F out there. The lakes are all but melted. Folks are out enjoying the weather in short sleeves. I even saw a guy out paddling his kayak in the Yahara River, not fifteen minutes ago. Yet the ice fishers are still at it, some easily within twenty feet of honest-to-goodness, ice-free water. Mere steps from puddles of water sitting atop the ice they're fishing through.

I suppose you could make a case that, after drilling a hole through the ice, you could tell it's thick enough to be on. Makes me think something about carts and horses.

Guys, give it up. There are plenty of other places to go to drink beer on a Saturday afternoon.

Mmm. Sprouts.

Madison.

Okay, so here's another one from the New York Times: Frank Bruni singing the praises of the humble Brussels sprout. I adore them when they're in season, which won't be until late October or November, depending on this year's weather. You could probably extend them well into the winter with a proper hoophouse setup, I'd imagine, but no one at the local markets appears to have done so. Not yet, anyhow. Given the choice between frost-sweetened spinach and Brussels sprouts, most folks tend to the former.

When I buy them at the farmers' market, they tend to come all attached to the stalk, a two-foot long shaft studded with tiny cabbage heads. A few vendors'll trim the sprouts off to sell by the pound - which ups the price, of course. It also means you'll have to trim the ends before cooking, since they dry out and get sort of woody. Not a big deal, especially if you don't have the fridge space to jam in the whole stalk.

I don't know that I'd ever had Brussels sprouts before buying them here at the market. My parents never had much in the way of cabbage around when I was growing up, and I think my mom has bad childhood memories of overdone sprouts. My grandmother comes from the old Italian tradition of erring on the side of overcooking vegetables, rather than the French preference for keeping them a little crisp and al dente. Through experience, I've found that my mom loves the latter, to the point where she'll comment on how she loves when I prepare green beans to go with Christmas dinner. All I do is boil or steam them. Add a little salt, pepper and maybe olive oil. Sometimes it's the (seemingly) minor details that elevate simple cooking to something special.

Two of my office coworkers like Brussels sprouts, though neither has any particular cooking talents. They'll readily admit this. So they microwave their sprouts, then add some salt and pepper. I'm a little freaked out by this method, because I can only imagine it bringing out the most pungently sulfurous qualities of the vegetables. Then again, I'm wary of using the microwave for much other than boiling water, softening lemons, or making popcorn.

My usual method, which is only slightly more difficult than the microwave, involves slicing the heads in half, then searing them quickly in a little butter to brown up the edges a bit. Then braise in chicken stock (or whatever's handy) until just tender, then take off the heat and drop in a knob of butter to thicken up the braising liquid. Salt and pepper usually cover the seasoning pretty well.

Also good, though, and on the slate for next year's pickling bonanza, are pickled Brussels sprouts. They first appeared at the combination Paul/Nick birthday bash, as just one among many of the available Bloody Mary garnishes. Paul grabbed them at the grocery store because they were just too weird not to - along with anchovies, sardines, and other deliciously pungent stuff that I adore and not many others do. Turns out, though, that they were fantastic. Just a whiff of sulfur, but that was pretty quickly overwhelmed by the vinegar and salt. Went very well with vodka-spiked tomato juice.

Also made for an excellent building block in the "build a Bloody Mary garnish that looks like Paul" contest.

Nanograms.

Madison.

An interesting article in the New York Times this morning about the latest conflict between haute cuisine and food inspections. Though I haven't had the opportunity (read: time and, especially, money) to try anything cooked sous vide, I can understand the principles behind it to see how it'd be a definite improvement over some traditional cooking methods. But it does sound like heaven for Clostridium botulinum: warm, moist, and oxygen-free. According to the FDA, an infective dose of the bacterial toxin can be as little as a few nanograms. I can see where the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene might be concerned.

You have to love that name. It conjures up an image of an old skater shirt I remember from high school: a stick figure holding a string running in one ear and out the other, with the caption, "Mental Floss." It's as though two tangentially-related city departments were mashed together to save on office space.

Nanograms, though. Damn. I can't really conceive of an amount that small. Just the prefix nano- makes me think of measuring things on an atom-by-atom scale, of interesting but beyond-my-grasp science like quantum mechanics and string theory. It's neat to read about these things in the newspaper, but I'm probably well past any meaningful, practical understanding of them. I can only pretend to discuss them with people as clueless as me, as small talk at parties. Even with a concept like relativity, I'm more or less stuck at an Einstein's Dreams level of comprehension.

3 parts turpentine...

Madison.

While watching North By Northwest last night, I was struck by a minor little detail. When Roger (Cary Grant) sits down in the dining car, he orders a Gibson before his entree arrives.

A Gibson, of course, is a martini with a pickled onion instead of an olive. My preferred ratio: 3 parts gin, 1 part dry vermouth. I like Hendrick's. If you prefer sweet vermouth, add a strip of orange zest as garnish.

The thing is, when his drink arrives, it's tiny. By today's standards. An ounce or so, by the looks of it, as though he's been brought a little cordial by mistake. But this is the way it used to be, in the golden age of cocktails, before the surging popularity of chocolate-based "martinis" and drinks served in stemmed goldfish bowls. Back in the day when bartenders created their own bitters from angostura and gentian root, among other things, and when people ordered Sidecars and Singapore Slings without being pretentiously retro.

Little drinks that tasted good, so you could have a drink before, and after, dinner without making it impossible to operate heavy machinery later that evening. Of course, those were the days before 16% ABV (and up) New World wines, so you could reasonably share a bottle with a date for dinner without getting hammered. I love the jammy, intense wines from California and Australia, but I no longer pretend I can drive to dinner and home again. I just call a taxi and consider it cheap insurance.

As for drinks, though, I do prefer the martini to the Gibson. Pickled onions notwithstanding, as delicious as they might be. There's just something to the combination of richness and brininess that comes with a good olive that complements the dry martini so well, that makes the last dregs of the drink half-martini, half-olive and all-wonderful. The only difficult part is that all the best olives come with pits, which makes 'em a bear to skewer with a toothpick. I've got some olives flavored with fennel and orange in the fridge, and they're just spectacular.

Not for the faint of stomach, though. Then again, neither is a good gin.

"Paint thinner," my dad calls it.

Pickling mojo.

Madison.

The market breakfast this morning features roasted Sungold tomatoes again, which reminds me that Sharon and I are nearly out of our own garden tomatoes. I think there are only two pint jars left - one of Green Zebras, another of mixed red and black varieties. Forty pounds sure seemed like a lot of tomatoes to can last August, but I'm sure I'll be wishing we'd done more come April and May, before they appear again at the market.

We're also nearly out of pickles, which tells me that experiment was a roaring success. For a six-dollar bucket of cucumbers (plus a little salt and vinegar and herbs), they've been well worth it. This year, I'm planning to try pickling everything I can get fresh and cheap. Or that's overly plentiful in the garden. So far, I'm definitely planning on asparagus, snap beans, carrots and onions, but I'm sure there'll be plenty else out there.

When looking through seed catalogs this year, I recall running across a small, tightly-headed lettuce variety that was pickled in the nineteenth century. So I guess anything's possible.

I'm also anxious to try fermented pickles again this year. Last year was a failure. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but the pickles smelled contaminated. I've got a newer, more specific recipe to test out now, so we'll see how that pans out. Having never had any, I'm not sure what the difference is between quick pickling, but Nick, who grew up in Romania, pines for them. Apparently, his grandmother would throw all of the fresh harvest they couldn't eat right away into a big crock, work her pickling mojo, and they'd have pickled vegetables all winter.

I gotta get me some of that mojo.

Rough drafts in ink.

Chicago.

Last night, for the first time since early December, I sat down in front of the typewriter again. I only managed to churn out about a page and a half of pure dreck, but it felt good. I think I've moved beyond caring that my fiction writing is - at least on the first pass - rambling streams of junk. For the most part. I like the process of writing more than the final product. Or so I like to think.

For pounding out a rough draft, nothing beats a typewriter. Mine's an Olivetti MS 25 Premier Plus, which is an awfully fancy name for a cheap, plastic, all-manual machine with a tendency to skip spaces and smear red ink into the black. But I like it. It'll work anywhere. It fits, without too much difficulty, on the back of my bike. The clattering of keystrokes, particularly during an intense bout of writing, feels deeply reassuring. And it's far more legible than my dodgy handwriting, doubly so when I'm scribbling as fast as I can.

The best part, though, is its permanence. It's a liability for letters or resumés, when you can't make a mistake, but a rough draft is all mistakes. On a computer, it's far too tempting to edit as you write, deleting words and entire passages, getting nowhere. On the typewriter, you just have to charge forward. There's a hard copy, provided you don't destroy the actual pages, something you can always refer back to.

It's like an old architecture professor used to tell us about sketching. He'd flip out when he saw someone using a pencil, because you never get anywhere with one. The temptation to erase, to fine-tune a line to perfection, is hard to avoid. Nearly impossible for a student. With a pen, you can't erase. You need to work with what you have on the paper. It also teaches you to be more cautious about what you do, but then to do it boldly. It's a simple lesson that I think most of the other students forgot - no one else seems to recall it - but it struck a chord with me.

Now I always sketch with ink.