The End-o'-July Bounty.

Chicago.

Yet another weekend of buying too much good stuff from the farmers' market. It's tough to say no when everything looks¹ so good. Sharon and I started to scramble to try to eat all the fresh produce possible before it spoils. As a brief listing of (some of) the spectacular bounty of summer, in alphabetical order:

• Apples. Ela Orchard was there, which seemed early to me. This being July. Bob assured us that he was actually a week or two later than usual, since he'd lost most of the first batch of Melbas.
  
  
• Artichokes. I wasn't aware that you could grow them in Wisconsin², so they were a very pleasant surprise. Tory Miller'd already been by to scoop up the bulk of the crop, we were told, but there were still enough for a pre-dinner snack. It's been so long since I've had them that I decided to play it simple: trim, steam, salt, lime juice. (We were out of lemons, and had limes for fresh salsa.)
  
  
• Blackberries. Josh from Driftless Organics has the red scratches all over his hands and forearms to show for it. Small but intensely flavored, and enough to send Sharon wild. She's planning a blackberry pie, which she tells me is her childhood favorite.
  
  
• Blueberries. Dump a big pile into a bowl of yogurt and call it breakfast. Add a few currants, just for kicks.
  
  
• Cherries. Sweet ones this week, since we have a freezerful of sours. They didn't last beyond Sunday afternoon, and only that long because we were devouring blackberries and blueberries, too.
  
  
• Chillis. There were some habaneros, but only green ones. That can only mean one thing: a tradeoff of the floral aroma for an extra dose of crazy capsaicin heat. So we went with serranos, jalapenos and Peruvian ajis. I pureed some of them into a minty, walnutty pesto that was great on the grilled eggplant and corn, on the advice of Mark Bittman. (The Minimalist in the New York Times food section.) He suggested chilli powder, but if you've got fresh, use it.
  
  
• Corn. It's a sign of the American summer when the corn goes on the grill. Granted, most folks don't toss it on beside thick slices of eggplant, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't consider it. What didn't get the charcoal treatment is destined for fresh salsa.
  
  
• Currants. Because I can't get enough of them. We were too late³ for black, which I haven't had in years. Maybe next year.
  
  
• Green beans. Flat-type Romanos, to be precise, from JenEhr. I turned a few into a quick and spicy pickle, using dill seeds from the garden, and the rest'll get devoured before long. They've got a good bean flavor, keep crisp in the vinegar brine, and aren't tough or stringy. I can't believe I'd never dicovered them before.
  
  
• Pears. Ela Orchard again, with those little Grandma-something pears. I can't recall the name, but they're tiny and, as I recall from last year, not the best eating pear. I didn't bother to taste any this time, but went right ahead and poached them in sugar syrup with some fresh ginger. Bob also noted - with a big smile - that there are plenty of Moonglows on the trees this year. They might not get big, depending on the weather between now and harvest, but that's just fine. The smaller pears are just as delicious.
  
  
• Tomatoes. Sungolds, all brightness and sugar. A good selection of various colors from Tomato Mountain, even though I can't recall their names.⁴ And some green tomatoes from the Jacksons, on the elder Alice's recommendation. We split them two ways: half went into hobo packs on the grill, with onions and squash; the rest we breaded and fried. Though it isn't the healthiest choice ever, the fried green tomatoes were absolutely fantastic. I don't care if they're bad for me.

And that's only a portion, not including the bakery goods from Cress Springs and Madison Sourdough, cheeses from Hook's, Bleu Mont and Butler Farms, and the massive rump roasts from Fountain Prairie that are destined for Jesse and Regina's wedding buffet. Plus whatever else I've forgotten.

* * * * *

¹And is.

²Okay, that's a lie. If Eliot Coleman can grow them in Maine, a dedicated and resourceful person ought to be able to do it in Wisconsin.

³In no small part because we bought so much before Blue Valley Gardens' stand that we had to haul back to the car to drop everything off.

⁴One was a Black Krim, I think, but I'm not entirely sure. Maybe a Brandywine, too. It's hard to say when you've picked out at least six different varieties.

The Lorenzo de Medici of Avondale?

Chicago.

For those stuck in Chicago during the heat wave, it may be of interest to swing by Hot Doug's to see their new "gallery." From the Hot Doug's web page:

Hot Doug's, the Lorenzo de Medici of Avondale, is proud to sponsor the permanent installation of mural paintings by Louise Baker, WonderWalls
OPENING RECEPTION:
TUESDAY, AUGUST 1ST, 1pm - 4pm
There will be cookies!

Let's repeat that last bit: There will be cookies!

Plus, they have air conditioning, which is something I'm lacking.

TimeOut Chicago has a brief blurb about the murals, should the promise of cookies and pleasant air temperatures not be enough on its own.

Food For Thought Recipe Contest.

Madison.

Now that's summer's here - and all the signs¹ point to it - it's time to get cranking on R.E.A.P.'s annual Food For Thought Recipe Contest. Last year was an unqualified success², but I have no such expectations this year. I'm considering it more as a chance to flex my culinary muscles, to try dusting off some old favorites and possibly come up with something new and worth repeating.

So far, this year, I've got four recipes more or less sketched out. I'm not sure when I'll have the time to test them - before August 18th, anyway - so I'm doing my best to think carefully and to modify some old standby recipes with new twists. I don't have anything really novel this year, anyhow. Nothing that doesn't require some seriously specialized equipment, like the cold-smoker, that is.³

So far this year:

• A crepe cake featuring strawberries and ricotta. I last made one of these many months back, when local pears were in season, just to see how locally-sourced I could make breakfast. By using whole wheat (Brantmeier Farms), eggs (Farmer John or Blue Valley Gardens), apple cider and pears (Ela Orchard), and maple syrup (Mother King's), the only potentially non-local ingredients were butter and salt. I've swapped out the pears in this one for jam and cheese, which is richer, less sweet, and (I hope) a bit more sophisticated.
  
  
• Sausage gravy and biscuits, featuring sage, chives and chive seeds from the garden. This whole recipe is an excuse to make use of the chive seeds I harvested on a whim one weekend. They're like misshapen, onion-flavored poppy seeds. That, and I love sausage gravy and need to make it an occasional part of my cooking repertoire.
  
  
• Welsh cakes with fresh currants. It's been a bountiful year for currants, and Sharon and I have had the pleasure of feasting on all sorts of different varieties: white, red, pink... I haven't seen any black currants, but I may have missed them.⁴ For my money, there's no finer addition to pancakes than red currants, all bright and tangy. Welsh cakes (picau ar y maen) are more like a flat scone, usually made with dried currants, but I'm determined to make a whole wheat version with fresh berries, which make for a much livelier biscuit.
  
  
• Lamb with lots of lavender. Also habanero peppers. Lavender's been a great success in the garden this year, with so many flowers that I'm not sure what to do with them. Lavender and habanero peppers are both so intensely floral that I think they'll be a great combination, so I'm banking on it. I won't be harvesting the chillis from the garden until after the contest, I'll bet, so I can't truly test this one out ahead of time. Still, I'm modifying one of Julia Child's recipes, adding roasted potatoes and compound butter, so I'm three-quarters of the way there already...

The next target - whether or not I can manage it - is to try adapting a miso-based Japanese pickling technique to use predominantly (or exclusively?) Wisconsin ingredients.

It's got potential.

* * * * *

¹Temperatures reaching into the 90s, humidity even higher, spectacular and sudden thunderstorms (complete with the associated flash flooding), and a refrigerator so full of produce that it's a struggle to eat it all in a week.

²First time trying, too. I try not to brag, but, damn, that felt great.

³Incidentally, that sucker works wonders. I'll get around to some "action shots" one of these days. Maybe for a day of fish smoking... weather pending. (See previous note on thunderstorms.)

⁴I know they've been implicated, in the states, as a vector for white pine blister rust. Recent research suggests that it's only a certain strain of the species, but that might explain it. That and the fact that most Americans have never seen a currant, and wouldn't know what to do with them.

The Battle of Downingtown?

Madison.

It's not often that one's hometown gets mocked on NPR, so I find it well worth pointing out. Even if it did occur on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me! nearly four years ago. "Bluff The Listener," specifically. Adam Felber does mispronounce Downingtown as Downington, but he's far from the first. A lot of people seem to have trouble seeing that w at the end.

In case you're wondering where this misguided blip off the Pennsylvania Turnpike is, here's a map. If you're into bogus history, it sounds like Downingtown's the place to be.

On gin and laudanum.

Madison.

I'm ever so cheered to see folks rooting for the gin martini. There's even a point - albeit small - scored for vermouth. Then again, I spent much of college drinking sweet vermouth, on the rocks with a twist¹, as an after-dinner drink. Dry vermouth's a bit much for regular drinking, but if you don't like it, don't order a martini. Ask for gin or vodka, straight-up. Most bartenders don't care what sort of glass you want it in, and it's not like they're keeping tabs on the number of olives left in the jar.

Sometimes I feel like a college indie kid again. Yes, I want good gin to be popular enough that I can be assured of finding it in liquor stores and bars, but I don't want it to be so popular that I feel silly ordering it. Then again, I'm fully creeped out by the notion of sugary-sweet "martinis," those of the chocolate, or raspberry, or whatever persuasion. Couldn't they have latched onto some moniker that wasn't something I genuinely like?

Oh, I'll just get it out of my system. As far as I'm concerned, there should be several ground rules for the martini:

• A martini requires gin. If it's made with vodka, it's a vodka martini. You can't make a margarita with rum or vodka or bourbon, at least not without pointing that out ahead of time.
  
  
• A martini requires a significant portion of vermouth. Dry, preferably one-sixth to one-quarter, so you can actually taste it. This may depend on your preferred gin and vermouth.
  
  
• The only sweet drink you can call a martini is a sweet martini, which swaps out the dry vermouth for sweet. Garnish with a strip of orange peel rather than an olive. Still gotta be gin.
  
  
• Anything hewing close to the martini recipe - gin + dry vermouth - can be called a martini, but only when its name spells out the modification. For example, a dirty martini gets a little olive brine added in, if that's your thing.
  
  
• The Gibson is cool enough to have its own, un-messed-with name. You may not fiddle with the Gibson as you would the martini. Something has to be preserved.

But enough about booze. What's more exciting? Opium!

Yeah, opium. As in, that very pretty flower that can get you stoned out of your mind if properly prepared. You can grow this at home, assuming you don't know that you can use it to make illicit drugs. If you do know, growing it is illegal. If you just think they're nice flowers - and they really are - you're probably okay.

Sound crazy? Take the time to read Michael Pollan's 1997 article on the subject. It's all sorts of maddening.

The high points, as I recall them:

• The seeds of "opium poppies" - primarily Papaver somniferum, among other poppy species - are readily available from gardening catalogs. Also from the spice section of your average grocery store. Perhaps on bagels, but I'd expect they might have trouble germinating after being baked.
  
  
• Seeds: legal. Plant: possibly legal, possibly not, depending on how many you have, how much you know, and who's asking. Seedpod sap and other extracts: all sorts of illegal.
  
  
• You want to buy some really out-there books? Until recently, the go-to place was Loompanics Unlimited. If no one else was willing to publish your book on, well, just about anything, Loompanics was the publisher of choice.
  
  
• Opium tea is a standard thing at certain Middle Eastern funerals². Marijuana is also perfectly acceptable in many cultures in that part of the world. Alcohol, though... not a chance. I guess you pick your poison.³
  
  
• Despite what some would have you believe, it's entirely possible to cultivate poppies in places other than southeast Asia. You can grow them here in Wisconsin, although I'd suppose illicit drug manufacture would require a suspiciously large flower garden.
  
  
• The Bill of Rights doesn't seem to apply in drug cases. You know, that whole "due process" thing? Get caught doing something illegal and drug-related in your home, and the authorities can seize your house, land, etc., then sell or use them as they see fit. Regardless of whether or not you're ultimately convicted of any crime. If you rent, you can be evicted, again, without actually being found guilty of a crime. Or even charged. Fun, huh?
  
  
• Opium sap is fiercely bitter. Add this one to the list of consumables that it's hard to imagine anyone discovering in the first place.⁴
  
  
• Rational behavior does not seem to come naturally to the drug enforcement authorities in this country. Or to drug-related taboos in just about any culture, anywhere, anytime. I quote Pollan, because it's hard to paraphrase his summary:
  

  The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas. Is it the quality of addictiveness that renders a substance illicit? Not in the case of tobacco, which I am free to grow in this garden. Curiously, the current campaign against tobacco dwells less on cigarettes' addictiveness than on their threat to our health. So is it toxicity that renders a substance a public menace? Well, my garden is full of plants—datura and euphorbia, castor beans, and even the stems of my rhubarb—that would sicken and possibly kill me if I ingested them, but the government trusts me to be careful. Is it, then, the prospect of pleasure—of "recreational use"—that puts a substance beyond the pale? Not in the case of alcohol: I can legally produce wine or hard cider or beer from my garden for my personal use (though there are regulations governing its distribution to others). So could it be a drug's "mind-altering" properties that make it evil? Certainly not in the case of Prozac, a drug that, much like opium, mimics chemical compounds manufactured in the brain.

• My favorite nugget of ironic humor: many of the hatchet-wielding hardliners of the Women's Christian Temperance Union were said to unwind at the end of a long day with their "women's tonics." Primary ingredient: laudanum, also known as tincture of opium. An alcoholic extract of the opium poppy. I find that all sorts of funny.

Suffice to say, I probably won't be growing poppies anytime soon.

Incidentally, my personal favorite high is from chillis. Eating enough seriously spicy food will get you feeling very, very good, presumably from all the endorphins the brain's pumping out to deal with the onslaught of capsaicin.⁵ Just thought I'd share.

* * * * *

¹Yeah, the drink from Groundhog Day. Benefits for college students of legal drinking age: is perfectly drinkable at low prices, unlike wine; keeps indefinitely^a and is ready-to-drink at room temperature, unlike beer; won't get you too intoxicated to do something useful, should you feel like it, unlike spirits^b.

^aRelatively, anyways. It's not like we were saving this for special occasions.

^bScotch is lovely and all, but I consider my evening effectively complete by the time I sit down with a glass.

²Opiates are powerful painkillers, true, but they also help eliminate depression. Though I can't substantiate it, I've heard that morphine works, not by reducing pain, but by making you no longer care. If the pain exists, but you're completely non-plussed about it, you might as well not have any.

Then again, you could have the great fun of withdrawal in your future. Whee!

³Or, rather, your culture and associated law-enforcement bodies pick it for you.

⁴Also: coffee, chocolate, huitlacoche, other delicious mushrooms that look a lot like poisonous ones, and so on.

⁵The accompanying beer to mediate the burn doesn't hurt.

Hyperbad.

Chicago.

I can't seem to find any evidence of hyperbad. This bothers me, because I'm quite sure I didn't make it up. Though there is the occasional brief segment of college life I can't remember¹, I'm pretty sure that this was real. Since then, I've retained it as the descriptor of choice for the worst films ever made.

In brief:
Hyperbad is truly, truly awful.

In less brief:
No, seriously. Hyperbad is so bad that it's irredeemable. Not even as really trashy camp, the sort that takes a three drink minimum to appreciate.

More thoroughly:
Here's how I recall it, more or less². In the AV Club's review of the straight-to-video Bats, the reviewer³ posited the existence of a pseudo-cyclical organization of movie quality. (See Figure 1.) As near as I can tell, this was the birth of the hyperbad concept.


Figure 1.

At the top, we have "Good," which, in general, is what a movie wants to be. From there, moving clockwise, movies pass through "Mediocre" on their way to just plain "Bad." Simple enough, right? I think it's safe to assume that the majority of movies fall somewhere within this range. I realize that my examples are a little sparse, but I'm finding it a lot more difficult than expected to think of mediocre films. They just have no mental staying power.

Sometimes, though, a movie is so bad it's good. They're "Camp." Not always intentional, but a long sight better than plain bad. Not all of them have enough momentum to make it all the way back up to good, but aren't entirely bad. They're just sort of "Lame Camp," the mediocrity of so-bad-it's-good, of the folks aiming for irony but trying too hard. Think teen sex comedies⁴ at the low end, Bruce Campbell at the top.

Then, of course, we continue along the circle, back to bad. It's a rare film that has this kind of exceptional awfulness, the sort of failure on so many fronts that catapults beyond the so-bad-it's-good of "Camp" to "Hyperbad." This is the sort of topsy-turvy place where normal adjectives just won't do. This is the land of Bats and Frankenhooker and other films that make you demand your money back from the clerk at the rental store. The land of Alan Smithee.

* * * * *

¹Due to either excessive alcohol consumption or, more often, sleep deprivation.

²I've fleshed it out, and the picture's mine. But this is the essence of it.

³I'm assuming Nathan Rabin, as his name's on the review as it currently stands. But since I remember a portion of the review that no longer exists, we know this assumption could be wrong, too.

⁴You know. The ones starring twenty-somethings as teens, that feature no sex, and aren't particularly funny, especially once the pop-culture buzzwords have lost their popularity.

So, being sick has an upside?

Chicago.

Ah, the Frugal Traveler. It's little gems like this that I look for:

Frugal Traveler tip: Illness helps trim food costs.

No kidding. But he is right: even if it's a shame to miss out on the loveliness of Kefalonia, there are far worse places to end up sick.

My other favorite quip from today's Times is from Mark Bittman's "The Minimalist":

How it happened that a good proportion of the eggplant now in our stores is from the Netherlands is one of life's great mysteries, but not one of its great joys.

Indeed. I'll just wait until they appear at the market; it shouldn't be long before the Hmong farmers start showing up with all kinds of skinny little eggplants.