aci biber sosu.

Sooooooooo, yeah. That's pretty fucked up looking. My breath is fucked up as well. I did end up making that amazing Maoz-centric idea I had last night, but didn't take a picture til today, that's it above looking like this awful Dr. Oetker cookbook someone gave us 15 years ago, or we possibly stole, or found, it was called Modern German Cooking I think. Unbelievably hideous food photography, like everything was photographed in a morgue with fluorescent lights.

But I swear those mint leaves just landed like that. They didddddd!!!

What we're looking at is minus last night's pickled beets and cucumbers, it's: those supergarlicky Tunisian carrots with cumin, ginger and olives (the orange stuff), plus the garlicky Yemeni zhoug (the green stuff), which is outrageously good, plus a slightly thicker version of that garlicky Turkish tahinli tarator (the beige stuff), plus I swear randomly scattered mint, plus "the spicy-ass red stuff", which is this:

Last night I had all of the above with a little shoarma-seasoned steak and it RAAWWWWWKED, but: today, no steak, add the missing beets and cukes and this is possibly the best vegan thing I've ever smashed into my face (no yogurt). It's Maoz at home. And, coolly, it combines contributions from three continents, but I guess that's how the Ottoman/Arab world rolls. More details after accomplishing something(s).

UPDATE: A day later I made this to play along with everyone else and it was realllllllly good: Roasted Cauliflower with Tahini Dressing.

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who's good.

Took a nice long healthy walk today like a good boy. Above: a view from the library. Below, mmm...somewhere on Prins Hendrikkade.

I was walking just to be walking, outside, during the day, but I had of course forethoughtedly already rewarded myself by destinationizin' wisely.

I returned home with what is probably the only reasonable approximatation of American-style pastrami in Amsterdam (just 100 grams' worth) and a mackerel. But they do have some things we should maybe get for Ameland (a petite wheel of smoked camembert, for example)...

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virtual tourism, continued.

View Istanbul in a larger map.

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The leetle friend Hilly the Poes goes off to Istanbul for work tomorrow and has had no time to do any research, so I did some real quick just now cos I used to be interested in a visit there myself, and cos I'm fast at researchin', and cos H the P does stuffs for me all the time.

Clicking on the little blue pushpins gives you further information, URLs and shtuff, but there's one pushpin you can't see because it's all off to the southeast in the Asian district: it's Çiya (seeya!), more detail here and also in the comments for this post, courtesy of the wonderfully helpful Zora.

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And now after looking at all that food I'm having terrible döner/shawarma/falafel/blo my dam head off with spicy stuff cravings. As a result, I will now try to make some of the hot-as-balls Yemeni thing called zhoug, plus some vitamin-rich omi houriya und some cooling tahini sauce.

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zhoug.

6 of them finger-sized spicy green Turkish peppers, basically like jalapeno hotness. Stemmed, not seeded!
1 cup of fresh cilantro, washed
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley, washed, or just use all cilantro like I did
3 cloves of garlic, smashed
1 tsp cumin seed
1 tsp caraway seeds, crushed
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tbsp water
1/4 cup of olive oil, plus 2 tbsp
optional: 1/2 to 1 tsp raw sugar, use only if you're thinking that something's missing

Pretty sure this is what I did except for salt and pepper could be off. But it looks and tastes EXACTLY like Maoz' spicy green sauce, which is a great great thing to look and taste like.

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f, c, k.

I know we're not supposed to complain about the weather around here, but check this out: It's supposedly 6°C outside (that's 42°F, or 279.14 Kelvin!). My heat is turned off. Why is it 23.5°C (74°F) in my apartment? This is not a trick question...I really kind of want to know. The upside is that it smells really nice and wintry outside so having the windows open is working for me. So see? Not actually a complaint after all.

But what is that "wintry" smell exactly? Where does it come from? Or is it just the smell of coldness. I could Google this shit but I'm trying to be Productivity Boy today....

And oh yeah: I'm back in Doomsday Rehab! Just trying to survive until Doomsday really. Looking back over this year's Day Ones, I realize that I actually did sort of OK, I mean yeah except for that part where I gradually didn't.

Hey but I did learn one thing. To very thoroughly document the first couple of weeks of stopping AND then also learn from what I did last time. Which is what we're doing right now.

And so here's the part where we do it one more fucking time, although probably with less excessive documentation. Tonight: roasted cauliflower and trying not to re-break the oven. More temperature trouble: the oven seems to be operating at a much higher hotness level (?) than it says it is, and thus keeps blowing its safety valve or hotness fuse or whatever it is. Somewhere gods and/or goddesses of regulateable temperature are frowning upon apartment 100M.

(But would you really need more than one god or goddess of temperature though. I'd think one would be enough. Or maybe there already is more than one and that's exactly the problem. Deeeeeeeep Thoughts.)

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sound, fury, etc.

A long week of performing and seeing other people perform, and as often happens in those situations, too much drinking and smoking and staying out late and generally acting irresponsible. On the upside, good and very good things were done and seen!!!

Actually I'm pretty sure no amount of exclamation points can really help at this juncture. But above is just Leidseplein, where they're just building the Xmastime skating rink and where I find myself changing trams even more often than usual now that I've lost my bike.

I spent a lot of time in alleyways it seems. This was Wednesday night's alleyway, outside OT301. Note the graffiti cat. In addition to a few DJ sets from me, this evening also featured a leisurely walk home with the lovely and talented P-Woe (cover art) and Duke Garwood (univibed feedback), and a mercifully brief stop at the Maloe Melo until they closed at 3. Really, at 3am on a Wednesday, I'm pretty sure you cannot do much better than the ol' "Home of the Blues".

This was Thursday night's alleyway, an alleyway that I associate with massive stress and typically equally-massive relief/triumph: it's just outside the Theater Frascati where our pieces seem to always premiere. But Thursday I was thankfully a just a normal viewer, going to see Tom and Keren's To Band.

Which turned out to be the most emotionally satisfying theatergoing experience I've had to date (I've had about ten, not including my own, which is yis I know not so many). Not personally knowing anyone in the 12-21 age group, somehow it gets real easy to be an old person who thinks "kids today" are uniformly shitty and stupid, and that yeah it wouldn't be the worst thing ever if the rising oceans swallowed all human life after my friends, family and I are gone, especially if 48% of current human life didn't immediately recognize Mitt Romney as a soulless corporate golfer.

Anyway, this pretty unpleasant anti-youth bias was thoroughly decimated Thursday night, at least temporarily. I only wept intermittently for like the first 20 minutes of the show.

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So. And this will surprise almost no one I imagine, now begins one of those regularly-occurring periods of attempted asceticism and healthfulness. If only that shit were more fun!

I did realize today something that might make things maybe one or two molecules more fun: I almost never recreationally listen to music around the house during these periods of re-calibration, and today I listened to about 8 hours of Spotify even though it's the devil and even though there's a new Spotify commercial that is juuuuuuuuuuuust horrible and I have to hear it every 15 minutes or so. God, I'll explain it in a bit.

Anyway, music helped. Note to self.

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P.S.: Other notes to self include

1. take vitamins (B1, C, and E)
2. turn off noise generators
3. clear the island off
4. stay out of bed
5. shave
6. go outside
7. walk/run/kick
8. don't worry about not sleeping

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rosa.

So, returning from a long-seeming night of beer drinking, I arrive home to wonder what there might be in the kitchen to sate myself with, and it turns out to be: one egg, one slice of American cheese, a pile of raw red onion, a bit of truffle mayo, and some ketchup. Is that wrong? It didn't taste wrong.

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autumn leaves.

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pass the bone.

The Mara has to have toothjaw surgery again. You've never seen anyone so excited about their third repeat of the same toothjaw surgery. She goes under the knife on Monday at Chinese Dentist Time (two-thirty...say it out loud).

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Also: our oven is officially kapotski. The burners still work, but ze big part not so much. Any bets on how long it will take us to replace it? My money's on "not before Xmas".

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In other painful news, I'm DJing again, next Wednesday will make it three times this month, so it must be official. One of the best things about DJing is looking for (and sometimes even successfully finding) new music. One of the worst things about looking for new music is having to put up with ridiculous music journalism that constantly tries to invent new styles of music. I'm not talking about genres with some basis in real things that actually happened (footwork, post-dubstep), I'm talking about shit that some little white hipster dude just made up yesterday afternoon in preparation for one day becoming Simon Reynolds. Here are some brand-new genres that I'm totally not kidding are supposedly now in existence.

ice-wave
vaporwave
hypostatic dub
wonky
#newbreed
cloud rap
swag
sassy

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Mara, please learn the moves at 0:56. Thanks!!!



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recidivism revisited.

Above: De Kletskop, on the Zeedijk, one of my favorite bars in that neck of the woods.

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I'm totally absorbed by my southern cooking reminiscences at the moment. Today I found myself slowing down as I passed the poelier, like H. I. McDonough and his convenience stores. Recidivism.

And then my slowing down became stopping and buying a leg of duck confit. Because yes I'm still thinking about New Orleans, and somehow the idea of duck confit and sweet potato bitterballen came into me mind (you know, instead of beef and mashed potato bechamel). Spices would be smoked paprika, orange zest, scallion, and...thyme? Cinnamon? Allspice? Chipotle? Whiskey? Cream cheese? Not all of these obviously, suggestions for refinement in the comments please. I imagine that the dipping sauce would be either something sour cream-like or something chutney-like. Maybe an orange crème fraîche like the lemon crème fraîche I had in Sweden last summer (hmm, not as crazy an idea as I thought).

UPDATE: So I tried this, but via grated sweet potato instead of mashed. They're good, but I think part of what I wanted was the texture of fully-cooked sweet potato fried rather than the al dente hash brown kind of approach.

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Virtual tourism continues via Trip Advisor, and I must say, although Trip Advisor is a wonderful resource for many reasons, sometimes it all becomes too much for me and I wish I could had time to hack into their servers and install a global banner that said "While traveling, please keep in mind: you are in a foreign fucking country. People might not speak English. This does not mean that they are "not catering to tourists", this means they are just going about their business. And even if it does mean they are not catering to tourists, it's not "a shame", it's completely OK. Because a lot of tourists suck, many many many.

For example, some tourists, I'm not mentioning any names, will come in to your traditional, basic tapas bar, sit down, order a couple of meat and cheese tapas, and wonder why there's no bread on the table to go with them. So they ask the waitress if they have any bread, she says: si, we have pa amb tomaquet. You say great (whatever that is, ha ha), she brings it and then you complain that it has tomatoes and garlic and oil on it, sorry, can you get one without all the stuff on it. You complain that the waitress "seemed confused and reluctant to honor this request".

And then the bread she returns with: it was kind of stale and tasteless. (pan amb tomaquet is known as a way to use up leftover bread). So you asked for some balsamic vinegar to "make it taste like something" (cause you're in fucking Spain, known for their balsamic vinegar), and the poor waitress was like was like, "ehhh, damn I love tourists, remind me why don't I speak English again?", and trudged back into the kitchen to ask the chef for his bottle, I would love to have heard that conversation, and, wow, "it tasted like it hadn't been used in years. Horrid." Yeah, guess what: it hadn't been used in years. You're in fucking Spain. "Needless to say, we did not enjoy the food here at all" you say. I say "GGG-GGG-GGG-GGG-GGG-GGG-GGGG-GGGG-GGGG-GGG-GGG"...(or however you spell machine gun fire).

Then you complain about the experience on Trip Advisor. Later reviews for this same place might say "staff seemed unwelcoming and unaccommodating for non-Spanish speakers". You know why? THEY'RE TIRED OF YOUR CRAZY FUCKING REQUESTS. And can I split this bill six ways?

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dreamland.

This morning I indulged in two of my dreamtime obsessions simultaneously. I had, of course, killed someone, as I do about once a month in my dreams. It's never malicious, or at least it's never premeditated, and it's often in self-defense.

The killing part is usually the short part of the dream: the long part is the disposal of the body and/or fleeing of the crime scene. Usually it takes the authorities anywhere from 12 hours to 12 months to start looking for me, and then I'm "on the lam" as they say. 

This morning's episode was an especially surreal variation: I woke up at 5am or something and was browsing around Ye Olde Internet before going back to sleep. For relaxation purposes, I'd been reading a bunch about Texas BBQ and how you pretty much can't get all of the best stuff in one spot, you kind of have to drive around to little towns throughout central Texas. 

So when I did finally manage to fall back asleep, naturally my post-murder fleeing of the police was combined with a tour of central Texan BBQ joints. In a parking lot, eating brisket in my car, hunkered down in the driver's seat so the flashing blue lights wouldn't illuminate my face, knowing my sauce and debris-obscured fingerprints were completely untrackable should I have to ditch the car for any reason. 

~~~

I´ve been thinking about southern food a lot, must be the unsouthern weather here.

Shrimp Remoulade.
although Commander's Palace's version is served on marinated hearts of palm with Creole tomatoes, tarragon and a spicy lemon dressing.
Crawfish Cornbread.
Brigtsen's Red Beans and Rice.
Smoked Duck and Pepper Jelly Sandwiches.
Cochon De Lait Cajun Pulled Pork.
Bourbon and Caramel Tiramisu

~~~