winter light.

Above: production line. Below: one of the many benefits of not drinking is that last night's entertainment costs = €0.00, which included two sets of ICP Orchestra and a gander at Tomoko Mukaiyama's wasted.

DIY.

We just reminded ourselves of the most perfectly illustrative example of why I don't do home improvement projects.

It was back in our suburban Atlanta compound, late 1990s, and we were "having guests". I have no idea who, but they were sufficiently important that we would be cleaning the toilets (in no way am I suggesting that we don't always clean our toilets before "having guests").

Anyway. Mara was doing 312 things simultaneously and I was just...not doing anything useful. This was before we'd really figured out how to assign housework tasks, so basically I would just do one useless thing of my choosing for an hour, like "organize the CDs", while Mara would do every other damn thing that actually needed doing. She was also handling most of the cooking at this point in our relationship as well, so you can imagine that by the time the first guest rang the doorbell, she pretty much wanted to kill me.

This particular evening, I was finally starting to wise up, and requested that she "please give me something useful to do so that you don't kill me", and she said over her shoulder on her way to mow the lawn or paint the porch or something, "honey why don't you clean the bathrooms, thank you".

Awesome. I can do this. I went into the kitchen to retrieve the "bathroom cleaner", a toxic spray rather famous in the minds of Americans my age because of their TV commercials, which advertise that this product's "scrubbing bubbles" do all the work "so you don't have toooooooooooo". In the commercial this last sentence is heroically bellowed by one of the animated scrubbing bubbles as he slides down the now-sparklingly-clean drain, the bellowing bubble rather pleased with himself and decidedly upbeat despite the fact that he is almost definitely about to end up in some kind of permanent sewage situation.

Discursive writing can be exhausting, I do apologize. So I went into the kitchen. I reached under the sink to grab the can of Scrubbing Bubbles spray. I went into the downstairs bathroom and thoroughly doused the toilet with the poisonous foam and then left the room so that the Scrubbing Bubbles could do their work, "so I wouldn't have tooooooo" etc etc etc.

After who knows how much time, I guess the amount of time it took me to forget and then remember that I was in the middle of an important task, I went back into the bathroom with a roll of paper towels and confidently/optimistically gave the seat a quick swipe. My paper towel stopped immediately in its tracks, almost as if it had been, well, glued to the seat.

For a second or two I seriously thought I was having a stroke or other major brain incident: I'd used these Scrubbing Bubbles before, so my expectations were high, I knew how to do this...and these results were so thoroughly illogical and opposite....it just didn't make any kind of sense.

Maybe I'd applied it wrong? Was that possible? Maybe it was past its "use-by" date? Who knows. I looked at the can to check the instructions. As you can probably already imagine, it was not in fact the Scrubbing Bubbles can. It was a can of Spray Mount, which, according to the 3M website, is an "artist's aerosol adhesive, that bonds practically any lightweight material instantly, yet allows work to be lifted and repositioned."

Needless to say, much hilarity ensued around the perfection of not only this failure but the resulting brainstorm of purposely using Spray Mount on all of the toilet seats and seeing what our guests had to say about it afterwards.

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crow.

Crow by Mara. His feet move and everything.

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party train.

As mentioned, it was Birre's 30th birthday yesterday, and since they're food people Mara made them some of our barbecue sauce. And since Mara's Mara she whipped up a pretty convincing BBQ sauce label for it.

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OK, I'm really exhausted just looking at what VDuck has been doing for the last month. The month of birthdays and adventure drinking is coming to an end, we just have Andy and Ron's birthdays to get through on Tuesday and Thursday. Mara has Matt's birthday this afternoon cause she is 11% more popular than I am.

Starting Friday? I think I do a few weeks of MFSDxiv (or is it just MFSDxv now).

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rebuildings.

Above: hangover helper, in the form of a brutal Asian/Atlanta fusion of BBQ shrimp, peanuts, mint, scallions, green chiles, and nuoc cham carrots. Below: last night's purple and pink sky; two new faces from Studio Moop.

pick up the pieces, volume xcvii.

Flipping the Doomsday Rehab reboot switch again, note to self: sleeping better was nice, wasn't it? Let's do that again.

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Excellent Thing Of The Week: Mars made Jamie Oliver's cauliflower risotto Tuesday night and, permission to speak plainly sir, it was like really really awesome? The best thing we've made in a while and totally worth serving to people.

As always, changes were made: our default risotto prep was used, almonds became the basis of the pangrattato instead of bread crumbs, and the cauliflower was unsurprisingly roasted instead of sauteed. No pictures, but it was fannnnntastic.

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roasted cauliflower risotto with anchovy-almond-chile pangrattato.

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dit is wat je niet mag doen.

Mara found this lying in a puddle on the street and was compelled to rescue it due to its awesome sad weirdness. At the top it says "Dit is wat je niet mag doen", or "This is what you mustn't do". And then there's the illustration of this thing that must not be done, which is mysterious in the extreme. Obviously a family, but where are they? In a tent? And what could possibly be inadvisable about their supplicating posture? I'd love to hear any ideas.

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Below, top: last night's unphotogenic but excellent bibimbap by Mara. Middle: current inhabitants of the kitchen island, also by Mara. Bottom: Surinamese snijbonen by me, easy and good.

and it shows.

Above: Baby Bird's First Show.

Bottom left: homemade rye + cream cheese + lemon cucumber + sweetnsour beet + smoked salmon + creme fraiche + chives.

Bottom right: Marcella's Goudified onion frittata + bacon jam + more creme fraiche and chives, cause it just makes everything look so durn fancy.

egon.

A watercolor experiment by Mara: Egon Schiele's Seated Female Nude with Raised Right Arm (1910), freshly painted on brown Kraft paper and taped to our window so the light shines through the still-wet parts.

The young Mr. Schiele's original:










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On eGullet, it seems like it might be worth checking out the unpromisingly-monikered Recipes That Rock thread. No, there's no musical tie-in, thank god...these are just the newly-discovered recipes that an especially discerning group of home cooks have added to their "permanent" repertoire this year.

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all the mandelas.

Remind me to tell you about the shockingly entertaining Henry Rollins talk I went to last night (for free). I'd always kind of thought that he was an obnoxious, unfunny macho meathead, but last night he filled 3 hours with what is probably the funniest, most engaging public speaking I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty (hitches up pants above waistline and blows nose violently into a cloth handkerchief). Plus he's a pretty killing impressionist (as in, he does impressions), or maybe that's called a mimic if you're not so serious about it. Whatever, consider me converted. Maybe I don't know everything.

(ETA: After a little bit of research, I've decided that he wasn't always as good as he is right now. In fact, even as recently as 2004, he sounds pretty much like Evan, Mara's younger cousin, used to sound: amusing, engaging, deeply knowledgeable about certain deeply geeky subjects, highly opinionated, a little obnoxious and basically putting on a show every time he opens his mouth, but without being quite as funny or smart as he wants to be. This is fine if you're out in the backyard grilling, but not something I'd pay money for, and definitely not something I could imagine listening to 3 hours of. So, maybe I just caught him on a really good night at the Paradiso.)

There was a howler of a segment about what we can expect from Mr. Bush's English now that Karl Rove is not around to organize Bush's thoughts (this is but one recent revealing/terrifying example). Mr. Rollins likened English words to sheep grazing in a pen inside Bush's mind. Rove the shepherd used to keep the pen shut and the sheep tended, but now the gate to the pen is open and the sheep are roaming freely over the countryside, eating garbage and standing on cars, and there's absolutely no telling what they'll do next, so these are exciting times.

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Chinese cooking coming along sizzlingly, ha. Below is today's lunch: pork with sichuan mustard greens and peanuts, and broccoli with oyster sauce (and a leeeetle butter). This pork was 100% simple and cheap, plus them mustard greens is supposed to be mighty healthful. The pork recipe came out of my newest Chinese cookbook (which one? get it, Wei Chuan, ahahahahahaha), which is a dang sight more useful than my first one. Anyway, I'll be making this pork again.

















And Mara made this last night out of beans and a shirt (the below photo, not the above photo). In about 10 minutes. If only there were some kind of Top Creature Maker contest or something like Ready, Steady...Make a Creature! She'd dominate them like she does me.

bowl of red.

Do you know anything about the chile queens of San Antonio? All I knew was a couple of paragraphs' worth in the The Whole Chile Pepper Book, which is an eminently readable survey of the world's chile traditions. Anyway, the above link is to an NPR special that will fill in some of your gaps.

















I knew I wanted to cook with chiles last night, but it was Mara who suggested chili (one of the least-good Wikipedia entries I've seen in some time, by the way). This is probably mostly to do with the fact that Andy has been making really good "chili" about once a month since the summer, and when he makes some, he usually brings us a bowl (or two, if we're lucky!). He just made some last week, but I don't think Miss Mara got to put her tooth on any of it...

So the only matter up for debate about tonight's chili was: what style? I used the quotes around Andy's chili because it contains a number of things that, if they saw them, would cause hardcore chiliheadz to spontaneously combust: carrots are probably the most flagrant violation of chili law, but his also contains beans, which as you probably know are a massive point of contention. Call his version "European-style".

Regarding our style choice, our two big options were: New Mexican, which is simply cut beef, beef broth, and chiles; or San Antonio-style, which uses ground beef instead, and adds onion, garlic, tomatoes, and some herbs and spices.

I've eaten enough ground meat chili to last me the rest of my life, so we did New Mexican chile con carne, augmented by some Texas-style spice. I may have been a bit overzealous in defatting this as it cooked...the flavor could be a bit rounder than it is. But it looks and smells beautiful, and pretty good chili is about the same as pretty good pizza or pretty good sex...it's plenty good enough. And if you need it, the round fatness can be retrofitted using crema, or creme fraiche in our case.

















To see what real chili geeks put in their brews, check out the websites for the two major factions of chili cooking in America, the ICS and the CASI. Still looking for a good source that explains the feud between the two and what the differences are in their cooking styles.

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border-style chile con carne.

1 kg riblappen or biefstuk if you see it on sale like I did
2 tbsp walnut oil (the non-border-style ingredient)
4 cups beef broth
4 ancho chiles
4 guajillo chiles
3 cloves garlic
3 tsp cumin
3 tsp oregano
1 sweet onion, for garnish
or maybe pico de gallo if i get around to it (I did)

Details forthcoming.

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If you're curious, diet is still in effect, yesterday was a good day. Went to the gym, plus:

Breakfast: smoked salmon sandwich on whole wheat with mayo and mustard. 350kcal.
Snack: couple bites of hungover Mara's tuna melt on whole wheat that I made for her. 100kcal.
Beverages: 2 cups of coffee. 1 rehydration drink. 1 Earl Grey.
Lunch: Weird. Nothing.
Dinner: a couple small bowls of chili. A couple tiny pieces of cornbread with butter. Even if this was all 1000 calories, I'm still cool for the day.
Later: Grapefruit at 22:30.