fortieth.

I don't know if this ever happens to the hypothetical you but once in a while when I'm not doing incredibly useless shit, I try to use The Internets to research something semi-valid. In this case it was something from my childhood that was so out of focus in the eye of my memory that I had almost no actual data to start piecing together. And at the same time I knew that whatever it was my mind was trying to remember was of some kind of semi-profound formative influence.

So in this particular case it was a book, a book I literally hadn't given one single thought to for years and years, and I have no idea what got me started thinking about it. But once it oozed into my mind, I started trying to remember more details about it, and once I did I could almost physically re-feel the unease and building dread I experienced reading it in bed, at night (stupidly): dread verging on outright childish horror. I can't imagine how old I was, somewhere between five and ten I guess, but I know that for me this book was the primary source of those "don't go into the basement" feelings that almost everyone with a basement seems to have (I have no idea what room kids without basements are afraid of).

OK here's so the Google montage (various quickly-cut and exciting camera angles of me alternately typing furiously or staring off into space thinking, then cutting to letters appearing in the Search box and then "Access Denied" kind of uninformative results): the first very gauzy re-reremberance I had was of some vague but horrific black liquid; a terrifying door; a grave or graves; and something about the word Omega. Then I pretty quickly remembered that the main character was a boy named Lewis. This is not enough information to find anything. Next some sort of impulse/vision of a kind woman with a refined name, and the fact that Lewis was nearsighted (and of course his glasses would habitually fall off at the scariest possible moment so that he had to cower in blind terror while he waited for the tentacles of impending horribleness to reach him).

This was all like weeks ago and after let's call it "several" fruitless Googles and some serious mental time trying to crystallize more detail, I forgot about it until about 20 minutes ago. I then tried my same old Lewis black Omega horror query but shortly thereafter somehow suddenly remembered that Lewis had a weight problem, for some reason the word "chubby" came into my mind, and finally the magic query: young chubby nearsighted lewis miss omega horror grave door revealed that in 1973, forty years ago, a man named John Belllairs started a series of books that introduced a character named Lewis Barnavelt, and for fuck's sake the book that made me forever apprehensive about basements was called The House With A Clock In Its Walls, a pretty good title for a scary book, amazingly enough with pretty ominous artwork by longtime fave Edward Gorey, such a great surprise (we decided long ago that Mara is The Doubtful Guest).

Here's a lovely Onion AV Club article about the book, comparing House to another Gorey favorite, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and confirming that I was neither alone in my youthful terror nor in my current half-remembered curiosity. It's interesting to me that this style of horror—slow-building, implied, atmospheric unease—is still absolutely one of my favorite things. As is Edward Gorey. Maybe my mother can remember approximately what year I was allowed to torture myself with this, but my point is: hey look, a totally satisfying use of the Google Wire.

+++

marvin lee aday.

This would be more Google Maps Street View, Antarctica this time. It's like the worst video game ever. You can't even interact with the penguins when you eventually find one (and there is one just to the left of that clot of three researchers or penguin preservers or whatever they are in red at roughly the 3 o'clock position above).

Here's Svalbard, a remote Norwegian archipelago. The red flags in the distance show where the "street" is.

+++

In my non-globetrotting hours yesterday, I made meat loaf for the first time (I typed meta loaf first, something else entirely). I was having this weird persistent craving for it, and Mara was all yeah yeah do it so I did it. It was the slowest, most careful meat loaf in history I think, because meat loaf is not known for being something you linger over in the kitchen, and yeah man I lingered.

I lingered b/c me, being me, never having made it, and me, having the humongous and still awesome Cook's Illustrated The New Best Recipe as my guide, wanted to make sure I was doing it right. I mean why bother using such an exceedingly anal-retentive cookbook if you're not going to do exactly wtf it says.

The most awesome and humongous thing I learned is that meat loaf is not at anywhere near its best when it comes out of the oven. It needs time to contract or something and I guess just relax for a while. The absolute best bite I had of it yesterday was at 11pm, five hours after it came out of the oven, and I don't think that's (just) the post-mirtazapine munchies talking, because this morning's bite at 6:30am was even better (and the bite I just had for lunch was even better, etc, it's really good now). I just don't think it should be any warmer than room temperature.

My adaptation of the recipe is gluten-free, with almond flour as the filler, and I think I didn't do much else different except bumping up some of the seasoning and omitting the, eh, bacon. And substituting arugula for the parsley b/c I didn't have any and don't ever reallly love it anyway.

Oh yis, the other awesome thing I learned was to not use a, eh, "loaf pan". This is what Cook's Illustrated is good for, they're the Mythbusters of the kitchen: turns out that if you follow conventional wisdom and use a loaf pan (can't stop saying it, loaf pan, loaf pan) for your loaf, the, ulp, "juices" will bubble up around the sides about halfway through the cooking time and ruin the sides of your glaze, which was actually the most critical component, the glaze was, so its non-ruination and general maximalization is an absolutely stellar thing to focus on. Ze recipe below will double ze glaze amounts and add a shot or two of Frank's to it for zest and zing.

And if we don't do that recipe again, we should do this one.

+++

red light radio.

'Member when we were on Red Light Radio back in June? Yeah me neither, but regardless there's an article about RLR and their environs in the New York Times today.

+++

stuffing.

Phew. Last night was good. The main events being (in addition to our Italian Wedding Soup [above]) a kind of scallop and shrimp rigatoni with buerre blanc, tomato, capers, parmesan, and basil, plus a stack of wilted arugula. Then: steak au poivre with mushroom reduction and polenta, all really perfectly done.

It never ceases to impress and interest me when someone I know cooks something difficult or time-consuming or easy to fuck up, and they do it awesomely...I don't think I could've made last night's ingredients look and taste as good as they did, especially the proteins. Maybe it's my lack of proper mise-en-place (below).

Afterwards there was Marie-Hélène's Apple Cake and sour cream ice cream for dessert, plus giant snifters of Grand Marnier.

band on the run.

8:08am, Saturday, I'm spending some time with the New York Times, which I don't do so much anymore, but a couple of things caught my eye.

This item about how the ash cloud is affecting musicians: Europe's Cloud of Ash Casts Pall Over World of Music. Sounds like a bit much, but we even felt the "pall" last night at Andy's CD release show when they had to play first b/c the opener was still en route due to travel snarls.

And this bit by Harold McGee about some of my favorite people: Cilantro Haters, It's Not Your Fault.

+++

Photo above borrowed from Het Parool...for non-Amsterdammers, it's a picture of Schiphol, our airport, specifically the ticket counter for rail service. There should not be this many people there.

An interesting item in the Parool mentioned also that after they stopped letting flights leave, they also closed the duty-free liquor stores. How smart was that? Extremely.

Something else I didn't think about: for some people, leaving Schiphol is not an option because they don't have visas for the Netherlands. Chinese travelers, for example. If Amsterdam was a connecting flight for them, they're stuck in the terminal section of the airport because they can't make it through Passport Control. I'm not even sure they can go outside to breathe fresh air...and can you imagine three days of airport food, especially if you're used to eating in China?

wheel in the sky.

I was going to send this to Mara but then I thought heck, I'll share it with ALL OF YOU. Zora is in town and has taken some nice pictures of places I've been lately but have not myself taken pictures of.

+++

I've been informed that my passport is in fact here in Amsterdam and should be in my possession tomorrow or Thursday, and that means I am out of here on Thursday or Friday, thus ending my thoroughly useless and frustrating limbo (yay!) and restoring a little Moop back into my life (double yay!).

+++

I haven't talked about this much here because, yeah, it's kind of boring, and in general (insert 14-minute pause for self-reflection to see if this is really true, and the verdict is: not sure) I don't like to complain, but my RSI pain had not ever really gone away as expected, and in fact had gotten quite a bit worse. Which unfortunately made sense, since we continued to have gigs into March.

I mention it here because there's a lot of RSI info out there in Googleville, but not a ton for guitarists, and specifically not much at all for my situation (switching from being a life-long flatpicker to almost 100% fingerstyle over the course of a rather intense 3 months).

But lo: the constant pain and stiffness have diminished greatly over the past week, like amazingly, which is really, truly fantastic news because throughout March my sleep and thus general mood had been steadily worsening, plus I was supposed to be working out but I had zero strength or flexibility in my right arm (did I mention the constant pain?), etc etc etc.

Now the bad news: the solution seems to have been to basically stop playing guitar for three weeks. Not ideal. But, I'll take it for now.

+++

toddler recovering after chopstick pierces brain.

This is an actual MSNBC headline today. I'm not even going to read the article, it can't possibly live up to my expectations.

+++

up in the air.

Antwerp still up in the air, lots of trains cancelled. Luckily I have American media to lift my spirits. I just saw this hilarious news item: "Pot found on Lil' Wayne tour bus." No, really.

+++

belatedly.

Gifts abound. We found this homemade gevulde speculaas (suspiciously similar to the one in the eG thread, no?) in our mailbox just moments before Valentina brought some freshly baked Genovese foccacia down the hall. Andy brought down bowls of the Thai shrimp soup he learned to cook in Thailand on Tuesday night. Urban life redeems itself.

We will return fire imminently, but tonight's ammo was inappropriate in terms of form factor (scallops), perishability (scallops), and number (we had four between the two of us...yes we're still on a budget). But stay alert.

+++

As you may know, I am usually pro-Wikipedia, but it's true that sometimes you'll find an entry that treads extra carelessly on that boundary between refreshing populist informality and bong-induced fantasy.

Witness this casual aside from the coconut crab entry I linked to a couple of days ago: "Recent discoveries suggest that the coconut crab may be responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, consuming her remains and hording her bones in its crab burrow.[29]"

Questionable grammar notwithstanding (so there's just one coconut crab and one burrow involved here?), this sounds pretty implausible. Coconut crabs took her bones? OK this could totally be true. Coconut crabs are responsible for her disappearance? That would require a not-insignificant level of long-range planning and communication skills from our hugely crabby suspects. Technical savvy as well.

And the motive? Unclear at best. If it was just a "humans taste good" kind of thing, you'd think there would have been easier predatory gambits than "lure celebrity aviatrix to remote Pacific atoll and force plane to crash".

There's some actual humor to be mined from this, but I'd need a film crew, a reasonable CGI budget and at least one more cup of coffee. And we're out of milk.

We also laughed at this (via Poesy Galore).

+++

cacio, pepe, cantucci, massaggio.

Ieri sera hebben wij

My mind is a funny one when it comes to language. It seems like it shouldn't be, but it is.

In other news....RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. Or fire up the grill.

+++

Last night we had a leetle deener down at Andy and Valentina's, and we were introduced to a "real Roman peasant dish" made by a real Genovese peasant (and yet, even though she initiated it, V. began to chafe at this categorization after an hour or two of being referred to as "that peasant" or "hey peasant").

She made cacio e pepe: pasta, pecorino Romano which has been melted via pasta water, and lots of freshly ground black pepper. There are already scads of blogposts out there about this, so I won't say much other than: this is one of those dishes that, for better or worse, makes you acutely aware of the quality of your spices, in this case your black peppercorns. It's vital that your black pepper is good and fresh (not just freshly ground), otherwise you miss an entire dimension of spice.

Or worse, you realize that the black pepper you've been using for weeks or months is rather vile and vaguely reminiscent of horse stables. This didn't happen to us tonight, but tonight's spotlight on black pepper reminded me of some peppercorns we had earlier this year that were "rustic-flavored" in the extreme.

+++

cacio e pepe.

pasta

pecorino

olive oil

black pepper

While boiling pasta water, grate "enough" pecorino into a bowl (eh...sorry I can't be more specific). After water boils, add pasta, and then after a couple of minutes steal a couple of spoonfuls of the pasta water and add it to the bowl of grated cheese, melting the cheese. Also add a shot of olive oil. You're trying to make something that's a little less thick than a paste and is not as thin as a broth, so keep adding pasta water spoonful by spoonful until you get to this stage, then add an appropriate amount of black pepper (you'll be adding more black pepper to the plated dish, so don't overdo it at this stage). When the pasta is al dente, drain it and add to the bowl with the pecorino sauce in it. Stir to combine, maybe adding another shot of olive oil for moisture if necessary.

Serve in bowls topped with grated pecorino and freshly ground black pepper. Bread and salad would be perfect accompaniments.

+++

Still to Come: Mara's cantucci, Valentina's treatment of my stressed-out right arm, and the subtleties of the word cacio.

+++

Oh No: I finally tried StumbleUpon. It's pretty good, in that destroy-your-free-time kind of way.

+++

pseudonymity.

Above: Sunday's sunset.

I just dreamed I met someone whose kids were named Absinthe and Persimmon. I think they may also have had tentacles.

+++

This is one of the first "fancy" dinners I ever tried to cook, in 1997 I think. I remember it being wonderful, but I'm trying it again tonight and we'll see what we think. ANSWER: Pleasant enough, but I'll be in no hurry to repeat it.

+++

You may have noticed that every other foodish blog in the InterWebz has done a Thanksgiving recipes post. We did not. Although we did participate in a medium-scale Thanksgiving meal (15 people or so?), I must say that the highlight of it was the absinthe (perhaps the source of the tentacle dreams?). Good carrot cake, too.

+++

baby laugh-a-lot.

Hey, Mara's "potentially life-threatening muscle disorder" from 2001 is in the news today. I understand why they're doing it, but downplaying the connection between GBS and the immunization seems a bit, oh I don't know, disingenuous to me, GBS being as rare as it is.

But, yes, on the other hand, Mara contracted it on her own without being immunized, so, eh...what am I saying. I'm saying I can't believe that in 1976, 25 people died from GBS as a result of swine flu vaccinations. And I'm glad Mara didn't meet a similar fate in 2001. Otherwise, she wouldn't be able to say cute things like, "Depth charges are cool," as she just did. Also? Gradually ascending paralysis would be a pretty shitty way to die.

+++

Speaking of shitty ways to die, here's another morbid little article about prisoners' last meals.

+++

I'm enjoying my tenth alcohol-free day in a row. Note to self: you feel better, don't you? Now if I could just stop eating I'd be all set.

+++

i'm so high.

(Photo credit: The 4-year-old Cole Mitchell)

+++

Wi-Fi again at 30,000 feet. This is a good invention.

Unrelatedly, I have some questions:

1) Americans will not only apologize for accidentally running into you, but they will also apologize for accidentally walking too close to you. A woman walked past me today and whispered, "Sorry". What about? We weren't standing in line, she wasn't obstructing my view...what had she done wrong???

2) As my good friend Terrill Soules once observed, "It is impossible to not think about sex in an airport." I'm pretty sure I'm paraphrasing him as usual, because that sentence sounds a bit awkward, but nonetheless: in my experience, he is absolutely right. But why???

3) Delta Air Lines is serving an "Almond Butter Sandwich" as part of their breakfast menu (you have to pay for it). What percentage of the passengers on this flight know what almond butter is???

4) Who, who, who brings a child on to an airplane and gives them a DVD player to watch WITHOUT HEADPHONES??? This is the kind of thing that gives parents a bad name. This person has somehow not noticed that every other living creature on the airplane is listening to audio via headphones EXCEPT FOR THEIR CHILD. This is a rhetorical question by the way, the answer is "the inconsiderate assholette in seat 41B".

5) This isn't a question. You may have noticed that the links off to the lower right here have changed recently, as they tend to do. I'd like to highlight Poesy Galore, a blog run by a librarian/cartoonist that is really hitting the spot for me lately. She's a great filter for catching intellectually stimulating bits that are careening around out there on the Information Superhighway.

6) Also not a question: I must be really, really tired, because I just fell asleep for 20 minutes on an airplane, which I never, ever do. I truly cannot wait to see my bed and all the creatures that normally hang out in it.

7) I guess the questions are over for the moment. I had a very good shrimp burrito last night, from Baja Fresh, who I've maligned on this site before I believe. Not everything we got was good, the chips were stale as all get-out, but that burrito was pretty darn perfect.

+++

gold nuss woman.

Lupini beans in de huis again. Casa Bocage is the only place in Amsterdam to get them (they're called tremoços in Portugese), and obtaining the precious golden beans involves a ritual which typically goes like this:

+++

Me/Mara: Hi! Do you have tremoços?

Casa Bocage Employee: (shaking head sadly) No, not today.

M/M: Boo. Do you know when you might have some more?
CBE: (thoughtfully) What day is it today?

M/M: Thursday?

CBE: (hopefully) They should be here on........Friday?

M/M: So...tomorrow?

CBE: (with conviction) No, the next Friday. Or the one after.

M/M: Ah. So, in two weeks for sure.

CBE: (smiling) Probably.

M/M: OK! Thanks! See you then.

+++

It's all extremely good-natured. Of course we never remember to go back in two weeks, and the whole conversation happens again six to twelve weeks later.

Today, I popped in to Casa Bocage randomly b/c baby bird's chomping beak is in overdrive at the moment, and lupinis are one of her favorite things, and...they had some!

I think I remember the first time I tasted them, or at least I'm inventing it with extreme clarity: it was in her parents' kitchen maybe 15 years ago, and at the time I found them a bit hard to love at first, aside from the addictive bit where you bite a hole in the skin and pop the bean into your mouth. But now I'm a fan of their weird uncooked texture and slightly cheesy taste as well.

+++

Unrelated to lupini beans, I was just reminded of this, and it's worth reading if you haven't. This eight-part travelogue is one of the primary pieces of writing that introduced me to eGullet a few years ago. It's basically the story of one woman's semi-impulsive trip to Mongolia and the absolute misalignment of her expectations and the reality of "sightseeing" in Mongolia.

For technical reasons, the links within eG don't work anymore, so here are most of the eight parts:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

+++

you are(n't) getting very sleepy.

Not relevant at this very moment, but by the time it is, it'll be too late to ask you: does anyone out there among the three of you A) go to sleep listening to podcasts, and if so B) can you recommend some? Lately when I can't sleep this is working OK for me.

To clarify: I'm not really looking for something completely enjoyable. I'm looking for something to put me to sleep. It has to be smart enough so as not to offend my critical sensibilities, long enough to where it won't end just as I'm falling asleep, aurally low-key enough so as not to startle (so, no monotone voices cutting to squally or squeally transitional music), and it must avoid the subjects of money, eternity, politics, religion, love, and family. Any suggestions? I'm all ears.

+++

On Sunday I made this Surinamese chicken soup again, with a couple of modifications: no lemongrass and no galangal, and green plantains instead of the potatoes. Then, the next day, I added two tablespoons of chunky peanut butter and the same amount of roasted coconut water and reheated it. A thoroughly good variation, approaching the taste of authentic pindasoep.

+++

preparing to re-enter.

In an effort to brace myself for the looming switchback, I'm thinking about thinking again. Here's someone applying Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies in the kitchen, albeit in an about-as-safe-as-it-gets manner. I'd like to see someone do it for real. Here's an online version of the cards if you want to get started.

+++

off the grid.

Tonight, gyoza, both steamed and fried. And I'm not going to lie to you, there were also a few fried shrimp with a chipotle mayonnaise. And later there will be pear caramel ice cream. And I'm still working on that fucking website I've been whining about: I'll be back to normal posting in a few days.

+++

Oh, but there is one more thing for now: I'll give you 10 dollars if you can figure out who lives at marker A in the below Google Earth photo.

everything is just a few hundred clicks away.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Continuing the geekery, thanks to The Onion...

+++

Also, I'm always forgetting that the BBC has a very useful vegetarian section on their site, probably because they have no RSS feed. I mean that's why I'm always forgetting about it.

+++

And let's see, what else....oh yeah: I've decided to finally go ahead and kill my estranged biological father. 

Shamelessly arresting, I know. Now I don't really mean it in the literal sense (a phrase which in my mind I can only hear screwed, having listened to Paul Wall's Chick Magnet roughly 400 times). What I mean is that, in the 15 years since we last spoke, I've considered contacting him a number of times, only to eventually decide not to, or only to eventually just "forget" about it. And of course, my inner pessimist's reasoning is that, well, as soon as I decide that I actually want to talk to him and I finally make the effort to contact him, of course he'll die. 

This is not as completely and totally irrational as it sounds, because he hasn't lived an especially healthy life. As a multiple-bypass survivor, lifelong pack-a-day smoker, intravenous drug user, and I'm sure plenty of other things I don't know about, he has easily secured a place on my own personal "Endangered" list. The last time I talked to him, back in, say...1994, he had just quit his morphine habit and was "only" smoking weed and cigarettes. I wasn't too worried about him back then, but I was 25 and in my own hermetically-sealed alcoholic pod...I wasn't worried about much. 

But now, I have his current address and a blank greeting card that says "Cowgirl Power" on the outside of it (which I bought in America for my upstairs neighbor here in Amsterdam who underwent Surprise Brain Surgery over Xmas for an aneurysm, but I never sent the card b/c I would've gotten home before it did). So Monday I shall jot some pithy lines inside and drop my Cowgirl Death Missile into the nearest postbox and hope that it's a dud. It's all part of The Year of No Regrets initiative, don't you know.

Oh, did I mention? VDuck in 2009 might be even less about food than normal. 

+++

parable of the bad programmer.

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

+++

Have you ever worked on a technical project that literally (well, literally enough) haunted your dreams? Where the client you were working for, though you got along with them well personally, had a completely different set of eyes than yours (literally, and figuratively), and it seemed that you could make no correct decision on your own?

A project from which you were so desperate to escape and get on with your life that, behind the scenes, you hacked together a borderline ridiculous and at least thoroughly inelegant solution to a sticky and terribly time-consuming problem, because: heck, you were never going to have to deal with that code ever again....this website would last them forever (hopefully literally).

And then, through some hideous alignment of circumstances, you find yourself not only working for the same person again, but having to reverse-engineer your own gross and undocumented code so you can figure out how to overextend it into an even more fragile state?

Oh...no? Huh. Uh, no...me neither.

+++

Maybe a few moments with Crayon Physics Deluxe will calm both of us right down. Here are some examples of how (not) to play.

UPDATE: OK, it is possible to become too calm as a result of Crayon Physics Deluxe. For instance, I wouldn't recommend playing it before going to the gym, because all of your testosterone evaporates into a big hostile cloud that takes off down the hall to look for beer and women.

Now in order to re-engage with my primal wrath I'm having to read about the revisionist history at work in drafting Bush's legacy. Before long I'll be like a pill-popping cliche, seesawing wildly back and forth between mania and depression, desperate for equilibrium: Crayon Physics! Bush legacy! Crayon Physics! Bush legacy! etc. etc. etc.

+++

Tonight? Sushi! Maybe. Today? Miso soup with tofu and leeks, because I forgot to eat before working out, and believe it or not, miso soup was the easiest/fastest vegetarian thing in the house to make. We didn't have any bread. It was good Emergency Food.

+++

oh i'm very interesting.

When he's not reverse-engineering Japanese soup, our tag-team cooking partner occasionally has time to think about other parts of the globe.

+++

Jesus, I had my first Top Chef dream last night. No, Padma wasn't involved. And I don't know exactly what the challenge was. But listen to what I was making: pasta with chicken, a basic cheese pizza, and unadorned broccoli. Thus committing at least 14 simultaneous violations of the Smart Things To Do On Top Chef code.

And of course, nothing worked (yeah, one of those dreams): I only had enough pasta for like 4 of the 10 servings I was supposed to plate; my broccoli was that terrible greenish-gray overcooked color, and my pizza was as greasy and artificial-looking as Pizza Hut. Meanwhile, everyone else was making Dungeness crab gelée and emulsified swan feet.