zjft.

never play A 2.

So I'm trying to build my range, which, for all the normal people who might read this, is the set of hands you will normally play (instead of throwing away) from any of the positions around the table.

This is a critical step for anyone who wants to consider themselves a serious poker player, but it's especially important for me because my biggest weakness as a player is.....wait for it......discipline.

That's right. Amazing? No. I'll play almost any hand, all the time. So by building a range, you're kind putting yourself on a diet, giving yourself rules for what hands you will and won't play. Now, is it really like a diet? Where you give yourself rules for what you will and won't eat, and then constantly either follow or break those rules? Yes, yes, kind of. But this is more important than a diet.

I joke. Anyway, today I was playing, and I was dealt an ace and a deuce of the same suit, which we write as A-2s, "s" signifying "suited". Now A-2 is one of the hands that I have told myself one billion times not to play, and inevitably I play it and it sucks and I say never do that again you stupid fuck.  And then it's dealt to me again and I play it again while saying "never play A-2 again you stupid fuck". Maybe poker is just a semi-harmless way for me to just violently and endlessly berate myself for not listening to my own good advice.

Annnywayyyyy, to bring this fascinating glimpse into my life to a close, today I was dealt A-2, annd I said to myself "never play A-2", and then I went ahead and bet and said (to myself) "OK, now this is why you never play A-2, you dick," and of course I was immediately dealt another ace and another deuce. And I won the hand. Great story Mark, could you tell it again?

Oh right, I'm not a koala anymore, I'm a black cowboy wearing purple.

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screen saver.

Above: here's the beach my screen saver showed me today. Below: here's the beach I went to today. That is the beach, right there with the backhoes on it, dismantling it completely.

Note the long fence below preventing you from going down there. At least I'd only taken a 38 minute train ride to get to this wasteland. I saw one family with kids, beach gear in tow. They did not reek of localness, in fact they looked very much like they had traveled very far to get here for some reason, they were actually tearfully clutching the fence in frustration, as if they had no idea the beach was going to be totally destroyed this summer. Seems like someone would've told them along the way.

OK so it wasn't much of a "beach" anyway, they weren't really missing anything: about 100 meters of dirty sand leading to thick mud, but it is the closest "beach" to Groningen. But really, it was disappointing even for a Dutch beach. Anyone American who is roughly my age who has ever come to visit me in this country has said at some point, "yeah, there's a lot of good stuff here, socialized medicine, legal weed, beautiful womens, good jazz, liberal thinking, a society that tries to be tolerant of and help all peoples, but....yeah, the beaches aren't so good, are they."

On a good day Bloemendaal can be a lovely experience. I myself like Castricum as well. Bergen is kind of nice. Even Zandvoort is OK once you drop your expectations accordingly. And the dunes on the islands are serene and severe, in a good way. But if you've grown up with Florida and California, those are just a different kind of beach. Waves.

Anyway, I say all of this to say that Delfzijl, where I was today, was by far the most depressing beach I have ever been to in a country of really mediocre beaches. I am very sorry for you if you live in Delfzijl at this moment, I cannot believe the streets are not littered with suicides. On a tropically hot summer day, someone has decided to tear apart your sad little beach. I can't decide if it was sadder to not have been able to go to the beach there today, or would it have been worse if I'd actually been able to lay my towel down on the rocks and listen to the sucking mud in front of me and the highway directly behind me.

card death.

So I've been playing a lot of poker lately. And though I want to grind my teeth to dust whenever someone other than me repeats all or part of their previous sentence more slowly for emphasis, I'mma do it myself right here: I mean a lot of poker.

If I wasn't already pretty keenly aware of how much it's come to monopolize my, ahem, "free time", the two apps with which I spend my all of my waking hours thoughtfully keep track of some numbers that could conceivably help one chart/graph/etc his or her complete withdrawal from interactive human life. In the past two months or so, I've played 6,602 hands in WSOP and 5,060 in PokerStars. Considering that each hand takes anywhere from 30 seconds (if everyone folds to an opening bet) to 3 minutes to play (if everyone stays in and there's lots of thinking and raising), and if 5,000 minutes is roughly 84 hours...you can see that it's been a lonely, fixated couple of months.

As you can imagine, this kind of devotion is not without its glamorous rewards. For example, I'm currently ranked #1 in the Netherlands*:















* OK, OK, I'm #1 in "my league", which is called "Skilled I" (I've already maniacally plowed my way through all five levels each of the Starter and Novice leagues and have Master and Elite to look forward to).  And overall I'm 6,972nd in the world. This is not quite as unimpressive as it sounds. Supposedly there are 87,580 other misfits/shut-ins/quadriplegics playing on PokerStars at this very sexy moment.

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I'm sure I'll write much more about the nitty-gritty ins and outs of my thrilling new old man pastime; like the week I spent being a black woman instead of a koala and became totally convinced that people were less friendly to me. Or the wonderful tension of ending up with my koala avatar sitting next to Pipe'nigga (in 4th place above) and all the other very carefully-crafted and -researched Cool People Avatars you can choose from as your "poker face" (cleverrrrr). Or how I have pretty much played poker my whole life (since I was 9 or 10 maybe?) without a deeper understanding of how it worked, and that that is kind of one of the beautiful things about poker: you can learn the rules in 15 minutes and play happily at that level for your whole damn ignorant life. But! If you're the kind of person who likes to get into things deeply, there's another whole underlying or overlying art/science to it that you can probably spend that same whole life looking at.

No, but hey: the first thing I wanted to write about was a poker term which I have found myself considering very metaphorically lately: being "card dead". This is different than the nearly equally compelling "drawing dead", which is when you are in a hand, paying to stay in and receive new cards in an attempt to better your hand but in fact, there is no card which can help you because you've already lost. Statistically speaking. You just don't know it yet because you don't know what your opponent(s) have. This is one of the really sadistic moments in televised poker, because you know what everyone has. It's hard to think of another televised "sport" where you get to watch someone optimistically pour their efforts and money into winning when you and everyone else watching knows that they absolutely, mathematically can't. I would mention the Mets or the Browns here but etc.

Right, that's drawing dead. Being "card dead" on the other hand is when, from hand to hand, you can not get good cards to save your life as they say. Time after time, you are doing everything right, technically speaking, but the cards refuse to help you in any way or show you the slightest bit of mercy. You know it's nothing personal, that it's "just probability", but after 25 hands of 6-3, 2-9, 9-3, 10-2, 2-3, 2-6, 7-3, repeat, you start to think "this can't continue".

So finally you get something barely bluffworthy and open with it because you think well it must be over now, I'm ok! and then you immediately (check out my new lingo) find you've gotten yourself into some postflop trouble by having over-aggressively reraised a late-position preflop raiser. You overestimated your hand, underestimated someone else's, and now someone else has the actual nuts that you've been pretending to have and the only way to keep looking tough is to just keep betting on your dead hand, not admit you made a mistake. But you're own your own buddy, you might as well be setting those chips on fire, the good cards aren't coming to rescue you.

Now, they also say that in Texas Hold-em, which is the game I mean when I say I've been playing poker, most of the time it doesn't matter what your cards are. And that poker is a game of skill, not luck. But good cards sure do help. More on this after a brief pause.

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the sweet smell of.

I was behind someone in the Albert Heijn today who smelled of loneliness.

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summer's kiss, part etc.

Featuring our old friends Mr. Tomato Sandweech and Ms. Ice-cold Melon. Not sure where they fit into the family tree but corn on the cob and bread and butter pickles should be knocking at the door any minute now.

this is currywurst.

this is vegetarian duck.

Supposably. This is me. This is vegetarian duck. Mister Fridges the refrigerator "broke" a week ago so I've been cooking through all of the defrosting toko purchases.

I put "broke" in "quotes" because, as a serial headphone destroyer, I know an abused cable when I see one, and all Mister Fridges needed was a new power cord. But like any good proprietary hardware scheme it's not the kind of thing you want to mess with yourself. So a Bosch man came today, five loooong days after we called them, and he replaced the power cable and now everything is happy time in the fridge agains. He also pooped in our bathroom. Which is fine, probably, because he didn't charge us anything even though the warranty expired two weeks ago. Tit for tat and whatnot.

So like I was saying. I cooked with these over the weekend. Tofu Skin Loempias. Mmmmmmmmm.  And they are just as dry as they look. And chewy. But really, totally edible, it's an even better wrapper for any kind of fried spring roll because it actually tastes like something. Although I have the same complaints Mark Bittman had here: just a little too dry and chewy.

So next time I'll try a braised version, to try and juice them up a bit. OK. I leave you with Restaurant Ufuk.

ternaard.

köln.

april.

wang's flavor.

hail, etc.

It's from Oh She Glows, and it was really really good. You need a real blender, not your budget zhoomer.

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caesar dressing, vegan.

1/2 cup raw cashews
1 cup water

1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 or 2 tbsp lemon juice, to taste
1 or 2 tsp Dijon mustard, to taste
1 or 2 small garlic cloves, to taste
1/2 tbsp vegan Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp capers
1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt and pepper, or to taste

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mfsdxxxxxx.

Time to reinvestigate MFSD. To quote, from our very own archives:

The basics of MFSDxiv are: mostly raw fruit and vegetables. A little fish. Very few grains. Very little fat, other than walnuts, almonds, olive oil, and avocado. No dairy. No sugar if I can help it, so this means that not all fruit is OK. Watermelon is OK, so all is not lost. Four or five quite small meals a day, the biggest being lunch. Nothing at all goes into the duck after 10pm. No alcohol.

I agree with all of this except no dairy. 4% fat cottage cheese is going to get me through this thing. There will be some attempts to introduce soy and hemp products, but mostly the goal will be to not really cook for myself, just put things in my mouse.

And how excited can I get about raw vegetables? Not at all. I will probably substitute pork a tiny bit.

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aiiiiiiiiioli.

So I was trying to have a stress-free day of cooking for company and wanted to have simple things on the menu. I made a condiment that's kind of the shit. I served it with grilled asparagus but it's good on literally everything so far.

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lemon-caper mayonnaise. 
2 tbsp capers
2 small garlic cloves
zest of one lemon
1 cup good Dutch mayo
1 tsp lemon juice or to taste

Zhoom everytthing except mayo and lemon juice, add mayo and then add lemon juice to taste. Serve with everything.

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we're back!

So, as 5 of you noticed, VDuck went dark for a couple of weeks. I was applying for a job with a challengingly perky young vegan blogger whose public disposition is laughably far away from that of your beloved VDuck. The application process was lengthy and borderline arduous, and just before I clicked on Submit I thought "let's have a quick look at VDuck to see just how footshootingly counterproductive it would be to have a potential employer read it."

So I had that quick look, aaaaaaand the second post out here was about my balls, so I decided, yeah, ok, ok, let's put things on pause for a couple weeks.

But! Then I failed. Was not hired. And so here we are againnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

God, remember when a lack of punctuation at the end of a sentence was really mysterious and disturbing? I'm thinking of like the last sentence of a Jack Ritchie story in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or an Alfred Hitchcock anthology or something, both of which I was thoroughly addicted to as a small child. Jeez, I get the heebie-jeebies just looking at the lists of stories. Anyway I seem to remember being totally spooked by that no-punctuation shit. 

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surprise.

This is not two slices of the worst-looking pepperoni pizza ever made. It's an unexpectedly good snack of roasted homemade sourdough, hummus, and Momofuku sweet pickled radishes. I'd serve it to someone.

sour notes.

3/4 cup starter
1 and 1/4 cup lukewarm water
1 tbsp maple syrup or honey
3 cups all-purpose flour, unbleached
1 and 1/2 tsp kosher salt

Instructions!

1. Get two bowls. Combine the ingredients in one. Let rest for 10-20 minutes. While it is resting, lightly coat another medium-sized bowl with olive oil. The bowl needs to be a big enough to allow the dough to double in size.
2. Work dough the absolute minimum to get things into a ballish shape, for me this was like 1 minute's work. You are not kneading. 
3. Shape into ball and put into the oiled bowl, smooth-side down, and then flip it smooth-side up so that all sides of the dough are covered with oil. Cover bowl with plastic wrap.
4. Let rise in a warm place at least 6 hours, folding every 30 minutes. 
5. Form bread into a boule (a round loaf) and place on a square of parchment paper. With a wet serrated knife, cut a couple of slashes on the top. Cover loosely with a damp towel and allow to rise for 1½- 2 hours.
6. In the last 30 or 40 minutes of the last rise, move your oven rack to the bottom third of oven. Put a cast iron Dutch oven with lid in the cold oven and preheat to 450º for 30 minutes. This temperature is a bit under debate, or our oven's ability to maintain this temperature reliably is under debate. Something is under debate. 
7. Remove the lid from the Dutch oven and put the boule in by picking up the corners of the parchment and gently setting it in. Be very careful, don't forget that you just took the Dutch oven out of an inferally hot oven 10 seconds ago so it's probably still "warm". 
8. Put the lid on the Dutch oven and bake for 12-13 minutes. Uncover and bake another 12-13 minutes.
9. Remove and place on a wire rack to cool for 30 minutes. DO NOT slice the bread until it has set for 30 minutes, everyone insists that this is completely important, though it is wholly inimical to the enjoyment of bread.  

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sev puri.

I've said it before in these pages, and knowing me I'll probably say it again. I mean who can really keep track of everything they've said over the course of 13 years of jotting down over 2,200 compulsively-rewritten notes to themselves. In public. Who can even count the number of years or notes properly (EDITOR'S NOTE: actually Blogger does a pretty good job of that last part, yes scroll down, it's right there in the right sidebar...but right that was probably rhetorical, anyway, carry on).

Indian food may be the hardest cuisine to replicate in the home kitchen (I say this without ever reaallllly having tried to cook with anything in that challenging-smelling Chinese medicinal herb aisle in the supertoko). I was just thinking. There are two components to the complexity: 1) exotic/authentic ingredients, without which you are not cooking the real thing. And 2) the sheer number of ingredients and techniques involved.

Japanese cooking, for example, also requires exotic/authentic ingredients in order to taste "accurate": miso, kombu, sake, furikake, etc. But once you're cooking, the ingredient list is totally manageable, six or seven things. It's the rare Indian recipe that doesn't involve at least two recipes within itself (I'm including condiments), and each one involves several ingredients, we're not even necessarily talking about curries from scratch yet.

But: I blather on about all this not only to unspool my mind into a text box in order to hopefully put myself back to sleep soon, which is why probably mm half of VDuck was written, but in order to proclaim into the void that I am currently "better at Indian food" than I've ever been in my life. In that what I cook tastes vaguely like the original thing I tasted that made me want to cook it in the first place.

Today's case in point: bhel puri/sev puri. Back in the day (I just spent 10 seconds deciding if quotation marks or italics more clearly indicated that that is not a phrase I normally use), I used to make the 35 mile (57 km) drive down to Indian Delights in Decatur as often as I could manage the incredible boringness of the scenery and the dent that the whole enterprise put in your day's productivity. OK, two hours, a two hour dent. Doesn't sound like all that much at the moment for a chance to eat at Indian Delights. Luckily they didn't serve alcohol or the dent would've been twice that and significantly more structurally damaging.

Annnywayyyy. That was where I first tasted South Indian chaat, special thanks to Cliff Bostock, who sent me into all the dark corners of Atlanta's 1990-2000-era exotic food scene via his column in Creative Loafing. Indian Delights is, of course, closed now, so I can't even find a menu to look at (although Chat Patti's seems to be very similar), but yes, their bhel puri was the stuff my dreams were made of. Crunchy, sweet and sour dreams.

This week, in an effort to re-locate the ever-elusive Pleasure Button, I started looking at chaat again, and thought that sev puri seemed like a slightly easier/more fun version of bhel puri. And, having made it, I can verify that it is. Once you 1) find some chaat masala (which is really nothing like any other masala, if you've been trying to substitute for this do yourself a favor and find the real thing) and black salt and papdi and sev, and 2) make the chutneys, the rest is just assembly.

Each one of these (as pictured above) is roughly the size of a light and crispy golfball.

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sev puri.

1 recipe date-tamarind chutney
1 recipe cilantro-mint chutney
5 medium potatoes, boiled and mashed roughly
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp chaat masala
1 mango, diced
1 cup chopped tomato
1 lime, juiced

1 red onion, minced
bunch of mint, leaves stripped, chopped

20-30 papdi (somewhere between a kroepoek and a pappadam and a rice cake, puffy and crunchy, the size of a Pringle)
2 cups sev (the chickpea vermicelli sprinkled on top)
1 tbsp chaat masala
20-30 dots of sriracha

This makes enough for at least 20 bites. So, you make the chutneys the day before, you boil and mash the potatoes with the cumin and chaat masala the day before but make sure they're back to room temperature before you try and serve. You can cut the mango and tomato the day before as well, I left them combined in the fridge overnight with the lime juice and a shot of agave because neither was very good by itself.

The last thing that should be done is dicing the onion. Then, assemble: on top of a papdi you put a tsp of potato, a tsp of tomato/mango, a dollopette of each chutney, sprinkle the onion on, put a dot of sriracha on top, throw a tiny pinch of chaat masala at it, and top with the sev and mint. Serve immediately or they get soggy. Apparently if you don't like cilantro, you can also just use a mint leaf instead of the green chutney.

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bietenstamppot.

stamppot of red beets in agrodolce, spinach, potato, gorgonzola, walnut. 

1 kg potatoes
2 handfuls fresh, washed spinach

3 large beets, roasted, peeled and sliced
3 tbsp raw sugar
3 tbsp red wine vinegar

1 handful good walnuts, toasted and halved or so
1 tbsp butter

butter or olive oil
freshly grated nutmeg
freshly ground black pepper

blue cheese, crumbled

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This was also pretty delicious as a red-wine risotto with roasted cauliflower instead of beets. And rice instead of potatoes.

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