aaaaaaaaaaand we're back.

I'm sure we're probably not. But we ("we") have reached yet another breaking point in this finite yet far too long series of breaking points. What do we call a series of points again, a line? If a line is one-dimensional and has no depth, sounds about right. I guess a curve is also a line, but this is kind of my point: what is wrong with us? Why can we barely express a complete thought. "We". 

I don't even just mean "we" anymore, I think I mean the actual we, as in all of us. Certainly one problem can be called something like patiencelessness when it comes to finding solutions for things, very much like the patience I just ran out of while considering how to start talking about this. To myself. 

Let's start over with a couple of basic modern challenges that, when combined, can very easily create the illusion of an impenetrable, oceanic wall of doom, at least for this writer. Off of what passes for the top of my head these days: 

1) Dopamine, the "firehose of pleasure" that being online offers us, the constant buzz of harmless, idle consumption...addictive enough to impair us from being creative our own selves in any meaningful offline way, more on that in a bit.

1b) The satisfaction of knowing anything immediately. This is a subcategory of dopamine addiction that makes us unprecedentedly susceptible to new problems like reasonably realistic misinformation, see below.

2) The lowered bar to content creation means that "anyone" can create "compelling" content, instead of having to learn a skill that doesn't involve a phone and an app and some kind of AI...just download a free app that does everything for you. One result of which is that our content keeps getting more homogenous, because everyone is using the same or very similar tools; and said content is generally less complex and "more stupider," because that's the whole concept of these tools...requiring as little skill or intelligence as possible, the less the better.

2b) I think that unless your profession or serious creative outlet involves expressing complex thoughts to an audience of listeners or readers on an extremely regular basis, your ability to express yourself is probably undergoing some kind of atrophy, because all you do is consume other people's gradually stupider content.

3) The fact that getting offline is still a minority position at this point, and probably seems like a comparably "lonely" undertaking, although there's considerable evidence that our being online all the time is not making us less lonely at all. Point being, "how can anyone survive offline!?!?!??!"

4) The disillusionment of discovering that people are generally not as good or as smart as we once somehow thought they were, a position we originally arrived at through a simple lack of evidence to the contrary, combined wish wishful thinking/optimism. Now there is plennnnnty of evidence and no legitimate reason for optimism.

4b) The fucking plague of Comments sections and the resulting decline of polite conversation and general interpersonal etiquette. This is partially my fault. I helped put the internet in everyone's home, which hurts me almost every day. But before 1995, when your average Archie Bunker type used to watch the news and get angry about, well, anything at all, they used to just complain to their spouse if they were fortunate to have found someone insecure or stupid enough to tolerate their stunted worldview, or maybe they would complain about it to a like-minded colleague or two at the steel mill or the slaughterhouse or whatever, or hey probably even the advertising agency if we're talking about pre-Reaganite yuppies. But their circle of toxicity was limited by their lack of transmission technology and the fact that in person someone can knock your teeth down your throat if you say something offensive enough. Then computers happened, but you still needed to have some kind of intellectual horsepower to be able to post content, and access to consuming that content was still very limited. Turns out this was a better, saner model. 

5) The plague of misinformation. This is probably going to be the end of us, because: we're addicted to being online; it's making us stupider; the stupider we are, the more susceptible we are to misinformation. And the more evil among us are going to use this to get ahead of the less evil among us, because it's easy.  Combine this with our increasingly insatiable need to have the answer to any possible question at our fingertips and well buddy you've got yrself a veritable powderkeg of something. Sorry, still shaking off the atrophy. 

My dark dark habit of reading the conservative "news" site National Review revealed this strikingly un-selfaware tidbit today entitled "The Television Age Is Over": 

Television maintains certain presuppositions about authority, expertise, and credibility. Anthony Fauci’s Covid pronouncements, “51 former intelligence officials” declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop a Russian dupe, and “fact-checking” debate moderators are all natural products of a televisual culture. They assume certain things about the way information is produced, verified, delivered, and defended.

If televisual forces (network executives and anchors, newspaper editorial boards, etc.) seem more and more defensive, it is because they are now in the position of conducting rearguard actions against the digital culture that has overtaken them — and that operates on altogether different premises. Joe Rogan and Walter Cronkite occupy entirely different roles in their respective information economies. If the basic question of television news is: Who said it? Do I trust them?, the basic question of digital news is: How does it map onto my prior beliefs? How does it make me feel? Indeed, what constitutes “news” in each economy will be different. The salacious rumor is digital. Proclaiming it bunk is televisual.

They say this without any acknowledgement that this is a serious problem, it's "just the way it is now", breaking their arm patting themselves on the back for realizing "we're in a digital age now". OH ARE WE? 

OK! Call this a work in progress hopefully. 

x

tortillas' recipes.

Tortillas was Atlanta's greatest ever burrito restaurant if you ask me or anyone else who ever ate there. As previously discussed in these pages, I would schedule entire days around leaving work early so I could get to Tortillas, have a shrimp and potato burrito with half a bottle of green salsa and two beers and be asleep in bed by 5pm. Good times. 

Anyway, their beans were really something special, and I am placing the semi-apocryphal recipes here for safekeeping since they seem to be disappearing from the places I thought they were. 

+++

Tortillas Burrito Recipes
adapted from the Tortillas myspace page

Guacamole
Ingredients: Haas avocados, red chili powder, ground cumin, garlic powder, black pepper, salt, vinegar.
Process: Break up the avocados so that they are chunky

Add the spice mixture in this ratio: 6 parts red chili powder, 5 parts ground cumin, 2 parts garlic powder, 2 parts black pepper, 3 parts salt.

Add vinegar to taste, approx. 1 tbls. per avocado used

Add Red Rooster or Texas Pete hot sauce to taste., approx. 1.5 tsp. per avocado used

Green Sauce
Ingredients: 1 part canned tomatillos, 1 part canned jalapeño slices, fresh cilantro, fresh onion.
Process:
Drain the tomatillos
Combine with the jalapeños and their juices. (1 to 1 ratio of tomatillos to jalapeños)
Add diced onion and cilantro and blend in a food processor.  Use cilantro for coloring

Red Sauce
Ingredients: 4 parts canned tomatoes, 1 part canned jalapeños, chili powder, cumin, salt
Mix the tomatoes with the canned jalapeños and their juices
Add the spice mixture in this ratio: 5 parts chili powder, 4 parts cumin, 3 parts salt
Blend in a food processer until the desired texture.

Salsa Fresca
Ingredients: Tomatoes>Onion>Cilantro
Process: Combine and blend that stuff!

Beans (Black or Pinto)
Ingredients: dry beans, salt, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, black pepper, vegetable oil (2 tbls. per lbs. of beans).

Do not presoak beans but do remove stones, etc.

In a pot, combine beans with 7 parts salt, 5 parts chili powder, 3 parts cumin, 2 parts garlic powder, 2 parts black pepper, and vegetable oil.

Cover beans with water (just above the level of the beans) and bring to a simmering boil.  Cook for 3 to 4 hours (less if using black beans).

Marinades
According to the “recipe”, the shrimp was covered in guacamole spice; the potatoes and tofu were marinated with the red spice.  The steak was marinated for a day using equal parts vinegar, water, corn oil, and red spice.  Red Rooster was usually added and sometimes the guacamole spice was swapped for red spice.

+++

Those are the internet notes. Here's my first attempt: 

900g dried brown beans
2 tsp fine salt
3 tsp chili powder (yeah, generic, would like to come up with a more specific instruction here)
3 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp black peppercorns, freshly ground
2 tbsp olive oil 

Cook til tender, about 2 hours. 

+++

couple things.

Hi. I am "OK"!
Also, the thing I find myself coming here the most for is, invariably, this, so I'll put it at the top and strip it down to the infinitely-modifiable version I always use these days in my post-shrimp life: 

+++

baked risotto.

3 tbsp olive oil
3 shallots, or one medium onion of your choosing, chopped small
1 cup Arborio rice
3/4 cup dry white wine
2 cups chicken or vegetable stock

up to 1 tsp salt, or possibly no salt, depending on saltiness of your broth
up to 1 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano (can also use pecorino romano sometimes)

garnishes: you choose. freshly cracked black pepper, butter, gormas, hot sauce, fresh herbs, pangrattato, furikake, etc.

+++

Heat oven to 190°C.

In a medium ovenproof saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add shallots and cook, stirring until translucent, 5 to 8 minutes. Add rice, and stir until grains are shiny and well coated with oil, about 2 minutes more. Add wine, and continue cooking and stirring until liquid is absorbed, 3 to 5 minutes.

Add stock, stir to combine. Cover saucepan; transfer to oven. Bake until almost all of the stock is absorbed, about 25 minutes. Take it out, check for doneness, it should still be barely inedible. Add cheese and return to oven. After 6-8 minutes, remove from oven, check salt level again and adjust if necessary. Serve immediately, topped with grated cheese and your choice of garnish.

Serves 4, sometimes less.

bitchin confidential, chapter 1.

Friday morning. I walk in at 08:06 and it's already clear that things have gone wrong, even before anyone else has been here today. Our main supplier delivers late Thursday night, usually around 22:00 (+/- an hour) and/but somehow cannot tell us in advance when they are unable to deliver any part of our order. 

Clearly, there are technological challenges. Their website only started to feature photos of their products a couple of months ago (it's 2023), it used to just basically be an enormous spreadsheet with a Submit button, so you'd have to select things like "15107 ACTIE Aard Alouette Vastk Aardappel 1kg", click Submit and hope for the best. 

Anyway: after too many Thursday nights waiting at the cafe for them to show up (neurotically checking the clock because we have to go to bed so we can get up early Friday and cook) we now leave them a key under the zinc flowerpot next to the back door so they can let themselves in and out. I do wish we also had a security camera back there so we could have some Instagrammable therapeutic times watching the delivery guy battle his way down the densely overgrown and rustic (unpredictable) garden path with an overloaded hand truck in the pitch black darkness. Thankless job, meet thankless job.  

So if the upside of this arrangement is a possible extra hour or two of sleep, the downside of not being there for this delivery is that we don't find out until Friday morning what parts of the weekend's menu are fucked (I guess if we found out Thursday night we probably would lose those extra hours' sleep anyway). 

"Choose another supplier". There just isn't one, not that delivers where we are. Nobody delivers anything where we are except for the mailman. Mailperson. Mail carrier. You can't even order a pizza. 

+++

We have dinner for 20 on Saturday and lunch reservations all day Saturday, and suddenly we don't have red wine, and we don't have buckwheat flour. One of those things might seem way more important than the other, but buckwheat pancakes have become a significant component of our lunch menu, and without them I can already hear the parents complaining that there's nothing on the menu for kids, which means that I'll probably be getting off-menu requests all day for which there is no standard presentation ("a cheese sandwich for table 6 please", "what does that mean", "you know, a piece of buttered bread with thinly sliced cheese on it", "[threat level rising] which bread, daan's or saskia's? just one piece? whole or in halves? toasted, or not", "I don't know, just whatever" "mmm, no: if i make this and you come in here to pick it up and then ask me to remake it i will kill both of us" "[brief pause] ok, saskia's, whole, and not?", "how old is the kid?" "6?" "ok got it  [waits a moment, then jabs paring knife into temple]").

(And why not just use another flour? Three things: gluten, veganness, and induction. Making pancakes on an induction burner is an inexact science (or a very very exact science: once you have a successful formula, changing any of the input variables in the slightest produces unpredictable results): we tried a different brand of buckwheat flour last Sunday, and one child ended up in bitter, bitter tears b/c her tablemates had their hot non-pancake food while the cook was in the kitchen silently screaming and hurling yet another failed pancake attempt against the wall. The biggest bug/feature is that the recipe is three ingredients: oat milk, buckwheat flour, and salt. It's, frankly, genius. But, having now tried a few different brands of buckwheat, all with varying results, I can say that the only thing you can do to mostly normalize the variation is to let your batter hydrate for 20 minutes, meaning just let it sit there after it's all mixed together. But yeah bottom line: predictable pancakes are only doable with this one recipe and this one buckwheat flour).

So, after figuring out what has showed up, and what it actually is (for example the crate of eggplant we ordered for caponata is comprised of tiny purple eggplants that are about as long as, appropriately enough, my middle finger. They are super cute! But their tinyness means it'll take at least twice as long to trim and clean them as usual, and the many many red onions we need for Saturday dinner are also unhelpfully tiny, meaning the same old sad story: more prep time and more waste), it's now 09:10 and i haven't started cooking yet. Instead I am calculating whether or not we have time to solve our wine/buckwheat problems: the nearest grocery store is a few towns over, about an 11 minute drive (one-way), and while they will definitely have some crappy red wine, the probability that they will have buckwheat flour is extremely extremely low. 

I mean they could, but given that I have 3 cakes, a soup, and two lunch specials to prep before 12:00 I don't have 22 minutes to find out that they don't, so I mentally 86 the pancakes, put on me apron, and enter the kitchen.

"Kitchen".

the tree was inside it all along, part 3.

Installment 3 of: just to be clear, because I used to hate it when I would find a blog that would talk about addiction struggles and then the blogger would disappear for two years: today is 993 days (minus 2) without alcohol.

ghost kitchen.

Yeah. Jotting this here because I can't find it online anywhere. 
The idea is that I've been baking with aromatics a lot lately, and these two Paula Wolfert variations seem like an interesting thing to add to a cake in place of "2 tbsp rum" or other alcohol. You can also flip the proportions of orange blossom water and Armagnac.

+++

basque aromatic mixture.

2 tbsp orange blossom water
2 tbsp anisette (not pastis)
2 tbsp dark rum
50 ml Armagnac
1 tsp almond extract
1 strip lemon peel

Combine. 

dill + peanut.

3 large aubergines (1.2kg)
some neutral oil
coarse salt

4 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 long red chilli, very finely chopped
2cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated

zest of one lemon
1/2 cup toasted coconut
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp tamarind paste
1 tbsp soft brown sugar, or more to taste
1 tsp ground cumin
¾ tsp ground turmeric

100g delicious peanuts, either pre-roasted and salted or you-roasted and salted
100g crunchy peanut butter

water to thin
salt and sugar and lemon juice to taste

Fried onions
Fresh herbs – a handful each of mint, coriander and dill, all chopped
Steamed rice and/or salad

pickled tomatoes.

PRUNE’S PICKLED TOMATOES actual recipe

400-500g cherry tomatoes, halved
2 scallions, greens and whites, sliced diagonally
1 green chile, chopped
½ cup white vinegar
⅙ cup brown sugar
2 tsp flaky salt
1 tbsp thinly sliced ginger
1 tbsp thinly sliced garlic
2 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp black peppercorns
2 tsp ground cumin
1 bay leaf
1 tsp cayenne
1 tsp turmeric
½ cup blended oil (50/50 canola/olive)

In a pickling jar combine tomatoes, scallions, and chile. In stainless steel saucepan, bring vinegar to a boil, add brown sugar and salt and cook until dissolved, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat. In a bowl next to stove combine garlic, ginger and spices. Heat oil in stainless steel saucepan until hot, add ginger/garlic/spices and cook, stirring constantly, for 4 minutes, until “aromas are released”. Remove from heat and carefully stir in vinegar mixture. Immediately pour over tomato mixture. Wait at least a day to eat, lasts 5-7.