redeemable.

Ever wonder if you are? 

You probably are. I may even be. Tonight, just now in fact, I punted the memory of last night's Dinner Abomination over the border of and directly into the heart of Anomalyland. 

In other words, tonight's dinner was easier, quicker, and roughly 1.3 trillion times better. I roasted another chicken, because they're only 2.99 at the Dirk and because the last one was so caveman-good. 

My goal this time was to see if a less fussy recipe would work anywhere near as well as the Dean & Deluca bird-flipping spectacular (they had you flipping and basting the bird every 15 minutes, which basically means that I wasted 90 minutes because I can't multitask creative endeavors and cooking...creatively I'm single-threaded). Remember, I'm new to this whole chicken thing. 

And lo, my Sunday Bird was even better than the last one and only required one bird flip. I used one of the variations for Claudia Roden's djaj fil forn, an Egyptian recipe. Basically, rub the bird with olive oil, cinnamon, allspice, salt, and pepper. I threw some carrots in the roasting pan halfway through and baked at 190C for 90 minutes. Keeper!

Photo: Mara. She's at her parents' place, coming across old photos, like one does, and tormenting this lonely duck with them, like one does. 

+++

swing and a miss.

When was the last time you made something completely inedible? It had been a while for me before tonight, I mean like a solid 3 years or so. Tonight: I can barely even think about it at the moment, I...really did not enjoy it. It was supposed to be some sort of Persian chicken, but yeah...there are some cuisines I shouldn't really attempt without a recipe in front of me. Plus I was using an unfamiliar ingredient (chicken legs... we don't eat chicken really). 

All is can say is ewww. It was like Sour Soylent Green. I mean the texture of the chicken was nas-teeeee, rubbery, flaccid, fatty, gag, ulp. The only way to purge the experience from my mind was to bake two sweet potatoes with cinnamon and sugar (it was my dinner! C'mon, I didn't use any butter. They're vegetables!) They smelled so good I thought someone had snuck a batch of cookies into the oven. I was working on something and then suddenly I looked up and said "Damn, who's baking up a dang ol' batch of cookies* in heah?" Mmm.

* That's an old Donald Barthelme trick, the "bad patois". Any clumsy-sounding dialect that the author knows isn't authentic-sounding. Try it, it's fun! 

+++

musselbound.

Maybe I'm amazed...well, no. Nope, I'm totally amazed at how good a body can feel when it hasn't been drinking and smoking and staying out late like a dullard...when it gets up early and goes to the gym and gets some sun, etc. I'm going to go ahead and recommend that I continue to do this. I still look like Keith Richards, but I feel like, I don't know...Prince? k.d. lang? Hopefully not. I don't have any idea, let me think about it.

So, what with the past couple few several weeks being devoted to the psychedelic drone abstract country rock 'n' roll lifestyle and the stress of family medical emergencies, the grocery budget has taken a back seat. The back seat, actually, there's only one.

So we now return to the budget lifestyle. After today. Here's something I don't think you see in America, or do you? At the grocery store, this is the way you buy a kilo of mussels:

Which I haven't done very often here because well I just haven't. But this week mussels showed up at the Dirk for a good price, and while I didn't buy them, I've been thinking about them. And thus today while I was at Albert Heiniehole and I saw these bitches I grabbed them.

In addition to thinking about food as little as possible, another of the week's goals is to use up leftovers or abandoned condiments in the fridge. Yesterday's ancho ketchup was part of this initiative, as was the Brazilian shrimp with tomatos, onions, and hearts of palm that I made on Friday...it was comforting and good without being exactly exciting, kind of like Cuban food.

But now I'm getting down to the point where there's not much left to work with except pickles, cheese, and mindblowingly hot sambals. Oh, and an open can of Italian tomatoes. Maybe we'll take our mussels in a Spanish direction.

UPDATE: "We" took them in an Italian direction, for a number of reasons. I had no salt in the house, but I did have some extremely salty Kalamata olives that needed something useful to do. I also had a few salted capers left, an open can of tomatoes, etc...it's plain that it was "in the cards", as they say. Basically a mussels fra diavolo, with bulgur (Our Grain of Choice) replacing the linguini. Excessively edible, very good.

Oh yeah, remind me to tell you the very funny thing that Joost said after he accidentally cut the tip of his finger off.

+++

true confessions.

I'm not even supposed to be blogging today, but I just had to tell someone: today I did something I've never ever done before. And I'm almost 40 years old. 

I roasted a chicken. Can you believe I've never roasted a chicken? I know, I couldn't either. So I did it. The mangled photo above is from after I ripped the legs off to see if it was done. But it came out utterly perfect thanks to Dean & Deluca's recipe. I stuffed it with walnuts, prunes, and garlic and used some leftover ancho sauce to make an ancho ketchup for dipping. I'm so sophisticated! And gay!

+++ 

food, thought, medicine.

Ike looks alarming, wouldn't you say?

+++

I'm trying a little experiment this weekend wherein I attempt to not do all of my little procrastinatory habits, most of which revolve around food or this blog or both. See, this weekend is the first and last time I'll have even the tiniest bit of breathing room for a few weeks, and I can already feel myself wanting to do nothing but breathe until there's no room left.

If that makes any sense. What I'm saying is, I often find it hard to work unless a deadline is standing on my neck, or pinching the bridge of my nose, or any other mean thing a deadline might do, but at the moment? I'm kind of tired of my deadline self. Like Carly Simon, I Haven't Got Time For The Pain.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if this time, just as a crazy experiment not completely unlike the Large Hadron Collider, I worked consistently and methodically every day, anticipating and subsequently avoiding my endearing tendency to wander off down other semi-related lanes of inquiry (those hours I spent recording solos on my new PostcardWeevil were totally well-spent, though, I'm not talking about that).

OK, like just now. I went looking for a video of the PostcardWeevil and I found this:

Which led to several other things, and I was in a Googhole for 20 minutes. That's what I'm talking about! Here's the PostcardWeevil by the way. In this demo it sounds tiny, but imagine if you ran the output through a humongous bass amp...total destruction. I accidentally blew a basketball-sized hole in the dining room wall this morning during my extended Weevil solo (not really...we don't have a dining room!):

OK, I used up all my food-talking time looking for information on how to fuck up children's toys. I guess that's all for today. But you see my point. Oh, and Pitts? Please make sure Erica doesn't throw away any of the twins' sound-making toys...I'll be bringing my soldering iron with me this Xmas.

+++

more gauze, this time with feeling.

Any idea what this is? In this photo it reminds me very much of Italian hospital equipment.

How about this view from above?













OK, maybe if I show you the nurse's station:













Why...those aren't nurses, you fiend! Those could only be....my God, no--vinyl mastering technicians!!! Actually one vinyl mastering technician (right) and the man who is on the A-side of the soon-to-be-pressed Double Headphone Project (he runs the label, so...of course, he gets the A-side. Just kidding, Ivo!!!!).

So, yes, they take your finely-crafted, agonizingly overconsidered, lovingly-rendered audio file and play it through a bunch of amazingly expensive vintage Italian hospital equipment that I don't understand at all (in fact, one of the weirdest things about today was being surrounded by technology about which I knew absolutely nothing), and it somehow gets etched/burned into this copper disc which becomes the, eh...master? I don't even know what it's called (Wikipedia does, though).

This copper disc then gets on down to an actual assembly line, where warm gobs of raw vinyl are mechanically fed into something that looks like a sandwich press (ah...the food connection, finally!), and pwong!!! Piping-hot records come out!

Crazy. So then I went home to my laboratory/kitchen table to continue figuring out how to turn this pile of wires and boxes I 've accumulated into Double Headphones Comes Alive! (two weeks away), but I had some sort of bug in my system:













A big, gross caterpillar of some sort as far as I can tell. Completely obscuring my work surface with its writhing, invasive, fuzzy bulk.

How'd she get so big? Too many omelets maybe.



+++

balm, me.

As the title of the last post said, "OK!" Which means, among other things, OK, I'm back. I haven't been feeling, eh, "100%" for the past few days, and haven't been eating much other than imaginary sandwiches (also see previous post). That ham, avocado, tomato sandwich was real, though, but it didn't fix whatever badness lurked inside me.

So today I went outside thinking "what's the healthiest possible food I could eat?" This is a pretty tough question to answer definitively, but lots of things came to mind: vegetables of course, dark leafy greens and bright orange things and stinky cruciferous things. But I was also craving protein, so I picked up the "sale tilapia" at the Dirk (frozen, don't worry...that's the only kind of "sale fish" I buy) and a big head of cabbage, thinking I'd make some kind of zuppa di pesce thing.

But my mind is still in the tropics. So we turn to the great tradition of tropical cabbage dishes. Don't laugh, there probably is one, I just can't think of anything except that wickedly spicy cabbage from Jamaican Foods in Athens, GA. I'll have time to use the InterGoogle eventually, and I'll return triumphant, you'll see.

I basically took a recipe for Surinamese cabbage (half of a cabbage) with masala (1 tbsp or so of Nandan brand Hindustani masala) and added 1 jar of "No-E" chicken broth (as in no additives), maybe a cup of sliced leeks, and 500 gr fish. I felt like I was channeling some Portugese influence via the ol' Mystic Pipeline (which I haven't used in some time, so bear with me) until I added some ginger.

Portugese-Surinamese? Or is it just Chinese with some Indian spices? I'll sort out the lineage later...right now it smells very good and will hopefully set my insides right.

UPDATE: This was totally delicious, especially after I added some adjoema and a sprinkling of seroendeng. Why do these flavors go together? I don't get it. I'll totally make this again, but it's so ugly I can't imagine ever serving it to anyone.

+++

ok!

Word on the street is that Big Dog is "out of the woods", which is very good news for everyone. But please don't stop sending those Healing Rays of InterGoogle Love...

+++

All I can really muster today is some food pr0n with the unlikely title of Metro Detroit's Best Sandwiches. That's it. I'll take a Reuben, please.

OK, that's not it, here's Serious Eats' sandwich feature. Apparently everyone is hungry for sandwiches, myself included. This morning's was ham, avocado, and tomato.

Oh, and the photo above is from De Witte Aap in Rotterdam, because I am mentally clinging to my absent white monkey much like the pair above. And she probably has the same look on her face, because she's in Cobb County, Georgia.

+++

big dog down.

Mara's dad, aka The Big Dog, has hit a bit of a speed bump. He's in the hospital at the moment. Let's all send him some powerful healing love transmissions via this here Internet thing, and Little Dog too. Mara's heading to the ATL first thing in the morning, so she'll be bringing some with her, but heck you never can have too much.

+++

doctor malanga.

As usual, better pictures of this evening elsewhere: Abra managed to make my sausage look edible (please hold your applause) and Klary makes my hands look a bit sinister. There's a craigslist personal in there somewhere, I'm sure of it.

+++

"Your Internet friends." This is the semi-derogatory term that my "non-Internet friends" use to refer to people with whom I have become acquainted via the Internet. Maybe derogatory's not the right word. They just can't relate.

It is a bit of a weird thing, communicating solely through text and pictures, not having any idea what someone's voice sounds like, high, low, accented, not, loud, quiet, I think you get what I'm saying. But once you hear the voices in question traveling across the space of a room and landing in your actual ear, I don't think the Internet side of your interaction is ever the same again...you're just "friends", right? That you "found" via the Internet, and might not have otherwise.

Why so serious, VDuck? Above: pom and Klary's hand. Below: poffertjes and Klary's hand. The pom was good, an 82% successful effort. It reminded me of the second pom I ever tried, after tasting the Tokoman's first. Good, but yes...not as good as The Tokoman's, and thus slightly disappointing.

Unfortunately I can't quite pinpoint what would've improved things. The texture was a wee bit dry and gummy, and I don't know if this was because of our higher than specified cooking temperature (necessary because after the pom was assembled and ready to go in the oven, we all took a couple of snapshots of it and then promptly forgot to put it in the oven. Oh, you bloggers! And who says taking pictures of food is more important than eating it???), or due to an underbuttering.

The latter seems unlikely, but really...this isn't like analyzing a ravioli or brisket recipe, where you're familiar with the source components: malanga is a foreign substance with bizarre physical properties, and I've cooked with it a mere five times now, which doesn't quite earn me the title of Doctor Malanga. But that's a really good title to shoot for. Guess we'll just have to make some more pom again soon....

+++

the russian cure.

The math went like this:

sound check = 4pm
+ we hit the stage = 2am
+ free beer
+ piping-hot vodka and lemon shots blowtorched by a feisty Russian lass = 3.50 euro
+ roughly 6,000 random joints being passed around
+ general Rube Goldberg carnival atmosphere (an example: the second-to-last picture below is actually a combination motorcycle/espresso machine)

I have never been that fucked up onstage before. The upside: the concentration that our altered states required from us resulted in a tremendously focused hour of music. The downside: today.

+++

the pom recipe.

The Smart Dutch Woman is going to make pom on Monday and she wants to use my goldang recipe! Only problem is, neither of us could find the durned thing. So here it is, stolen from my eGullet foodblog.

+++

pom (surinamese chicken and malanga casserole).

300-400g chicken breast, leg, or thigh meat, or a mix of these
freshly grated nutmeg
salt and pepper

100g zoutvlees
150g180-200g butter
3 yellow onions, chopped
3 canned roma tomatoes, chopped
1 cup chicken broth
2 tbsp palm sugar

1 kilo pomtajer/malanga, grated
1/3 cup celery leaves, chopped fine
the juice of 2 oranges
the juice of 1 lemon
freshly grated nutmeg
salt
pepper

Soak the zoutvlees in cold water for 30 minutes or so, then rinse and dice the meat.

















Rub the chicken pieces thoroughly in a mix of equal parts salt, pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg. Here's my cute little nutmeg grater:

















Brown the chicken pieces in a sautepan, using a little of the butter to facilitate if necessary. Add the zoutvlees and saute for 5 minutes or so, then add the rest of the butter and the onions, tomatoes, chicken broth and palm sugar, and simmer until the palm sugar melts.

















Turn off the heat.

Grab your defrosted, grated pomtajer.

















Add the orange and lemon juices and the celery leaves to the pomtajer, then add all of the liquid from the chicken mixture, and stir to integrate everything.

















































Spread half of the pomtajer mixture along the bottom of a buttered baking dish, and then place a layer of the chicken mixture on top. Top with a layer of the pomtajer mixture. Dot the top with butter if you feel like it.


































Bake for 60 minutes at 175C, and then 30 minutes at 150C. After about the first 45 minutes check to see if the top is drying out. If it is, either dot some more butter on top, or if you think you've already added plenty of butter, you can mix things around in the baking pan to moisten. But when I used the full 180-200 grams of butter, everything was perfectly moist.

Serve with birambie (or similar homemade spicy pickles) either by itself or on a baguette for a broodje pom.

+++

I did skimp on the butter a little, about 50g less than I probably should've used...but my conscience was peering rudely over my shoulder in the kitchen and I just couldn't do it. I'll think I'll stick with my proportions so that my guilt is just ever so slightly less crushing.


















+++

indonesian leftovers.

Andy just got back in town and passed on his photos from the Indonesian throwdown a couple weeks back. See, it's not just Mara that gets to look ridiculous out here. Up here. Wherever this is.

+++

cv.

You know, someone once said that I never post any nice-looking pictures of Mara up here. Out here. Wherever we are. In my defense, here's what I have to work with:


















"I got nowhere else to go....."

+++

I've just crossed some sort of Geek Threshold. My first meme. This is The Omnivore's Hundred, which I filled out b/c I had 10 minutes to kill while my bulgur cooked and because it's a pretty good list...I have fond memories of most of the 75 78 items I've tried. There are some that I feel like I've tried but have no recollection of the details, like borscht and gjetost. And there are only a few things on here that I don't feel like I ever need to try again, like sea urchin and andouillette.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (well, alligator)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (it's not for a lack of source material, but I don't see this one happening)
43. Phaal (should get on this one)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (Big Macs, yes, but never the Meal)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (no desire to try this one)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost
75. Roadkill Not as far as I know, and let's keep it that way.
76. Baijiu I think I pretty much understand how pure alcohol works at this point, this isn't a priority.
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

+++

a one, and a two, and a...

Just found out that the gig I thought was on 30 Sept is on 30 August. Oops! No worries...

+++

devil's workshop.

Did something today I haven't done in a long time: cooked a complicated dinner because it felt like the only pleasant thing I was capable of doing.

Waah. My back has been hurting for a couple weeks now, but last night's sleep was foiled by not only that but a plague of additional hostile entities: silent, thirsty mosquitoes; unsilent, mysteriously motivated cats; and this wicked, throbbing shin injury that I must have picked up during Rotterdam's post-gig shenanigans.

So today I was just barely functional, but there were some projects in store for us. One positive, constructive project, and one destructive project. The positive one is pictured above in an unfinished state: new shelves in the kitchen (hopefully the first of several planned kitchen modifications). They're really more integrated than they look. If you know Mara's work, you'll agree that none of the following facts are surprising: 1) the materials used are scraps from the backyard, costing zero; 2) the entire project was finished in two hours; 3) I had nothing at all to do with it.

My contribution to the team's achievements came in the form of Complicated and Sloppy-Looking Southwestern Cooking.






















In 20th-century menuspeak this would be something like Red Chile-Pesto Shrimp with Fresh-Roasted Red Peppers, Guacamole and Black Bean-Goat Cheese Huarache Quesadilla (Which You Can Almost See Underneath Everything Else) Plus Chive Oil. Etc. Today it is called Ancho Shrimp with Goat Cheese Huarache.

+++

Really just a lot of sub-recipes: an ancho chile sauce with (subtle) cinnamon and marjoram, a basil-pine nut pesto (which was already lurking in the fridge), a black bean and roasted garlic puree, and a chive oil. And a guacamole, which I bought, and which (though expensive) is real guacamole, from De Avondmarkt.

Pesto sounds like a fusion-y bit of overkill in a Southwestern context, but it's really not: basil and pine nuts are perfect complements to the main players here...but they do work best when they don't dominate the proceedings, and when combined with the earthy notes of the darker dried chiles like ancho (not pasilla as described here earlier...in my weakened condition I'd forgotten about the West Coast predilection for calling things pasilla that ain't).

With that in mind, I would call this successful because it tasted simple...if I'd been served this in a restaurant I would've said "Hmmm, darn tasty, but I could cook that." And in fact I'd be totally correct, which is rare for me. Today's recipe was based on several things out of a new cookbook sent to me by my lovely parents, Richard Sandoval's Modern Mexican Cooking.

The first of these several things was a huarache, which I somehow hadn't realized had become a easily findable edible in America these days (more info here and here, still looking for a postable recipe). But: when I went to make some masa for my possible huarache, I discovered that (cue foreboding music that introduces our destructive project for the day)...

...our pantry moth problem is out of control. You can read about other unfortunate victims' tales of woe on the eGullet Pantry Moths thread, but it suffices to say that we threw out just about every dry good we had at home, with the exception of the newest shipment of chiles and Mexican herbs from Phoenix. These went into the freezer. This process of retaliation and, yes, destruction made it look like we were just moving in instead of moving someone else out...






















+++

uploads.

This was my way-too-early lunch in Rotterdam on Friday, at Bazar. Yes, it looks like enough food for three people, but it was mostly lettuce, honest. Those are falafel in the back, and chicken wings in front. Everything was good, I'd go back if there was one of these in Amsterdam. Oh, wait: there is.

Here's our version of "Song 3" from the other night, with extra reverb added by me. It's certainly probably not awesome, but it's also just about the first time we ever played it like this all the way through. Is it really 10 minutes long? We were quite worried that our entire set was going to clock in at around 8 minutes.

+++

food, water.

Pretty sure this is a Vegetarian Duck first: live foodblogging from a DJ gig. Don't even ask.

Below, we have some sort of vegetarian wrap; an artichoke tapenade topped with a blueberry (!); and some roe with a lemon creme fraiche and a sprig of lavender? And prosecco. Lots and lots of prosecco. More up-to-the-minute action as it occurs. UPDATE: I missed the vitello tonnato, manicotti (maybe?), and something else warm that looked delicious. I did snag some lovely cured ham, maybe Parma? All thanks to Casa Catering.

The actual content of the event that I'm being lighthearted about here is substantial: the social politics of water governance. I've watched a couple of very compelling speakers talk about the difficulties and unexpected conflicts in areas of true water scarcity. It's (as you might imagine) a situation whose complexity is entirely outside the scope of this site, but I'll try to put some links up here that concisely outline the story.

To sum: we take clean, useful drinking water for granted....and (duh) we should maybe not do that. I heard many interesting things this evening, the latest of which rang true: that our own disconnection from our local water systems (not understanding how our own water becomes useful and gets into our homes) impedes us from truly understanding and empathizing with cultures who aren't as fortunately situated as we are.

All this said? This is no environment for a DJ. I am having serious Corporate America flashbacks.

+++

the ex in ethiopia.

Jace had a nice post about The Ex today, and that led me to this: this video is four years old, and it's a quite really rough version of a Mahmoud Ahmed song I think, but you have to see the dancing that starts at the 2:30 mark and continues to the end. I'm so doing this at the next show I go to.

If you're wondering what the crowd is cheering about every 10 seconds or so, it's the lyrics.

Another good one, maybe this is a Tlahoun Gessesse song:



+++