Balls and Walnuts
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New Year’s gift
Some of you may recall that I had wanted to use my short story “Heaven on Earth” for PBW’s eBook challenge, but it got published instead! Well, the requisite six months have passed, so I’m now able to post the story.
I won’t try to classify it. SF? Spec fiction? Magical realism? Who knows. I wrote it to honor the memory of my grandfather, on whom the character of Papa Nate is loosely based. My grandfather never hung with the zoot suit crowd but he was a terror in any grocery store’s produce section. The speech patterns are entirely my Papa’s.
He died with dementia, which I believe was indeed multi-infarct dementia, a complication of untreated hypertension. The man would not take his blood pressure meds. “I feel fine without them,” he would say. “What do doctors know?” But it was a horrible way to go for a man whose personality drew so much from story and memory.
It’s fitting, I think, to “fix” his terrible end with a story, and to leave him in an eternity built on memory.
You may use this post as a comment thread on the story, if you like. And don’t forget: I’m going to do my best to live blog tonight, 7 PST at the latest. If I don’t see you, drive safe, everyone, and enjoy your New Year’s Eve.
D.
We’re back!
The eats were good and the weather balmy, so we spent an extra night in Eureka (our nearest “big” city). Thursday night we ate at Cin Cin, an upscale Italian place, where the most memorable dish was a platter of five cheeses, walnuts, grapes, and honey. Mmm, walnuts dipped in honey. Jake, the Salt Monster, discovered he could dip grapes in honey and sprinkle them with cracked salt. Don’t knock it ’til you try it.
Biggest dessert hit was the panna cotta, which I had never had before. Karen says they did an unusually good job of it, so I’m tempted to see if I can make one at least as fine. As for main courses, Jake had gnocchi, I had about the most perfect scallops imaginable (seared/caramelized on one side, quick-seared on the other), and I think Karen had a salad.
Family photo below the cut . . .
Thirteen culinary abominations
Today, I shall prove to you that my foodie arrogance knows no bounds.
Image shamelessly scanned from The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks, a gift I received from La Voluptuous & Demented Michelle.
We may be going to Eureka today, in which case I won’t be able to disseminate (oh how I love that word — Disseminate! Watch out, people, I’m disseminating!) my linky lurve. But feel free to leave links in the comments. Shout out your most recent cool posts in the comments, if you like, or give me your own nominations for worst culinary abominations.
For folks who are clumsy with HTML, here’s how to make a link. Substitute brackets <> for parentheses in the syntax below:
(a xhref=”link URL”)Here’s the link(/a)
Cut and paste the page’s URL into the quotes “link URL”. Yes, you need the quotes, and don’t go adding any spaces around that equals sign!
Thirteen marginally edible horrors below the fold.
Nostalgia for Gerald Ford, etc.
The other night, when Karen and I were watching Chevy Chase’s impersonation of Gerald Ford on the old SNL, I said, “Those were the good old days, you know? When the only thing about our president you could make fun of was his clumsiness.”
For a long time now, I’ve wished we had a president whom I could respect. Here’s the Wiki on Jimmy Carter, the last president I liked, a guy my dad still says “was too nice to be president.”
Some heavy-duty insomnia last night, so I may or may not chime in later with something more substantial. I’ll close with two links:
Thanks to Dean* remembering Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, I have tracked down the elusive theme music: Sarah Dash, “Sinner Man.” Amazing that I should have warm thoughts about a disco song, but there you have it.
And here is an interesting link to excerpts from Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, wherein Hochschild speculates on the historic basis for Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. Here’s a snip:
”The ‘Inner Station’ of Heart of Darkness, the place Marlow looks at through his binoculars only to find Kurtz’s collection of the shrunken heads of African ‘rebels,’ is loosely based on Stanley Falls. In 1895, five years after Conrad visited this post, Leon Rom was station chief there. A British explorer-journalist who passed through Stanley Falls that year described the aftermath of a punitive military expedition against some African rebels: ‘Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house!’ If Conrad missed this account, which appeared in the widely read Century Magazine, he almost certainly noticed when The Saturday Review, a magazine he admired and read faithfully, repeated the story in its issue of December 17, 1898. That date was within a few days of when Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness.
Oh how I love the holiday season, tra la la . . .
D.
*Read Dean’s Global Orgasm Day story. Read it now! Much better than anything I have to offer.
Where are they now?
My adult self came together in the years 1975 to 1980, and in my recollection of those years, Saturday Night Live glitters, a gaudy thing, a huge but imperfect gem. On the one hand, it flashed with brilliance: SNL introduced me to Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Madeline Kahn; and oh, the musical guests, could they ever be eye-openers to a kid raised on AM radio. Through SNL I met the B-52s, Elvis Costello, Zappa, Leon Redbone, and David Bowie. (I knew Bowie’s music, of course, but seeing him perform was a revelation.) On the other hand, SNL could infuriate. Who can forget the dreaded Last Half Hour, graveyard of unfunny skits? And yet we would watch on, long past the point of fatigue, hoping for one last laugh.
The first season of SNL (1975-1976) is out on DVD. Yesterday, I rented two of the set. I wanted to see Peter Cook and Dudley Moore together, and I wanted to see Peter Boyle cut up for the camera, too. And of course I wanted to see Gilda, who died way too soon.
Before I get started, I have a question for the older crowd: what was the name of the program which followed SNL at 1 AM? It was a musical program, I remember that much. And while the theme of SNL is engraved on my brain, the musical intro to that program escapes me . . . and yet that, too, was once a shining point in my life, something a good deal more vivid than the rest of my day-to-day crap.
Below the cut: where are they now?
SBD: Sex, Gatsby, and overreaching
You might not think Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have much in common, other than the fact both focus on the lives of the shallow, nouveau riche, but for Beth’s Smart Bitches Day (which I have ignored these last several weeks for lack of anything to say), I can do better than that.
But first, you’re probably wondering what happened to me yesterday. Or not. Maybe I shouldn’t assume your lives depend on me posting at least once a day, hmm? Anyway, let me quickly say WE’RE BOTH FINE. It’s good for hospital morale if the employees see their physicians (and soon to be chief-of-staff, I might add haughtily) use the emergency facilities. It fills them with confidence. And besides, the nearest larger hospital is another seventy miles south, not that that had anything to do with our choice of hospitals. Nope, nothing at all. In any case, I don’t have pneumonia and Karen didn’t have a heart attack so I guess we’re both a couple of hypochondriacs.
Am I boring you yet? Here. Check out Renee’s Christmas card to me. One question, Renee: is that mistletoe hanging over your girlfriends, and if so, may I please have a raincheck?
Onward to more serious Smart Bitchery . . .
Yummy eggplant thingy, AKA involtini
Tonight, I tried to reproduce an eggplant dish I had in San Francisco at Ti Piacera. Involtini, it’s called: thinly sliced eggplant rolled around a cheesy filling, broiled and served with a red sauce. My verdict: not bad. Certainly worthy for company. Not easy, but what the hell.
The eggplant
Peel the sucker and slice it thinly (1/8 inch or so) from top to bottom — lengthwise, not crosswise. Salt the slices and let them drain for at least 30 minutes. Rinse off the salty sweat and drain on paper towels.
The red sauce
Leftovers from last night’s ravioli: one big can of chopped tomatoes, a sauteed onion, couple cloves of garlic, crushed, pepper, olive oil, a dash of fish sauce. Simmer a good long time.
The filling
Also a leftover from last night’s ravioli. I sauteed about a pound of baby spinach in butter and, when wilted, I let it drain. In a food processor, I placed the spinach, salt, pepper, about 1/2 cup of ricotta cheese, another 1/2 cup of parmigiano reggiano, some grated fresh asiago, some nutmeg, and two egg yolks. Process until smooth.
The preparation
Saute the eggplant slices and drain on paper towels.
At one end of each slice, place a rounded teaspoonful of filling, a bit of mozarella cheese (roughly 1 – 2 teaspoons), a bit of fresh basil. Roll it up.
Arrange the rolls in a greased baking dish and bake at 250F until thoroughly heated — about 30 min. Then broil until slightly brown on top.
Spoon red sauce over the top. Sprinkle with finely chopped fresh basil.
Hey, you know what we haven’t done in a while?
Recipe requests. Got any?
D.
This could be interesting
In this morning’s email:
hi i am Jana Duggar.. if you have any questions at all you can email me at bowlingqueen1@aol.com!!
I only take emails with no cursing in it!
Thanks
I’ve invited her to give an interview for Balls and Walnuts. But how do I confirm she’s who she says she is? (There is a Jana Duggar — I confirmed that much.) Or does it even matter? It could be fun either way.
You may leave suggestions for questions in the comments. And keep it respectful, people. I only want questions with no cursing in it.
D.
Performance anxiety
Ack! The clock is ticking. I’m running out of time for Renee’s Global Orgasm Day contest. But sex isn’t funny; it runs the gamut from exhilarating to pathetic, but funny? It takes someone of Roald Dahl’s talent to make orgasms funny (see “Bitch,” in his collection Switch Bitch).
Upon rereading, I see it doesn’t have to be a funny orgasm story. Just has to be an orgasm story. ‘Kay, I can do that. I’ll give you a pathetic orgasm story.
In the dorms, my roommate used to screw one of our fellow dormies. (These were co-ed dorms, you see. We even had co-ed bathrooms.) I didn’t mind it so much, even though I had a thing for her, too. But once, my asshole roomie screwed her in OUR room with ME in there, too. Guess he figured I would sleep through it.
I lay there listening to them. They tried to make as little noise as possible, so all I could hear was the thumping and the squeaky-spring-squeaking and it was — well, when I could get past being pissed off at my roomie, I had to admit it was arousing, too. I, too, tried to make as little noise as possible; I didn’t want to distract them.
I wanted to see (hear, really) how this would end.
It didn’t take long. Sorry, Joe, but I’m not going to lie for you. I’ll bet you would like me to claim I lay there for over an hour, wondering if it would ever end, but in truth, I barely had time to figure out what I would say to you the next day*.
Five minutes? Okay, six. I’ll give you six.
When it was over, I heard the first non-thumping, non-squeaking sound from them: her disappointed whimper.
If you ever read this, gorgeous, will you please tell me why you only screwed the losers? Were you one of these women who had a bad-boy fetish or something? I hope you’ve wised up since then.
One way or another, I would have left you satisfied. I consider it a point of honor.
D.
*Oh, it was quite the zinger, just what you would expect from an accomplished Man of Words.
“You know, I heard you two last night.”
“Um. You did?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
In any case, it never happened again.
The wonder of me
SxKitten posts the following challenge:
The Holiday Challenge: Post your 4 virtues – 4 things you like about yourself.
The Hard Part: No qualifiers, no but’s, no apologies, no back-handed put-downs. You have to give yourself 4 solid, undiluted compliments.
SxKitten’s done it (linked above). Dean’s done it. Now it’s my turn.
By the way, I’m still thinking about Renee’s challenge. Hmm . . . funny, sexy story, eh? But sex is so bloody serious.
Back to my virtues.
1. I’m funny. I laugh at my own jokes constantly. As a kid, I had to be funny. It was the only way a little pisher like me could effectively deal with bullies — all the bullies, not just the ones in my family.
2. I’m a damned good chef. I can wow the socks off dinner guests and I can even impress my wife and son.
3. I have a great brain (not to be confused with a beautiful mind). It has served me very well these many years and has shown itself up to every challenge. And I have a string of A+’s and a magna cum laude from Berkeley to prove it 🙂 so there.
4. I’m a good doctor. My patients love me and I have to admit their affection is well deserved.
Hey, that was easy. Do I have to stop at four?
Your turn.
D.