Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: November 2011
A passing resemblance?
Yesterday, one of my older patients said to his wife, “You know who he looks like? That guy. You know. The one who played John Adams.”
Having missed that one, I flashed on some actor in a powdered white wig . . . but a little trip to IMDB later that day revealed he was referring to Paul Giamatti.
I dunno . . . I don’t see it.
Mee krob
Mee krob is one of those pain in the ass Thai dishes that even the Thai restaurants rarely make. Back in Crescent City, we had a lovely restaurateur/chef who would make it for us if we begged prettily. Aside from her* mee krob, most others have been overly greasy, or have used too much sauce such that the rice stick becomes soggy.
Every so often I get it into my head to try to make this stuff, and oh boy does it make a mess. Conceptually, it’s similar to Pad Thai, but the additional step of deep frying seems to raise the difficulty by an order of magnitude. Oh, well. Consider it part of the Thanksgiving feast, a few days late.
Here is, roughly, what Mee krob ought to look like:
The basic idea is that you have fried rice stick (Chinese is mai fun) dressed with a sticky, peppery sweet/sour sauce, then tossed with sauteed green onions and red peppers, scrambled eggs, and a variety of other things, including garlic, tofu, fresh cilantro, freshly chopped green onions, and meat if you like. I used some leftover chicken breast and a few shrimp. You dress the thing with the cilantro, chopped green onions, some un-sauteed red pepper slices, and bean sprouts.
Here’s the basic recipe I used, but I had to adapt it. I knew the sauce would be all wrong — way too salty for starters.
If you can find whole tamarind, you can probably find tamarind paste. It’s at most Asian markets. I used two tablespoons of paste with two of water. But here’s my sauce — you can compare to the original if you like, but trust me, this is the real deal:
4 tablespoons tamarind juice (see above)
4 tablespoons fresh lime juice
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon Vietnamese fish sauce
1 teaspoons lime zest
1 heaping tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon Chinese red pepper sauce
Combine the ingredients and simmer until it begins to thicken. Set aside. Ideal consistency is a bit thicker than room temperature pancake syrup. Too thick and it won’t incorporate into your fried rice stick easily, and too thin and it might soften your rice stick.
The sauce can be made ahead. The next step is to prepare your various vegies: separate the white and green parts of the green onion; chop your cilantro and your red pepper — I used red jalapenos; wash your bean sprouts. Dice your tofu and dry it on paper towels. Dice four cloves of garlic.
Lightly fry the tofu, then place in the oven to keep warm (I used a 300 F oven).
Saute the white part of the green onion with some of the red pepper, and once the onion is nearly done, add the garlic. VERY lightly saute the garlic (you don’t want to make it bitter!) Keep the sauteed vegies warm in the oven.
Saute your shrimp if you’re using it. I added a tablespoon of the sauce while sauteing to add flavor. Put the shrimp in the oven to keep warm.
Fry up your rice stick. Here are some tips: unless you have a huge deep fryer and want to use a ton of oil, pre-cut the rice stick using kitchen shears. Rice stick will fly everywhere, so put the “bale” of rice stick into a gallon bag, then cut it with shears. You are trying to create flatter “bales” so that they will submerge in less oil.
Set your rice stick aside on paper towels.
Once you’ve made the rice stick, the clock really starts ticking, since this stuff goes stale FAST. The only thing left is the egg. The linked recipe recommends dripping egg into the hot oil. I did this in batches, and the way I did it was to put two scrambled eggs into a sandwich baggie, seal it, then snip a little hole at one corner. Swirl the egg into the hot oil.
Everyone should do this at least once just because it’s fun. BUT. This is easily the greasiest part of the dish, so in the future I will forgo the scrambled eggs in oil bit and do it the Pad Thai way (make an omelet and cut it into strips).
Toss together your sauteed vegies, sauce, and rice stick. Use a big bowl or else this will be damn near impossible. You can put your other warm ingredients on top or on the side. Finish with garnishes of bean sprouts, cilantro, green onion, and red pepper.
It’s beautiful and the flavor is decadent. It’s the closest thing that a main course ever comes to being dessert — probably because of all the greasy stuff and the sweetness of the sauce. You may note that I cut down on the brown sugar by 1 tablespoon, but it’s still fairly sweet . . . as it should be.
This isn’t something you’ll do once a week, or even once a month. But for an occasional treat, and probably for company (provided EVERYTHING else can be made in advance and kept warm), it would be a show-stopper.
D.
*Her name is Koon and her restaurant is Sea West, a true gem. Indeed, the two best restaurants in that town are Asian. Thai House (a Vietnamese restaurant — don’t ask) is the other gem.
music is subjective, but . . .
I recently added three albums* to my iPod: Rasputina’s Oh Perilous World, Vox Vermillion’s Standing Still You Move Forward, and Portishead’s Third. I picked up Oh Perilous World because it sounded interesting:
The storyline of Oh Perilous World, essentially, is an audit of six years of post-9/11 America and its domestic and foreign policies under President George W. Bush’s administration, but told through a fictional steampunk parallel universe. In this world, America is ruled by the tyrannical Queen of Florida, Mary Todd Lincoln, threatening war and occupation of the small, third-world sovereign of Pitcairn Islands (a metaphor for the Middle East) using her blimps and airships. Her opposite number in Pitcairn is an Osama bin Laden-like resistance leader, Thursday October Christian (in real life the offspring of Fletcher Christian, leader of the Bounty mutineers who settled on island).
and because, well, I really like Rasputina — at least based upon their live album A Radical Recital and their debut album Thanks for the Ether. The Vox Vermillion album I bought because I liked their stuff on Pandora, and Portishead . . . well, I’m a dope. It’s taken me this long to realize they had a third album. You know — Third.
I’ve listened to the Vox Vermillion album once. I haven’t even finished Oh Perilous World. Neither of them can compete with Third. I lack the vocabulary and knowledge to write a decent album review, so here’s a link to a review that does the job quite well.
And here’s an amazing song, and a mesmerizing video to boot.
D.
*Albums? Disks? Collections? People still speak of a discography, but isn’t “disk” only a little less archaic than “album”?
Noise, and the nearly nonexistent lefty survivalist
About a week ago, I finished Darin Bradley’s Noise, a novel about college students responding to — and some would say helping to precipitate — TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it, an acronym common on survivalist web sites, along with WTSHTF: when the shit hits the fan). In some ways, Noise is an infuriating novel. Bradley wrote it following the completion of his PhD in English literature and theory, and it shows. He writes in the postscript, “So I had a head full of cognitive theory and nineteenth-century American utopianism, and I had loads of free time.” The novel often reads as though Bradley had just finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and said, “Hmm, you know what? Not lyrical enough.”
That said, I loved Noise and recommend it without any other reservation. Alternating chapters relate the first person narrative of “Hiram” (who, with his college roommate “Levi” have adopted new names to fit their new identities in the post-WTSHTF world) and The Book, a cobbled-together guide to surviving TEOTWAWKI. The details of TEOTWAWKI — referred to in Noise as “the Collapse” — are sparse, but Bradley suggests an economic bust so profound that governments and law enforcement fragment, its individual subunits going rogue in a last-ditch effort to survive. Hiram’s chapters detail his and Levi’s efforts to “get the jump” (predict the Collapse so as to get a head start on last minute preparations), put together a Group, bug out of their college town of Slade, Texas, and make it to their Place, which they have called Amaranth. The Book chapters would make a fascinating read all by themselves, as they provide a manual for how to survive and ultimately thrive in the most ruthless of new (post-apocalyptic) worlds.
Hiram is little more than a boy. The memories he draws upon to ground himself in this new world are of his days in the Scouts and his all-nighters playing Dungeons and Dragons. Bradley masterfully orchestrates the interplay between Hiram’s memories, the dictates of the Book (theory), and the things he must now do (practice). To commit sometimes horrific acts of violence, he and the rest of his Group have adopted new names, wear face paint or masks, carry out their actions in a somewhat ritualistic manner, and afterwards reassure one another with, “What you did was right.” That last essential closer is what in my opinion makes this a truly haunting work, for it is the acceptance of the perpetrator’s new society, his Group, which makes maiming and murder not just socially acceptable but laudable to them.
This book has stayed with me. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I will say that the closing image was predictable yet still remarkably powerful.
And this book has played into some of my own fears and anxieties about the world and the shit we’re getting ourselves into. I’ve been beefing up our somewhat meager emergency kits, trying to think both of the relatively trivial emergencies like breaking down on a drive over the Grapevine in the middle of winter, and the big ones, TEOTWAWKIs. In the course of doing my internet searches, it soon became apparent that survivalist types are largely right-wing and, well, religious. And that led to what I had thought at first was an innocent question, but has turned more interesting than I’d first thought:
Are there any liberal, lefty, left-wing survivalists, or are they all rifle-toting God-loving Obama-hating rednecks?
Drawing inspiration from just about anywhere
Yeah, not often I find a new recipe playing Facebook Scrabble (oh, they don’t call it Scrabble, but are there really any differences?) But when it occurred to me to check whether I could add a E to BARD to create BARDE, thinking perhaps it would be an alternate spelling, the game said yeah, go crazy guy. So then I wondered, is BARDE just an alternate spelling for BARD, or is it something else?
Yes, it’s an alternate spelling. But it’s also:
bard or barde 2 (bÉ‘Ëd)
— n
1. a piece of larding bacon or pork fat placed on game or lean meat during roasting to prevent drying out
And it so happened I was roasting a chicken at the time. So I quickly cut a few bacon strips in half and decorated the top of my chicken with them. This was about 3/4 through the roasting process; I always start with the bird breast-down, do her ’til she’s toasty, then flip her over and finish her breast up. And then I make dinner, yuk yuk yuk.
Karen and Jake both liked the end result, and they finished all the bacon, too. Which just goes to show, (as we all knew) everything is better with bacon.
D.
When did high school turn so brutal?
And I’m not talking about bullying — Jake’s at a Catholic high school, so there’s none of that. Unless you count what the teachers are doing.
I popped my head in to see how he was doing. I suspect he was sleeping, but he denied it. He has to finish reading a chapter in his American History text, and it looks like he has about 10 more densely worded pages to go. It’s 10:30 and he still has assignments for Biology and Spanish due tomorrow. And he has a four to seven page paper due on Friday for Theology.
Used to be he was chronically sleep deprived because he’d be up all hours surfing the net. Now he’s chronically sleep deprived because he’s inundated with homework. Is this necessary? Really? I think my high school did a great job preparing me for Berkeley, and I know I didn’t work half as hard as Jake is working now. Well, maybe half as hard. I still had time for leisure reading. And for a girlfriend.
It’s the sleep deprivation that bugs me the most, perhaps because it’s something I understand only too well, having had lots of experience with it during training and from time to time thereafter. My episodic bouts of insomnia occur frequently enough that I am always at least a little bit grateful when I have six or seven uninterrupted hours of rest. I think Jake’s youth is getting him through this, but at what cost? At the very least, he hasn’t the time to join me at the gym.
He’s been slow to do his online Driver’s Ed, and now I’m thinking it’s a good thing he doesn’t have his license. I don’t think he’d be safe to drive, not when he’s been up all night working.
D.
60 and counting
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) – TLC reality show “59 Kids and Counting” may soon need a new name. Arkansas couple Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar appeared with their burgeoning clan on NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday and announced they are expecting their 60th child in April.
Eighty-five-year-old Michelle Duggar said she’s in good physical shape and that she’s not worried, despite complications during her last pregnancy that led to the premature birth of their youngest child two years ago. She says she’s made it through her first trimester safely.
The couple has said they don’t use birth control. Michelle Duggar says she didn’t necessarily expect to get pregnant again and that she and her husband are excited to welcome the new addition to the family.
“If it’s a boy, he’ll be, oh, J-something,” said Jim Bob. “And if it’s a girl, she’ll be, ah, J-something-else.”
The couple confided that in recent years, megadoses of estrogen for Michelle and electrostimulative ejaculation for Jim Bob have been helpful assists to conception.
“My trips to the clinic give me something to look forward to every month,” said Jim Bob.
“With today’s advanced hormonal techniques, the sky’s the limits!” Michelle enthused. “The good Lord willing, I may have another twenty before St. Peter greets me at the Holy Gates!”
D.
Die Sünde
On our honeymoon (Christmas, 1984), we did the European museum thing — the Louvre, the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Salzburg Museum, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. What stood out the most from all of those museums was Franz von Stuck’s Die Sünde:
If anything brings me back to Munich, it’ll be this painting.
D.
Lest ye think I’ve been writing
Oh, nay.
I’ve been playing Globs, an insanely addictive game in which you merge with colored spheres by flipping to their color. The goal is to clear the board in 25 moves or less, and — here’s the real hook — your score doubles for the moves you have left over under 25. The piddly 2 points per sphere you get as a base score is nothing; it’s the geometrical growth of your score that drives gameplay. The board starts relatively small, but by level six you have 14 by 14 grid. At 14 by 14, you have to either be lucky or put in some brainpower to clear the board in under 25 moves.
The color of MADNESS!
In my defense, I do come home tired at the end of the day, and it’s tough overcoming the potential energy hill to get into writing mode. It’s much easier to play Globs. Easier to play Globs than to play World of Warcraft. Amazing, eh?
I’ve been trying to crack the top ten on the daily high scores list. To do so, you need a score at least in the quadrillions (which, amazingly, you can reach by level 20 with some skill and luck). And I finally managed to do that just a moment ago, only to discover that the high scores list is disabled. I wonder if that’s enough to kill my addiction?
The game has been permeating my brain. A few days ago I found myself in bed in the middle of the night in a limbo state, half asleep, half awake, and I was flipping my own color to merge with the bed, the floor, the room . . . It might have been interesting to merge with the universe, all very Zen of me, but I was up to merging with the room when I realized what I was doing and kicked myself out of bed and had a good pee. The Buddha peeing beside me was having a good laugh at my expense, so I elbowed him in the ribs and he peed all over his own bare feet. Touché!
D.