Quiet Reparations

Archive for May, 2002

May 03 2002, 11:00 AM A Clean Well-Lighted Place

There is something to be said for "synergies of food", a playful term coined by another from my shady past (and entirely before the rage for words like synergy) that relates to uncommon combinations of very simple fare. Example: a sandwich of white toast, cream cheese and strawberry preserves. And again: shedded wheat, cold milk, and honey. There are others, certainly, and my list will not be the same as your list.

A thing that always makes food better is to eat it outside, preferably on a boat at sea. We do not have boats at sea here in my particular urban topology, but we have places we can eat outside. One of them is turning into my clean, well-lighted place. The food is a simple Italian, but by people who can put together Italian. Even on dimly cool nights like tonight, it is possible to be warmed enough by the food and the people that staying for the second cup of coffee is not a question. Invariably a meal there will overcome one with calm seven-tenths of the way through, just in time for the decision about dessert.

Treat the wait staff of the world well, for they have the power to make a thing perfect without noticing.

Alternately: Bela Fleck is a (relatively) well-known banjo player. Edgar Meyer is a (relatively) obscure bassist. They and three others joined to cut a disc of musical alchemy in 1989. I think I'm deciding not to put links in the meat of this thing (this is the lifecycle of my weblog, Alger Hiss), but: this is good music. Do not jump for it unaided, but by all means look for the precipice. There's a tremendous view.

May 09 2002, 04:26 PM Trattoria of Light

Here in our neighborhood, we have trees. In the winter, the trees make combs for clouds and nets for stars, dark fingers against a dark sky. In the summer, they bloom into a lumpy green, obscuring the hard lines of the buildings.

A thing that I do not like about big suburban housing developments is that they raise the land of trees first. No canopy.

Most of the streetlamps in out neighborbood are sodium lamps, leaking amber light. That light washes of the trees of color, oddly, and can penetrate through the leaves to make the tree look sullen and deep.

But we have a singular, bright white streetlamp (fluorescent? incandescent? I do not know. I suspect the former, because it seems blue, but there is so much red about from the sodiums), and it has entirely different effect. The leaves become a deep, liquid green, and the light only touches the surface, leaving an unreal plane of color mixed with ink black holes.

May 16 2002, 12:11 PM Gargle Unto the Moon

Some time ago when it was still Winter here, I had occasion to look up, straight up, straight into a deep crystal bell of a sky to look at the full moon. There was a ring of bright blue light around the moon, and my fists told me that the ring had a diameter of maybe twenty degrees (one's fist, extended a full arm's length, is maybe more or less ten degrees of sky).

If one does a Google search for "ring around a full moon", one gets a lot of odd stuff. However: what I saw that night is called a Lunar Halo, and is twenty-two degrees across, and is quite a sight to see.

Last night was another night of bell-clear air, but the moon was only a slim quiver of light, a giant fingernail clipping in the night sky. Behind it, the darkness of the moon was itself a very mellow grey, and I wondered at it: does the metropolitan complex of the northeast bit of this continent generate that much light?

I do not know. I heave read someplace that the percentage of land in this country where one can make out the milky way at night against the light pollution is very, very small.

Bother.

May 27 2002, 09:19 AM I Could Use It to Pick Up BBC World, Too

When I was young, one of the more fascinating things that sat in my (parent's) kitchen was a large stainless steel mixing bowl. It was entirely too large, indeed: it would have made for a very competent dog bed, if we had had a dog, and it had liked to sleep in large stainless steel bowls. It rested upside-down on top of the refrigerator, protecting smaller cousins from dust and other bits of stuff flung up from cooking. It was used almost exclusively to mix up large batches of granola.

I have begun to play with granola, and I need one of these now, it is clear to me. I have mixing bowls, and I thought they were large. More to the point, I thought they were large enough. They are not.

Granola is simple:

Granola

Mix in the biggest bowl you've got:

• 4 cups of rolled (not instant!) oats
• 1 cup of (untoasted) wheat germ
• 2 cups untoasted slivered almonds
• a scant 1/2 cup brown sugar
• nutmeg and cinnamon to taste (I use a scant tsp. each)

In something else, mix together:

• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 4-6 ounces of honey
• A little vanilla extract, maybe

Work the wet stuff into the dry stuff. Use your hands (clean 'em first). Try to get it vaguely consistent. Spread it out on edged pans (rimmed cookie sheets, or jelly roll pans), and toast in a 250 degree (Fahrenheit) oven for 60-75 minutes, stirring every quarter hour or so, until toasty and brown. Let cool, stirring occasionally to break up chunks.

Some notes: all of the above is tweakable, and scales as far as one has time for the toasting step. Maple syrup can be used instead of honey; less sugars can be used entirely. Other nuts can be added or taken away; all manner of seeds (sunflower, sesame, pumpkin) can be made part of this. Other grains can be added: wheat berries in various stages of undress. Powdered cardamom can be added, or not. Some batches can be toasted a little longer, and it won't matter. It's pretty forgiving stuff. The trick is to have a sufficient amount of rolled (not instant!) oats around for everything else to rest with. Also, 'slivered' is a damn fine word.

Trying the above experiment will give up the first reason for the big bowl; during the mixing stage, the stuff got all over the counter. One has to be careful. Or get a bigger bowl.

The other reason is that the stuff shrinks when it is toasted, so the glorious shaggy heap of untoasted granola begets a paltry (well, in comparison) amount of said when it finally goes into the bin in the pantry (in truth, I must also admit that a fair amount of nibbling goes on, and that always leads to more lossage than can be held in the mind). Since this stuff burns up an entire day anyway (pleasantly, too be sure - like bread or soup, it does not demand sustained attention) one might as well make an unsettling amount of it (it stores well in the fridge - we keep it in the pantry 'cause we eat it up quick). Sadly, to get an unsettling amount of finished granola, one must make two unsettling amounts of the raw stuff.

I need a bigger bowl.