Compound InterestThere is a book, a fine little book by Paula Wolfert called Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco. She points out the title in the book, admitting that what was to be a glorious comprehensive stomp through Moroccan cuisine turned out to be an exploratory mission, stumbling through the slim streets and alleys of Casablanca and Fez and everywhere else. The telling part is this; there is a light touch near the beginning of the book that is an excellent example of the twists of the journey, a cheerful handful of sentences about egg sellers, who sell hard boiled eggs from street carts, dipping them in a powdery mix of salt and toasted cumin. I read of this lying in bed. I am not ashamed to say that I got out of bed, toasted some cumin and ground it with salt, boiled an egg, and ate same with said. I am not ashamed because it really was that good, and I have been richer since I ate it.
There is a book, again, and also a fine thing: Pass the Polenta, a small treasury of essays with recipes brought forth by a woman named Teresa Lust. The catcher here is the bit about the polenta itself; the woman almost got me out of bed, too, except we didn't have all the necessary cheese.
To that end: buy some cheese. Buy some mozzarella, as fancy as you like - we opted for the creamy white domestic we usually bake with. Get some gorgonzola, as pointed as you like - we tend to gravitate toward the less hostile of these cheeses. Find some Parmisano Reggiano, as before. Fontina and Provolone are also useful here, should one want. The first three were enough for us. Gather your cheeses, and head home to start on the stew.
Beef stew, this; I did a rather standard procedural of browning the stew meat, then cooking down onion and carrot with a bay leaf or two, then adding in tomato and the beef, topping off with a bit of wine, and cooking until it was done. The important flavors are the beef and the wine, but stew is stew. Stew as you will.
When the stew is done, make some polenta; corn crossed with water is all that is needed here. When the polenta has thickened, prepare!
Everyone gets a dish. Into the dish goes a glop of polenta. Atop this golden bed place pieces of the gorgonzola, fontina, mozzarella, and provelone, as available. Glallop a good ladle of stew over this, then do it again. Grate the parmesan over top.
(It was pointed out at the time that having the gorgonzola mixed in to the polenta was so fine a thing that one could simply stop right there, but I chose to press on, press on.)
Eat.
I do not tell this tale as well as Lust does, but it remains a most remarkable thing. Her book holds many remarkable things. We ate a meal of polenta and stew and cheese with the stewing wine beside, and stumbled off into the night, dizzy with the smells and filling warmth. Give it a try. I have been richer since I ate it.
The Glittering PlumThere is a moment in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Juliette Binoche offers Daniel Day Lewis a cognac, and pours it for him into a small, straight sided jigger of glass so that the spirit trembles on the rim. The glass was a little dingy in my memory, but it was a simple glass, and I find likable things in simplicity.
The other half of us has made more of a study of glassware. We have several different kinds of glasses for various bits of drink; we have a number of different shapes for different classes of wine. I have no complaints about any of that; they are fine things, and sing sweet when gently pressed around with a fingertip dipped in the grapey dregs at the end of the meal.
(There is also this trick with a laser pointer...)
In any event, I rarely use them. I instead find myself holding wine in a stout glass tumbler, as plain and round as I can find it. At the moment, this would be a glass from our dwindling supply of half-size juice glasses from Ikea. As always, they are somewhat awkwardly named: they call them Krunk.
WashHere, then, is where we have gotten with the Pasta Diablo: nowhere. We have tried ever-increasing amounts of Aleppo pepper into the egg and semolina dough, to ever-prettier effect (thin sheets of long-streaked pepper bits, like a fine hand-made paper). We have set the pepper to sit in oil for a time to release itself there, turning the oil a sullen red, and making the pasta with that. This has led to ever-blushing batches of pasta, as the ratio of pepper to egg has risen. But as soon as they hit the water, they fade, and when they are to the teeth, they have no heat, the perk somehow gone out.
To hell with that. We have taken instead to the shortcut of dumping the pepper oil on the pasta directly when the latter is done; the results are much more pleasing, and I will continue to claim so as I sweat uncomfortable in my chair, weighing whether it would be, in the end, a poor decision to chug the sour cream to make the heat go away.
It has turned out that one of the benefits of the farm share has been a weekly abundance of one or two herbs per in a nearly decadent amount each, so potent and vivid that I am convinced they had been in soil on the morning of delivery. We have a bundle of rosemary hanging in the onion basket over the counter, and when I chop things I smack into it with my head, spilling smells all over the place. The rosemary has been going into bread, and it is alone a better argument for roast chicken than anything I can come up with.
The other eye-opener so far has been the thyme. It is smoky, biting, pungent. The flavor is large like a locomotive is large, a pleasant contemplation until circumstances bring it closer than one is accustomed. At some point upon approach, it becomes near enough to fill the world, and then the mind, agape as it thunders by. This thyme is like that on the tongue. We put it into pasta.
For every egg and three-quarters of a cup of semolina, use near a tablespoon of finely chopped thyme leaves. Mix and knead, rest for one half hour, roll, slice and dry. Cook in plenty of water. Serve with a good oil and cheese. It is very nice stuff.
There is no reason to stop there. That rosemary also speaks well with tomatoes, so put it into a sauce with some toasted garlic. Toss the cooked pasta with that sauce and bits of goat cheese, and serve under more cheese. Garnish with the pepper oil. Consume!
Call It In The AirA while back, a friend of mine mentioned that he had a pointed dislike of dimes. If I remember correctly, the list of crimes included their thinness, their smallness, their propensity to get lost in the couch. I believe an argument was floated as to the ever growing ineffectiveness of ten cents, a potion of a dollar that was growing more obsolete and pointless with every handfuls of days. In an effort to be contrary, I bought him a dime, and attractively presented it with a bit of horrible doggerel that came to mind at the time.
The interesting bit was the purchase of the dime; there is nothing so odd as as the purchase of money. I wanted an interesting dime, and dimes have changed with the times. I found dimes from the earliest turn of the twentieth century somewhat interesting. I believe I ended up paying six dollars for an example of one, worn by nearly one hundred years in pockets and under thumbs.
I found myself with a disc with several values. I had paid six dollars for it; it was arguably worth six dollars. The metal itself was in portion silver; there was value in the specie, but I do not know what it was. The thing itself had history, and there is value there, too: I would like to think I put value into it when I chose it.
(The value of money is a strange space: if this notion holds a seed of interest, I would recommend the work of and about J. S. Boggs.)
Beyond all of this, it was, after all, a dime. It was still worth ten cents, should I have choosen it to be. As far as I know, no one has spent it yet.
AmnMy amn ee key is ying.
rat.
LemonsWe are at Marco's house. We are sitting within the house but outside, too. We are sitting in a great square hole in the middle of Marco's house, a courtyard open to the air, surrounded on all sides by roof and rooms. The earth colored tiles on the roof slope downward on all sides. They cover a square porch that surrounds the courtyard, making it difficult to tell where the roof of the porch ends and the roof of the house begins. Marco's house is like an onion: garden, porch, rooms, porch, courtyard. He has a word for this place, but I have forgotten it already. He is trying to explain it to me, but I am not paying attention.
"It makes plenty sense," he tells me. "You see where the suns falls now? We are in shade." We are; our backs are against the welcome cool of white rock that makes around much of the edge of the courtyard like a bench, or perhaps large steps. He points to our left. "In the mornings, the sun falls there," he says. "Never here. It is always cool here."
"Do you see the gutters?" I look, then, at the lip of the roof and see none. I am about to tell him so when I think about it instead. It has become a puzzle to me. "The water falls off, straight off," he says. "Fush!" He makes a movement with his hands. He pats the stones we are sitting on. "It falls here, and then down to where our feet are. You see the lip? You sit in my gutter!" He laughs loudly at this, and I can tell he's told others this story in this way. He points at the corners of the courtyard: "the drains are there, and there, and there and there," he says. "It is very easy to clean the leaves out of them."
"It is very quiet here," I tell him. He nods to me, and then lets us rest a little against the end of the day. The sound of the small fountain in the corner steps carefully to the front, and somewhere up in the square of blue and white above a plane goes invisibly past, betrayed in its passing only by a low trembling of the air.
"We should eat," he says, and pulls me to my feet with two hands. We stop for a moment under the roof but still outside to linger, looking back out from this cool and shaded place into the slant light of the old day, still bright against the white walls.
"I would like to see it when it rains," I say. I know this will add some days, or maybe weeks to my stay here.
"Alright," Marco says, testing a new word. "That is alright."
Quick and Silver FishWe have a bulb of fennel as part of our weekly haul of green. I am at somewhat of a loss for it, but not because I do not know what I want to do with the thing. My first and strongest notion was to have it done with a fine dice, and then fold it into good canned tuna with a little mustard and mayonnaise and smashed capers.
The lonely pair of tuna cans in the pantry were purchased a bit before the danger of such stuff was ratcheted up. There is metal in that meat, they tell me, a bad metal that I would do well not to ingest. In small amount I should be fine, they say, but I find myself reluctant, and I would feel a little stupid to eat it. I would feel a little stupid to throw it out.
Regardless of that problem: I have made myself hungry for the trying of it. I can only blame myself.
Time Hangs SoftlyJuliet and I are making fun of Juliet's name. It is almost awful to do it, for it is a beautiful name and speaks of this beautiful place, but Juliet is insistent. She is also a guest of Marco this summer. Juliet is pacing up and back on the paving stones outside in mock agitation, for the house lacks a balcony. I applaud politely. She stops, and becomes serious.
"Come with me," she says. She takes my hand. "I want to show you something." It has been her habit to do this, pulling me to this corner of the grounds or that part of the estate, down to the stream to see the poles in clear water duck and dive the hungry birds who crash into their quiet wet world, hungry. She pulls me around the house clockwise, but this time veering to the outside of the potting shed, under a quince bush. We brush against lilac as we pass, and the little flowers shake sweetly for us.
Soon we are back in the sun again, in a little yard with a low brick wall, in spots heavy with ivy. I cannot see the house from here. The floor of the yard is crunchy river pebbles the color of old bone. On the gravel is a forest of pedestals carved in all styles, and they hold sundials in the air at waist height, a logged forest topped with thin sticks of brass and copper at angles, all casting shadows on broad faces etched with lines darkened by time outside.
"Look at that," I tell her. "They're on the wall. I've never seen a sundial on the wall before."
Her lips are soft. They seem soft enough to make my lips soft, too.
77459 67116There are stories in radios. I mean: there can be stories about particular individual radios, or there can be stories that are delivered via radio. Sometimes, radio itself can deliver up stories from someplace within. I have read a handful of short stories about the massive radio transmitters of the midwest, amplitude modulated super stations pouring power into the night and keeping the trucks and dreamers company. They were pretty good. Radio still has some magic.
I listen to the shortwave radio at night, most nights. It is a continuing amazement how very noisy the night sky is; all manner of radiation pours into my thin metal antenna from point sources around the globe and beyond, energy leaking in from the stars and the winds they drive. Sometimes, there are those who have taken it upon themselves to overwhelm a feeble signal with noise, smothering a static riddled voice in the night with a loud, mechanical jabber. They do this for their own reasons; it is never explained, but sometimes it is easy to guess. Sometimes, it means a dimmer switch is on in the other room. I have discovered that a neighbor is craftily interfering with bits of the bands by operating a window air conditioning unit, churning up the power each time it becomes too warm for the piano. There are stories there! Most of them are innocent. We live in a noisy place.
There are a group of men who live on a mountain someplace; I can only gather they are far from civilization. On a given evening in the month at a given time, they speak to each other in serial on a single frequency, handing off to the next as each finishes. When a member of the group does not appear at his allotted time, the others work plans into the rest of their conversation to check up on the man at some point in the coming days, one at a time, for five minutes each. They say "So long!" when it is time to go.
The radio becomes a darker place with numbers stations. They are making the rounds again; they are mysteries spun of espionage, intrigue, and large governmental agencies that prefer acronyms. It is worth searching them out. There is much to them; simply put, they are an unassailable way to send private messages to secret operatives deeply in the field. The manner of transmission is usually strings of numbers, unending numbers.
There are stories here, but one can usually only see the edges. It is a method of communication almost as old as radio itself, but little is officially known. As the geopolitical map has shifted, stations have risen from the night as others have faded out entirely. During the 1991 Moscow coup attempt, a plaintive broadcast of a single fragment in Russian, over and over and over again. There is a station that has broadcast a metronomic metered buzzing for longer than I have been alive, and has only stopped to broadcast once. It broadcast numbers.
I am listening to numbers now on my radio in simple stacks of 5, sent from somewhere, meant for someone else. I understand nothing.
Hey, Greg!I have some more notes on fresh pasta, if you are given to believe them:
Look around for good flour; I been able to scrounge up 4 varieties of semolina so far, and one of them has given us markedly better results than the others. I know where to get it here (PennMac, as I should have known from the start) but I do not know where to get it there. Go hence and seek. Get good eggs while you're out.
I have managed to semi-successfully make a batch of noodles by hand, using only board and dowel. I managed to get a good-sized sheet down to about a '4' on the pasta machine. I think I broke both of my wrists doing it. I think I never want to get into a fight with anyone who does this for a living, in either sense. In any sense. And to top it, I need to get it thinner, yet. I will practice. I can confirm, however, that the stuff rolled with sweat between wood does have a better texture than the metal pressed variant. If I can make the former an easier exercise, it will be worth it.
I have had much better luck with the dough in the machine if I give it a quick roll on the board by hand to get it down to the thickness of the widest the rollers can go. There may be texture benefits there, too, but they are slight (if they are at all).
In any event, I am too wimpy yet to roll it all by hand, and it is indeed stupidly hard. You were right.
I owe you a KitchenAid.
Pasta, AlsoThis evening's pasta was a simple preparation of plain fettucine, dressed with a little olive oil, some shredded Prosciutto di Parma, bits of Taleggio, and a bit more parmesan over top. It was a bit salty, and very nice.
To be sure, a high-rent variant, but essentially ham 'n cheese.
The AntsThere are ants in the kitchen, but this does not bother Marco. We are somewhat out in the hills, here, embedded in vineyards and low golden fields and patches of tree and bush that are neither of these things. The kitchen itself is half out of the house. It spills from the southern edge of the house through large doors that are often wide open in warm weather, onto an ancient patio and then on into the rows of vegetables and herbs. The ants march merry into the kitchen, sometimes lulled by the dish of honey we put out by the door, sometimes bolder.
Marco does not store food in the kitchen, of course. In the cooler part of the house under a staircase is a thick-walled room that is sided with shelf after shelf of neatly stacked plastic pickle buckets and a refrigerator in the back. I do not know how he got the buckets. He stores food in these, in that room. It is a measure of his humor that he has taken to labeling the buckets in Korean. He does not speak, read, or write Korean, and the contents of the buckets often change. If at one point the labels were accurate, he does not say. He has always had a good memory, and is rarely confused for more than a handful of days after the basmati is gone and has been replaced with jasmine. The rest of us more often than not remove lids.
We bring to the kitchen what we need for meals and we suffer the ants as they suffer us, eating under a tired sun on the long, thick wood of the patio table. Marco on various occasions has made it quite clear to the ants that the kitchen is as far as they are welcome in his home, and they seem to have decided to abide. For the most part, they eat what we discard into the small pile by the door on a battered and plain copper place; we discard little, but it must be feast upon feast for them. After a time we bring what is left to the compost, and clean the kitchen for the evening.
Sometimes when I am sent to pantry to fetch some more flour, when I am alone in the cool quiet of that room with the one thin window that does not open, high on the wall, I pop the lid on the large bucket of wheat and plunge my arms in to the elbows, the cool flour, filling the room with the smells of summer and sun.
There Is SmokeCharcoal is an old thing; far older than the smell of lighter fluid, or hideous newly-rusting engine-red lidless grills, or buzz haircuts and a strange urge to warp the backyard into some sterile cathedral ceiling'd auxiliary dining room. Charcoal is old enough that people would spend days with absolute minimal sleep, tending a huge smoking sodded hill of gently cooking wood. They did this so they could eat. I follow them, somewhat, to go to similar places, though my straits are far fairer than theirs.
I've looked into making charcoal myself. It's easier these days; we have better tools, and better tools to make them with. My present deficits are land and time, so I have not tried it yet. I mean to. Elsewhile, I get natural lump charcoal when I can. It burns faster; it burns hotter. The heat is worth the trade. I think it tastes better, but I am uncomfortable in saying so, for I think that I sound stupid when I do in ways akin to stereophiles who obsess over placing lumps of dense wood around the listening area in positively perfect places.
I don't use lighter fluid. That I can smell and taste, and disrecommend. What we used to do is forage dry kindling from the yard and pile it up in the kettle grill, starting it going with a little bit of paper, and flicking lumps of charcoal into the flames with quick fingers. These days I use a charcoal chimney, which is a wonder of ease and use. I have two for slogging through winter grilling. Should you use them, have a good place to set them: they generate tremendous amounts of heat, and it's surprising how melty some things can be. Every time I see an infomercial for a gas grill begin with obviously bad actors attempting to incompetently start a charcoal grill, I shake my head and smile sadly before I throw a brick through the television.
I like kettle grills. Get a kettle grill. There is no better way to cook a chicken. Get a good bird for roasting; pull the giblets and rinse the bird well. Pat it dry with a paper towel or three. Smash a clove of garlic, and rub it all over the chicken. Smash another clove of garlic, then toss both into the cavity, with a stem or two of rosemary from the garden. Oil the bird lightly with a good olive oil, and drop on a hot, oiled grill over a drip pan surrounded by happy ash-faced coals. Put the lid on and cook it until it's done.
We cheat a little there; we have a thermometer with an alarm and a remote probe, and it was a spectacular investment. Another good trick is brining the thing before cooking; that works especially well for larger pieces of meat. Simple experience plays here, too. After time in the kettle, the bird should turn a brown somewhere between gold and mahogany with crisp, smoky skin and meltingly juicy meat, laced with hints of rosemary. The meat may be a little pink near the skin; this is an artifact of the cooking process, and is fine.
Let it rest before cutting, then eat. A bit of good bread and some pepper, perhaps, is all that needs to stand beside it. Eat it outside in the good weather, as the setting sun sets fire to the sky.
What We AteFirst
Salad of greens, onion, tomato and radish
Salad of tomato, mushroom, chives, and shaved Fontina Valle D'Aosta
Second
Risotto with Chicken and Prosciutto
Kale in Pepper Oil
Third
Fettucine with Tomato and Taleggio
Fourth
Brownie Cashew Cake
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