Chikuru

I flew to Portland this morning, sleeping from Austin to SLC, breakfasting at the American Bandstand restaurant, and doing crossword puzzles from SLC to PDX. I had purchased a copy of Will Shortz's Greatest Hits: 150 Crossword Puzzles Personally Picked by the Puzzlemaster yesterday for the trip. I started with the first crossword in the book, a Monday puzzle, and am still stuck on part of it. I thought, "Wow, these are much harder than the ones in the Statesman." But then I did a few other Monday puzzles and they've all proved to be easy peasy. When I finish the Mondays, I go on to the Tuesdays. I've only started doing crosswords recently have have some catching up to do.

This evening I discovered that doing a crossword puzzle with family can be a lot of fun and a good way to remind people of stories. I did two puzzles this evening with Mom, Dad, Joy, and Bill A. I'd read out a clue and we'd work on the answer together.

Do try this at home.

This evening I heard a story I'd never heard before. Once, during the depression, 1934 I think it was, Uncle Bud killed a bear in the woods. From the experience my dad learned two things. 1) Bear meat tastes good. 2) Bear fat makes great doughnuts.

A final foodnote: Supper was tilapia ("samaki" in Swahili), potato salad, canteloupe, watermelon, banana bread with cream cheese, and tomatoes.

We had an hour to kill before the animal shelter opened so I consulted YPMobile on my iPhone, asking it for nearby vendors of "breakfast". Flip Happy Crêpes showed up in the list, just 0.6 miles away. And so here we are. It's an Airstream trailer with picnic tables in front of it. Open for brunch/lunch Wednesday through Saturday. They have both sweet and savory crêpes. I don't know what they taste like but they look good. (The service isn't super fast.)

This just in--they taste good.

It's not necessary to go out to a restaurant to have a great Valentine's Day dinner. Tonight we celebrated with the following lineup:

• Filet Mignon
• Lobster
• Hacklefish Caviar (a decent made-in-America alternative to the really expensive stuff)
  
• Green Beans
• Barley Bread fresh from the bread maker
• Cheese
• 14 Hands Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington State

We rounded out the evening with Desperado, one of our favorite movies--great music, beautiful actors, wonderful directing. We interrupted the movie for dessert:

• Chocolate Pot de Crème
• Blueberry Dessert Wine
• Decaf Espresso

Thanks, raaga123!

After rock climbing, I went next door to an inauguration party.  The food was excellent, though I didn't try the dish that looked like grilled spam on blocks of rice wrapped in sea weed. It turns out it was grilled spam on blocks of rice wrapped in sea weed. The hostess explained that it was Spam Sushi, a favorite in Hawaii.

"Oh, I get it--because our president is Hawaiian."

Well, born in Hawaii, anyway.

After all the other good food, I wasn't hungry enough to try the spam sushi, but I did take some home for tomorrow's lunch.

Per my contract with my blog buddy, I need to post another entry and it needs a picture. So here's a picture of a few friends enjoying mimosas, muffins, and iced coffee in our back yard.

On Monday Irvine Robbins, co-founder of Baskin-Robbins, died.^[1]

Today Baskin-Robbins announced it is going to start selling soft-serve.^[2]

This morning, while still in Washington state, my folks, elder sister, Lyn, and I observed a tradition of my family--going out for pie. We like to go to Shari's restaurant where we can get Marionberry pie. Marionberries are a special breed of blackberry developed in Oregon by someone my folks used to know.

This evening we had a kräftskiva or "crayfish party" with a close friend, once removed, who will hopefully become a close friend. Highlights of this Swedish tradition are silly paper hats, which we made ourselves out of newspaper, bibs, paper lanterns, and crayfish cooked with dill. I like cajun-style crayfish, but I think I liked this even more. Our host also served homemade egg pie (which he called quiche), homemade bread, cheese, salad, homemade loquat wine, homemade peach wine, homemade jalapeño porter, and ice cream in homemade cones. Two or three times during the meal he favored us with a Swedish drinking song.

I felt honored to be a part of the celebration.

I finally finished reading Omnivore's Dilemma. It took a long time because it is a little overwritten but mainly because it kept getting interrupted by more compelling books.

In the final chapter, the author describes a meal in which all of the dishes were obtained by foraging. It included a pig he had personally shot, some morels he had personally collected, some cherries he had picked, and some bread made with yeast he had literally pulled out of the air (using milk and whole wheat flour as bait). Considering how long it took to collect all the ingredients, this was slow food at its slowest.

I find the idea of making bread using local yeast intriguing. The trick, according to the author, is to keep trying until you get an infection of milk and wheat flour that doesn't smell bad.

I wonder if you could make yogurt that way.

Here's another cool idea from Omnivore's Dilemma--how they deal with cow manure at Polyface Farms.

In the winter, the cows spend a lot of time in the barn and a generate a lot of manure. To deal with this, the owner periodically puts down a layer of hay (if I remember correctly), wood chips, and corn. The result is a growing stack of active compost that reaches a height of about three feet by the end of winter. This means that the cows' floor is continually rising. But that's not all it's doing, it's also generating heat to keep the cows warm. (Anyone who has worked with compost knows that it's a good source of heat.)

In the spring, in order to turn the compost, the owners lets a bunch of pigs into the stalls. The pigs dig in up to their eyeballs looking for kernels of fermented corn and in the process mix up the compost which the owner ultimately spreads on his fields to feed the grass that is the cows' main food source.

One of my favorite ideas from Omnivore's Dilemma is that of the Eggmobile, a chicken coop that gets moved every few days.

Farmer Joel Salatin is an extreme example of a practitioner of sustainable farming. In order to optimally use his pasture land, he moves the cow's pastureland every few days. He uses an easy-to-move electric fence to keep the cows where they belong. Three or four days after the cows have grazed (but not overgrazed) an area and moved on, he moves in the chickens. The chickens eat not only the grass (which the cows have clipped to just the right height for them) but also the fly larvae in the cow dung. If the chickens move in too soon, the dung isn't dry enough (which offends the chickens' delicate sensibilities) and the larvae aren't plump enough. If the chickens move in too late, the larvae have turned into flies and have flown away. Also, if the chickens stay too long, they put too much nitrogen into the soil via their own poop. It's a delicate balance.

The drawback of Salatin's approach is that it takes a lot of effort on his part and on the part of his two interns (and occasional journalist). I can't help but wonder whether any farmers are using his approach, but using machines to move around the various pens and coops instead of relying on human labor.

I've been reading and enjoying The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. The book is longer than it should be but is full of interesting information about how food works in this country. The first, long chapter is about corn. Apparently a large percentage of everything we eat ultimately comes from corn. Our most popular sweetener in this country is high fructose corn syrup. Pigs, cows, and chickens are largely made out of corn even though these animals (cows especially) weren't designed for eating corn. And there is a host of other things with long, chemically names that are made out of corn.

There is a lot not to like about our system of turning corn into overweight Americans, but I couldn't help but be impressed at how efficient we have become at turning corn into so many different things.

I'm only halfway through the book. The main point I've taken from it so far is that we put way too much energy (much of which comes from foreign oil) into producing every calorie of food that we eat. It's made me fantasize about growing a few vegetables in the side yard.

But why stop at vegetables? I wonder what my neighbors would think about chickens living next door to them. Or maybe goats. Goats might actually be quieter.

I estimate it's about 365 days till the next Super Bowl. That should give us enough time to finish all the cookies, cake, chips, and drinks left over from yesterday's party. That party's not advertised as potluck, but our friends are generous with what they bring.

I finished the book Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl last night. There were two selections for this month's book club and the other one looked much more interesting. I only checked this one out in case the other didn't become available in time. But then I ended up really enjoying it. Ruth Reichl, then food critic for the New York Times, is very good at describing food. She gets into food the way that Steve Almond, author of Candy Freak, gets into candy.

In order to learn how restaurants treat regular customers, she liked to disguise herself, which she did very well. In New York, the NY Times critic is all powerful and is treated, literally, in one case, better than royalty. That is unless she isn't recognized, in which case she might have to huddle next to a cold window and be all but ignored. One of the best parts of the book is seeing snooty restaurants get their comeuppance.

I highly recommend the book. It was a quick and easy read that took me into a world I couldn't afford to visit myself.

This evening, we wanted to grab appetizers at a nice, but not-Tex-Mex restaurant. Not that we don't like Tex Mex. It's just that that wasn't what we were in the mood for. Turns out such things aren't that easy to find in these parts. North by Northwest is Tex Mex. So is the Iron Cactus. And so is Baby Acapulco's. At least that's my impression looking at their menus. I called Reed's Jazz and Supper Club. The advertised phone number didn't work. We dropped by on our way into town to see what was up. We found a note on the door saying that the door was locked and would remain so until $50,000 in back rent was paid up.

We could have gone to Eddie V's if we'd been willing to wait till 9:30 for a table.

We ended up at Sherlock's Pub. Rather pleasant and not crowded. I had a Scotch Egg (a boiled egg wrapped in sausage breading and served with hot mustard and pickle relish). Lyn had fish-n-chips without the chips.

Last night we went to an end-of-year party at our next-door neighbors'. They are Iranian and had prepared some Iranian food. I asked about the pot of porridge bubbling on the stove. He said it was oats cooked with chicken broth. It took me a second to decide that this was okay. I normally think of oats as a breakfast food, but of course it has as much right to be a dinner food as do wheat and rice. He pointed to a bowl of strips of cooked chicken (all white meat) and explained that these were to be stirred in with the oatmeal. I was about to jokingly ask if I should add sugar when he pointed out the sugar and cinnamon to be used to top it off.

It was very good. Could have used a little milk though.

Today we learned something very important. Antonio's, which is within walking distance of our house, serves up a pretty decent brunch and isn't crowded in the mornings. This means we don't have to go to Kerbey Lane and either show up very early or wait 45 minutes in line for our brunching needs. We went there this morning with T&D. D reports that the migas are first rate. And I was very happy with my breakfast burrito (like a breakfast taco, but bigger). The pancakes were a little disappointing--not huge and fluffy like the ones at Kerbey Lane, but quite edible just the same. The coffee was okay. And if you need a margarita with your breakfast, theirs are among the best.

The summer is almost over and today we finally managed our summer tradition of visiting Lake Travis and the Oasis. The water in the lake is higher than it ever was last year, which makes it a little harder to find a place to put down a towel. Fortunately, the water was warm enough that we didn't need hang out on the side of the lake, we could just float in the lake. For me, this only works if the water is very warm, otherwise I start to shiver.

The Oasis is back in almost full swing after much construction to rebuild the decks, which burned last year after a lightning strike. The restaurant part is still under construction, but the decks, where they serve lighter fare, are all open. We had our traditional margarita and fajita nachos (combo chicken and beef with the fixins on the side). Today the chips were red. Don't know what that means. Does corn come in red?

The Brew was playing, as is customary for them on a Sunday night. They play Latin dance music. We don't know the difference between a mamba and a sambo (though I think one's a snake and the other is a small boy), but we danced along as best we could. We left after they played what I believe is the song at the beginning of Desperado, one of my favorite movies.

The wind was warm, the music was good, the moon was almost full, and my belly was full of chips, cheese, beans, meat, guacamole, and jalapeño peppers. Life is good.

Last night, Lyn took me to Eddie V's Edgewater Grille for my birthday dinner. I had half a dozen oysters, a filet mignon, a lobster tail, a twice-baked potato, and a bread pudding. The ambiance was fine, the staff friendly, the food was good, and the restaurant is reasonably close to where we live. I recommend it.

McDonald's embiggens the smallest man

One of the benefits of Lyn's birthday subscription to NetFlix is that now we can get caught up on some of the movies we've missed, like Supersize Me, which we watched this evening. To help set the mood, we ate Sonic hamburgers, tater tots, onion rings, and, in my case, a malted milkshake. McDonalds would have been even better but there's a limit to how far we'll go to set a mood.

In case anyone out there doesn't already know, this is the movie about a man who ate nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days. The effects of this diet on his liver, cholesterol levels, and a bunch of other health stats surprised his doctors. In terms of the effect on his liver, it was as if he had gone on a drinking binge.

In 30 days, he goes from 185 pounds to 210. At 6 foot 2 inches, 185 pounds is just about right. Even at 210, he doesn't seem that overweight so it's a little surprising how sick he is according to his doctors and his own diagnosis. I'm not sure what to conclude from this: either a) You can be just 15% overweight and really unhealthy, or b) You really shouldn't suddenly go from a 2500-calorie diet to a 5000-calorie diet for 30 days in a row. It would be interesting to have someone double their caloric intake on healthy food and see what that does to them.

Disappointment

The film featured a lot of those little black rectangles, mostly over people's eyes to hide their identity. Perhaps the greatest disappointment in this film was that the black rectangle wasn't bigger in the scene where he gets a rectal exam as part of his pre-diet physical. Seeing him throw up one of his first meals--I really didn't need to see that either.

The Flirt

I often flirt with the idea of becoming a vegetarian. After seeing this movie and watching the interview with the Fast Food Nation guy (one of the extras on the DVD), I'm perhaps closer than ever to making the switch. Unfortunately, when it comes to food, I am a lazy person married to someone who doesn't like most vegetables. So I have a challenge for the vegetarians out there (and I know who you are):

The Challenge

Post either here or in your own blog a favorite vegetarian recipe, perhaps one that is a staple in your diet. I'm especially looking for ones that are easy enough to tempt someone so lazy he thinks an Ensure Plus and a banana make an acceptable meal. Not that such a person exists. Vegetarian recipes from non-vegetarians also accepted.