Saturday, February 27, 2010

Dear Diary, Dante and I share a smoke and everything is a little clearer now


Dear Diary, sorry to have been away so long.  I've been spending time with my friend, Lamy Vista, I think I mentioned her before.  You know how it is.  And helping out a bit somewhere else.  Sort of important.

Anyway, I shared a little smoke with Dante this morning and he remindid me I really ought to say something. So here I am:

Last weekend, at our place, after we'd returned home from our sojourns, James Guido, el zorro plateado, or, I guess, really la volpe argentata, cooked a beatiful tuna over carmelized onions and a balsamic vinegar reduction, and broccoli rabe and a dish his mother used to make that's like a pizza rustica without the pastry. Lori made a salad with green olives and sassy almonds and she made a monster goat-cheese cake with a crushed brittle topping, and I made mushroom & fontina pizza for everyone to start with. R&E brought fabu wines & chocolates & a special guest, P&K brought bubbles galore. It was a great night, but here's why I'm really mentioning it: there were fishetarians in the house, so I couldn't put any slices of my cured duck breast on the pizza. Bubububutttt, I'd made enough dough and prepared enough mushroom to make another pizza the next day & did & lavished it with deep dark duck which got deeper and darker after 7 minutes of hot hot hot. And the next day after that I made a side of Brussels sprouts & figs with cubed up little pancetta-like ducky.

There. Sometimes it's all about the duck. Because sometimes all the other stories go somewhere else.

Oh - one other thing. The Losers' Lounge 60th Birthday tribute to Karen Carpenter at Joes Pub was (and will be again tonight) absolutely killer. Killer.  Absolutely On Top Of The World.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

100223 hat moon Dante plague-doctor

(When I posted this image last night I neglected to say that the handwriting in the background is Banjo Paterson's manuscript of Waltzing Matilda.  Thank you, Roger Clarke.)

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Oh, the damned tree in front of our house what broke our 10 year old sidewalk

 
Oh, and I walked home after Megan O'Leary made me a hot toddy at Bar Toto, and I saw the snow hanging down so heavy on the damned tree what broke our sidewalk that I'd already shoveled three times today catching on the cracks and nearly breaking my wrists, and I thought, Damn that tree, I hope the wet heavy snow snaps it like a twig! 
(And I'd have taken a better picture of it, but I wouldn't lay down in the wet snow for it.)

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Hold for Lewis










When I was reading Ruhlman and he kept referring to McGee, I thought, Oh, yeah, I've seen that book...  And when I was rummaging around yesterday for the big Beard (guidance needed re sourdough), Oh, yeah, look, there's the McGee, right next to the Beard.  And when I took it off the shelf and opened it, there was this bookmark in it from Book Court, and on the back of the bookmark was Hold for Lewis 1/6/05.
So, once upon a time, exactly 5 years and one month before pulling it off my shelf yesterday, Lota or I wanted the McGee badly enough to special order it.  Maybe I even started reading it before.  The bookmark was inserted in the section on milk chemistry.  (I sat down with the book and started reading it from the beginning, got weirdly to just about exactly the point where I'd found the bookmark, stuck the bookmark back in, and wandered off muttering about hairy milk proteins having their negatively charged tips sheared of to get all curdlike.) I'm gonna look on that shelf again today to see what else it remembers for me. 

Friday, February 5, 2010

Self-Enervation; it's consequences and treatment

Well, I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes this morning - browsing the the collection at Making of America, thank you very much - when I came across  Doctor Eldridge's book.  And, yes, I've started reading it.  Oh!
That it is one of the most prolific causes of insanity known to the human race, is well attested by the history of hundreds that are annually admitted and provided for within the walls of our eleemosynary institutions. Out of eight hundred and sixteen cases of insanity in the New York State Lunatic Asylum, there were one hundred and seven masturbators. This ratio seems astonishingly great, but it is nevertheless true, as the fearful records afforded by other institutions, prove the alarming correctness of our statement.
No mention that the figure is closer to 100% for people outside the the walls of the eleemosynary institutions.  Substitute "bloggers", "tweeters", or "facebookers" for the M word?