This is my tasting spoon

The tasting spoon is all about rule number three:  taste what you are cooking.  (Rule number one is to not pass up an offered drink of water, and rule number two - more important in my older age - is to not pass up an opportunity to use the toilet.)  It's revolutionized my life.

Busted and ratted out

130 people at the house a few weeks ago for the annual big doo, and just about the only thing broken was my blue glass garden ball.  Broken on purpose by one of the kids at the party, who was immediately ratted out by other kids.  And, Lori, he broke it on purpose!  Been meaning since then to photograph it, I don't know why, but now I have and now I can say goodbye to it.

Favorite tool: plumbers' snake

Not many things cause a gag reflex in me.  Large rotting fetid mucilaginous clumps of hair, and needing to grip and pull them from clogged plumbing, are on the short-list.  So, without going into great detail, allow me to say that, after some initial uncontrolled pharyngeal difficulty, it was with relish that I plumbed a dozen feet of spiraling steel coil from my manual hand-spinner through the poorly installed sink and trap and into the century old upstairs drain, yea verily to the 130 year old sailstack, allowing us to shave and brush and freshen up once again without fear of flow and the lack thereof. (Dude remember: never put a quarter inch coil into a pipe of greater than 2 inch diameter.  Bad things can happen.  Cool?  That applies to so many things!)

Steroid Maximus

Well, JG Thirlwell was a lot of fun!

But Dr. Lonnie Smith - he was a whole lotta lov!

Wine book??

Been thinking of creating a wine-making picture-book to share with the 11th Street crew - not theory, but a bunch of the procedural stuff that's easy to pass on to others, and some of the  rules of thumb I'm always forgetting...

My pizza don't stink

Everyone knows the old chestnut, Pizza is like sex - when it's good it's good, and when it's bad it's still pretty darned good. Thing is, my pizza (yes, pizza, not sex) is to me, the best pizza I've ever had. That's a little goofy, and likely not true, but you couldn't prove it to me.

This evening it was the latest dough experiment (1 part bread flour, 1 part whole wheat, 6-ish parts all purpose. Risen twice, and some of it just about thrice as it sat in a fridge for one and two days), and topped with escarole, first wilted and then done up with garlic and pepperoncini and onions and oil. A little more oil and sea salt on the dough before the escarole, and then - who can remember? - maybe more o&s. Maybe not. 7 minutes @ +500 F, crisp & chewy at the same time. Bitter / salty / a little sweet from the onion (and should I have added currants?). A liter cap bottle of Grüner V. to say howdy. A little chocolate afterward. It started raining while I was eating on the patio and I just stayed out there. Think I'm gonna have another leetle cigar.

Duck fat, you are my potato

There was a fabulous plan to do a hand-drawn post, at the center of which was pasted the cigar ring from the only cigar I've enjoyed the heck out of in the last year or two, and surrounding that ring a schematic of the events leading to and away from that cigar. It was a glorious conception. However, mistakes were made, and the post, she is no.

So let me say instead that shortly after the said cigar, there was a using of duck fat, still fresh and sweet smelling from this spring's confit, to fry up little hashy cubes of potato & shallot, and set beside some braised cabbage (honey, fresh nutmeg, currants, white wine) and a couple of lovely flat irons, all on the still warm back yard flagstones with a bottle of rosie wine. I'm just gonna eat me to death.