Reading Rant

I recently received an iPad from my lovely wife, and probably the coolest thing about it so far has been my discovery of the local library's eBook collection. Free books to download to my Kindle app. This is simultaneously awesome and tragic.

I am a compulsive reader. I will go two months without reading anything longer than a tweet, then consume three novels in a week. I don't sleep while on a reading binge. I ignore my family. My hygiene suffers. I eventually have to wean myself with Sports Illustrated and People magazine.

My recent reading list is causing more problems than just lost sleep, though. To wit: Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie (in process, one chapter a night), and Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (also in process). Lots of open spaces. Adventures. Building things with bare hands. Making one's own way in a new land. Traveling. Trusting fate and a gun. Rugged individualism.

I'm not one of those people who see literature as an escape. Reading about these things does not make sitting in an office staring at a computer more bearable. It makes me want to hit the road. See America. Live off the land and the kindness of strangers.

Perhaps the upcoming trek to Colorado will appease my wanderlust, but I'm not sure that four kids in a minivan for 12 hours is really going to make me feel like Pa Ingalls. Maybe I need to stick to Jim Collins books instead.

TV Rant

As we were going to bed a few nights back, Rachelle asked me to put on some mindless TV. I searched Netflix for a minute before coming across The Wonder Years. Awesome. A crowd favorite. Rachelle was asleep before the credits finished rolling.

I watched two episodes. It it struck me that the last show I'd been catching up with on Netflix was another look back at the nostalgia of the 60s: Mad Men. And it popped into my head that I need to tweet, "TV shows about the 60s: Wonder Years > Mad Men." You know why? Its sweet. Hokey. Sentimental. But also real. It's not Leave it to Beaver. Whinnie's brother dies in Vietnam in the pilot episode. Paul and Kevin get caught with a sex manual in episode two, but don't get in trouble because Kevin's mom mistakenly assumes they stole it from her room, then is too embarrassed to admit her mistake.

Mad Men on the other hand is not sentimental or endearing or sweet. There is no love in it. It is compelling drama, but compelling in the same way the videos of Dan Wheldon's fatal Indy car wreck are compelling. We watch to see what will blow up next.

Why is so much of our entertainment these days like this? Mad Men is the latest in the Sopranos family tree. Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire, CSI Toledo. These shows are praised as "realistic". They don't shy away from the way life really is. Broken. Painful. Morally ambiguous. Futile. All true.

Even the comedies are nihilistic and depressing. The fact that Two and a Half men has been the most watched show on television says less about the crass sense of humor in this society and more about the depressing view of family and relationships we have.

Life is full of pain and loss and death. But it's also full of love and joy and beauty. Life is hokey and nostalgic and silly too. Why do we gorge ourselves on the negative and throw out the stuff that's seemingly too nice or rose colored? Is pain the only thing that's real?
Does it hurt too much to see love and joy on screen because it reminds us of not having as much as we wish we did? Is it easier to watch Don Draper screw up his kids emotionally because it makes us fell better about our own parenting? Do we need to see corpses to remind ourselves that we're still alive?

It seems to me that connecting to beauty in entertainment makes us better at finding it in real life. Immerse yourself in loving images and it's easier to see love in the world. But maybe it's just The Wonder Years talking.

Diatomic Foods?

I haven't posted anything here in many, many weeks, mostly because not much has been going on this summer.  No, that's not right.  My lack of blogging probably has more to do with the fact that in the  three months since my last post we have: decided to move back to Oklahoma, started a new job in Oklahoma, prepared a house to be sold, sold a house, searched for a house, bought a house, made 10 trips back and forth between St. Louis and Stillwater, had a new baby (#4), and begun packing to actually complete the move.  So get off my back about the lack of blogging, OK?

Given the circumstances, what could possibly motivate me to blog again?  Dinner, that's what.  Tonight, the family enjoyed a very nice little corned beef brisket that the wife prepared in the slow-cooker (an excellent tool for those times that you have four children under 6, including a three-week old).  The corned beef, of course, was accompanied by rye bread, horseradish*, and mustard.

This got me thinking: I never eat rye bread unless it has corned beef on it. And I'm pretty much not interested in corned beef unless it's on rye bread with mustard and horseradish.**  (Unless, of course, it's in corned beef hash, but that's a whole different story.)  These foods do not occur individually in my universe.  Other foods? I don't need corned beef to eat sourdough, or whole wheat, or brioche.  And I certainly don't need rye to eat a ribeye steak.

Naturally, this raises two important questions.  First: what other foods match this description? What else is out there that I only eat in combination with another specific food?  At this point, I can't think of another one.  But, believe me, I'm not giving up the search.

Second, and the real subject of this post: what should we call this phenomenon? I chose the title above in reference to "diatomic" elements like oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, which don't naturally occur as single atoms.  But that's not a very precise analogy, since I'm not talking about only being able to eat rye two pieces at a time.  Perhaps a better name would be "Q" foods, since the letter "Q" usually only occurs with a "U" following it.  Clearly, though, given the common practice of referring to barbeque as "Q", the risk of confusion is high.

As you can see, I'm in for a long night of tossing and turning.

_______________________
* For mom and dad only.  Boy #3 tried a bit but then attempted to scrape the taste buds off his tongue.

** Perfectly illustrated by the fact that I made a special trip to the grocery store before dinner tonight to buy rye bread and horseradish.

Car Dealer Service Departments: Thieves or Merely Incompetent?

Disclaimer:  I know a few mechanics. Even ones that work or have worked at dealerships.  They're good people, and I have the utmost respect for them.  Having worked as an auto tech in college, I know that it takes a ton of training and knowledge to work on modern cars, most I which I don't have. Auto mechanics make the world go 'round these days, and I don't mean to attack them personally in this post.  (Not to mention, as a lawyer, I know I have little leeway to be attacking the integrity of other professions.)

That said, the people who run service departments at most car dealerships seem to have the ethical standards of a North African dictator.  I took the wife's minivan into the Honda dealer this morning for recall work on the brake master cylinder. (This recall comes on the heels of the recalled power steering reservoir, recall adjustment of the transmission computer, the warranty replacement of both the torque converter and the front brake rotors. Good thing I bought a Honda, huh?)  In any event, today they had to perform some adjustment of the master cylinder to prevent the car that carries my wife and three (almost four) kids from careening out of control on the way to yet another Children's Place spree.  

I mentioned to the service rep that one of the tires also had low pressure, and asked him to check it while they did the master cylinder work.  Two hours later, he informed me (while trying to up-sell me a throttle body cleaning, power steering fluid replacement, alignment, and new wiper blades) that there was a nail in the left rear tire that they would be willing to patch for a mere $25.  Given that is a very slow leak and that I can get it fixed at the place we bought the tires for free, I declined, but asked him to make sure they aired the tire up.

When I got in the car to leave, the tire pressure warning light was still on.  I went back in to ask why.  The service rep explained that the technician had "put some extra air in there to give you as long as possible before it goes flat."  So the light was probably warning of a severely overinflated tire, he opined.  I questioned this strategy, and he went into the garage to talk to the tech, and came back saying, "Yeah, he put like 35 psi in it, so that's probably what's triggering the light." Curious as to how this could happen in a car that actually recommends 35 psi for the rear tire pressure, I went back out, got my tire gauge from the glove box and discovered that the left rear tire contained 22 pounds of air pressure. Ah ha.

Back at the counter, I suggested that either the tech had pulled the nail out causing the tire to be losing much more air than it had been previously (like 13 psi in five minutes), or--shockingly--he hadn't actually aired the tire up at all.  The service rep took the van back around to straighten the whole mess out, and when he came back, he apologized and said that the tech had accidentally put 40 psi in the RIGHT rear tire, instead of the leaking left rear. He had fixed it all up, though, he said.  I asked him to wait right there while I checked each tire with my gauge.  Satisfied that these highly trained and highly paid (union mechanics here get well over $100 an hour) automotive experts had finally figured out how to get the right amount of air in my tires, I got in to leave.

The light was still on.  I asked the service rep again what the deal was.  He suggested that the simple  pressure monitoring system somehow KNEW that there was a leak in the tire, even though the pressure reading was right on and not fluctuating at all.  I then recalled that the light has to by reset after adding air be turning the car off and on again.  I restarted the car, and the light went out.  Politely thanking the rep for his time, I drove away.

Now, how worried should I be about the brake master cylinder?

Steak in Cast Iron

A few years ago, I watched Alton Brown make pan fried chicken on an episode of Good Eats.  It looked really good, and I wanted to try making it myself.  But we didn't have the appropriate hardware:  a large cast iron skillet.  I asked my dear wife to pick one up on her next trip to the store, but made the mistake of telling her to get the biggest one they had.  Expecting a 12-inch model like the one my mom had, I was a bit taken aback by this behemoth:

It's over 15 inches in diameter, which means that almost 2 inches of pan overlap the edges of the largest burner on my stove.  It also weighs something like 20 pounds. Not the most convenient piece of kitchen equipment.  After producing Alton's fried chicken (not my best effort), it's been used only a couple of times in five years (it works pretty well on the gas grill, though).

The first episode of Good Eats describes a stovetop/oven method for preparing ribeye steak and calls for a 12 inch cast iron pan.  I've been debating with myself the rules for my re-creation of these episodes, specifically on how closely I'm going to conform my efforts with what's seen in the show.  Hence, I had a bit of an internal crisis about whether I could use Ironzilla for the job or if I needed to go buy a 12 inch model. Then I thought about explaining to my wife that I needed to spend $30 right off the bat to be able to make this blog all that it can be.  Ironzilla would have to do.

There's not really a recipe in the show. The method shown is supposed to produce a juicy, tender steak with a crisp outer crust without the bitter, flame-induced char that results from the fat melting into an open flame.  All of this sounds good to me.  AB (Alton Brown, as he will henceforth be known) calls for two 15 ounce, boneless ribeye steaks, at least an inch and a half thick.  I have on hand two bone-in ribeyes, a bit less than an inch thick, weighing in at a bit over a pound (16 ounces) each.  (Local, grass-fed Missouri beef.)

Against my better judgment, I decided to bone the steaks to maintain consistency with the show.  Why I decided remove the flavorful, moisture-rich rib bones, we may never know.  After boning, and owing to the differing size of the bones, the two steaks were 12 and 16 ounces.  In retrospect, the thickness of the steaks was a much bigger problem for this application than the bones would have been.


The cast iron pan goes into the cold oven and preheated to 500 degrees. While it's heating the steaks get coated with a bit of canola oil and seasoned liberally with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. After moving the pan to the cooktop on high heat, the steaks go in for 30 seconds per side.

Side One (note use of phone timer)

Side Two

The pan and steaks then go back into the 500 degree oven for four more minutes (with another flip at the two minute mark).  This is supposed to result in a medium rare internal temperature of 135 or so.  Though I tried to shorten the cooking time a bit based on the thinness of my steaks, I still overshot the goal a bit.  I prefer my steaks on the rare side of medium rare, so this was disappointing.

Why are the steaks in a colander?  That's the other unique method AB describes, intending that the juice draining from the resting steaks (five minute rest required after cooking!), pools in the bowl under the colander instead of dissolving the crust that was the whole point of the cast iron method.  (The show's companion book includes a recipe for a cognac pan sauce using these drippings, but since I didn't have any cognac on hand, I skipped that one.)

Results:  The meat itself was very good. Very beefy flavor, and as you can see in the pictures above, a ton of marbled fat that kept the meat moist and tender, even cooked a bit more than I wanted.  The crisp crust was great, and there wasn't any of that burned fat flavor that you get from flare-ups on the grill.

That said, I'll probably stick with the grill as my main steak preparation method.  You don't have to deal with smoke alarms going off, you don't have a pan to clean up, you get cool grill marks, and you get to stand out on the deck with a cold beer and commune with nature.  (And don't get my wife started on the inanity of the resting set up.  Way too much to clean for marginal improvement in the meal.)

I mean, how could you give this up?

WILFCCM, Vols. 3 and 4

My trip to lunch today (Subway, if you must know) yielded not one, but two irresistible lessons for WILFCCM.

First:  "Make believe that you've been good and give your love the the one you should, but you can't, no you can't, 'cause you're tied to her and I'm tied to him, and we don't want to hurt either one of them. So what can you do, what can you do, when you're married, but not to each other?"

(From Barbara Mandrel's classic "Married But Not to Each Other")

And second: "Well, I ain't gonna work this hard every day of my lifetime. One of these days, everything that I want's gonna be mine, but if it ain't that'll be all right as long as there's sunshine, and a big ole brew and little ole you."

(Mel McDaniel, "Big Ole Brew") 

WILFCCM, Vol. 2

"With a Louisiana woman waitin' on the other side, the Mississippi River don't look so wide."

Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn - Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man

Q Results

After about 18 hours in the smoker, this is what you get.

First Q of the Year, Part 1

A few weeks ago, I opened grilling season on the deck with a couple ribeyes from the side of beef we've had in the freezer a while. It was a wonderful experience, one I've been dreaming of while shoveling snow the last few months.  But winter's not really over until the first round of BBQ comes out of the smoker.  That glorious moment is now upon us.   

This beautiful piece of meat is an eight pound picnic shoulder (that is, the lower half of the pig's front leg) from a local farm run by some friends of ours. Some other friends of ours bought a whole pig, and asked me to turn this portion into pulled pork.  My pleasure. 

Since it's the season's first Q, I had to make up a new batch of rub.  If you think I'm giving you my rub recipe, you must not know much about BBQ.  (But you could probably find it somewhere else on the Internet like I did.)

Rub ready.

Meat rubbed. (Over the sink to minimize clean up.)

Into a well-seasoned smoker.  Results tomorrow.

P.S.  This post is not part of the planned Good Eats chronicle, but there is an episode on pulled pork that I will get to eventually, including an attempt at the homemade flower pot smoker.

Jogging

Back in the 80's my dad had a shirt kind of like this one:

Dad's was gray and I'm pretty sure it had said Oklahoma State on it somewhere, too, but I have no idea why.  I also have no idea why Dad had the shirt in the first place. He's never been a jogger, he's not a collector of Garfield kitsch, he almost never wears Oklahoma State apparel.  That shirt continues to be one of the great mysteries of my childhood.

But I think, somehow, the shirt served as a touchstone for my entire world view. I've never understood the concept of jogging. It makes no sense to me why anyone would want to do such a thing.  I regard people who jog regularly with a certain amount of suspicion and mistrust. The word "jogging" itself sounds like a made up activity for third graders.

My own experience with jogging consists solely of being forced to run 3 miles a day for the first month or so of the spring soccer season. Jogging is bad enough in perfect conditions, but in the windy, 15 degree weather of January in Oklahoma, it's pure torture.  Needless to say, this is not a habit I've kept up over the years.

Until now.  My "friend" Nick tricked me into signing up for the MS Society's Mud Run, a 10k run combined with a mud-filled obstacle course.  So now I'm jogging to try to keep from having a heart attack on the course.  We're doing a "Couch to 5k Plan" that consists of three-day-per-week sessions of running and walking that supposedly build your endurance to be able to run the full 5k in 30 minutes.  It's actually going OK so far. Last night I ran two 8 minute segments with five minutes of walking in between.  That may not sound like much, but for a guy who was struggling to get to 60 seconds of jogging 4 weeks ago, it feels pretty good.  Saturday morning, I'm supposed to run for 20 consecutive minutes.  We'll see...

Coincidentally, a friend posted this video on Facebook a couple days ago. Somehow the folks at Nike are reading my mind. 

UPDATE:  

Look what Mom found!

What I Learned From Classic Country Music (WILFCCM), Vol I

A "cowgirl's dream" consists of a man in "high-heeled boots and painted-on jeans".

From Dolly Parton's Why'd You Come In Here Lookin' Like That

A Fresh Start

Why a new blog?  Why not? The Internet is full of blogs no one reads, and there seems to be room for countless more.  The main point of this one, though, is to serve as a broader platform for the posts that I think about but never write.  As it is now, I think about posting on my other blog ("A Film Journal") all the time, but never quite get around to it.  Many of those thought-but-not-written posts have nothing to do with movies, which gives me the excuse of "it's not really about film, so I can't put it on my blog".  This blog negates that excuse, but I'm sure I'll come up with a better one soon.

I have a couple of specific projects in mind for this forum.  This first is an account of cooking my way through the Good Eats TV series.  Yes, it's a blatant rip off of that "Julie and Julia" movie.  But I'm a fan of that Alton Brown guy, and I recently acquired the show's companion books that have recipes from each episode and plans for all the cool contraptions he makes.  So I'm hoping to do at least a weekly post on a new Good Eats "application".

The second is much less ambitious.  Since I got an HD Radio in my truck, I've been listening to a lot of Classic Country music.  I can't get enough of 93.7's HD2 channel.  It's mostly 70s and 80s stuff, with some older and newer classics thrown in.  It's a great mix of really good songs and absurd gimmicks that made country music what it is today.  Pretty much every morning on the way to work, I hear a lyric that makes me think, "That needs to go on a blog somewhere under the heading 'What I Learned from Classic Country Music'".  So, prepare yourself for that.

Enjoy!