June 2011 Archives

i've found over the past several days that i am often 1 pound (more likely 1/2, my scale has 1-lb increments) lighter immediately after my shower compared to immediately before it.

i'm not parting with any bodily fluids/solids from the usual orifices during that time, though i suppose i could be sweating.

or maybe i'm just using way too much hair gel.

well the acras were a big failure (thanks food network!) but my smoked chicken experiment was a huge success.

i marinated 4 thigh/legs for 24 hours in:

lime juice
corn oil
fresh ground pepper
smoked salt
eaton's jamaican pepper sauce
turmeric

on the "not directly over the flame" tray of my grill, i put the chicken. the rear and middle burners were off. the left grate was set against the rear, so there was a hole in the grates on the southwest grill quadrant.

i tried a variety of smoke producers, but the only one that worked with a damn was to put a large chunk of alder right on the flame tamers, under the grates. if it didn't smoke, i'd ignite it with a pastry torch and then spritz it with a spray bottle of water.

i kept the temp around 230-300F for maybe 2.5 hours, keeping as much smoke going as possible. when that was done i cranked up the heat and grilled the chicken over direct medium for about 5 minutes.

the skin wasn't as crispy as i wanted, or it was burnt. and some bits of the chicken were a little overcooked. but it's smokey! i finally managed to get good smoke flavor out of my grill.

it still doesn't taste like bagasse fired rotisserie chicken :/

so that's why they call it "salt" cod.

followed the execrable food network recipe for acras. next time we'll use a real french recipe.

i'm not as bad off as this guy, but never in my adult life have i been able to schedule doctor's appointments at reasonable times when i'm sick. if i get sick on friday and want to see the doc on monday, forget it. if i get sick on monday and want to see the doctor the same week, forget it. it doesn't seem to matter what insurance i have, what medical group i'm dealing with, or even what city the office is in. it seems universal.

so i have a new system. i have a doctor's appointment with my doctor, whose website allows me to easily reschedule. when the day before the appointment arrives, i reschedule the appointment for later in the week. that way if i get sick within the next week, i'll already have an appointment, very likely the next day.

i wonder if the doctor's appointment system will detect my ingeniously lame strategy.

the tiny bit of french that i know has apparently pushed the tiny bit of spanish that i know straight out of my tiny bit of brain.

i suffered epic pronunciation failure when ordering food at a guatemalan restaurant the other night. i wasn't even trying to converse, just to order some costillas de res, but i couldn't manage to say three words correctly.

it really doesn't help that one of the most common words in spanish is "de", and one of the most common words in french is "de", and that those two words, which mean the same thing and are spelled the same way, are pronounced entirely differently.

both france and spain have academies which jealously guard and guide their respective languages. can't those guys get together and maybe smooth out some kind of common pronunciation?

[ i was going to put a joke here in esperanto, but google/translate doesn't do esperanto, and the esperanto translators on the web are all either godawful, godawfully broken, or just nonexistent. so you'll just have to make your own esperanto joke. ]

my amontillado has gone missing :(

for some reason i have two large bottles of oloroso and no bottles of amontillado. i think a mistake was made at the liquor store.

guillermo del toro is probably my favorite director.

i just can't understand why he hasn't done a film with his brother benicio.

they're both great, why can't they work together?

pour le dejeuner ajourd'hui, j'ai un sandwich de baguette avec du fromage, du jambon, et du cresson. mon ami au bureau pense que je suis maintenant français.

hops and i had a pretty disappointing dinner at a local restaurant. the wait staff was nice and friendly, the food was cooked with good intentions but it lacked the polish that i've apparently come to demand from an expensive meal. the biggest disappointment was the duck: it was nicely cooked but it was drowning in a sweet, syrupy berry sauce that would have been better on a belgian waffle. in theory, i suppose, the sweet sauce makes a good counterpoint to the savory duck, but when you add a glass of red wine into the picture, suddenly the red wine tastes like battery acid. and why am i eating duck but to accentuate my delicious red wine? so please, put the rooty tooty fresh and fruity sauce on the side, by which i mean the side of the kitchen table. don't let it out into the dining room.

but at the end of the meal, i had a glass of nobly rotted Tokaji, a sweet dessert wine from Hungary. It's got a more robust flavor than the gold standard Sauterne. A nice end to a dinner that wasn't great.

then, this past saturday, we dined at all spice. i have decided that i won't go to any more "fancy dining" places in san mateo county (with the possible exception of iron gate) other than all spice. after all was said and done, we had more food, more wine, and paid $40 less than at ecco, not that the relative price has much bearing on my love for all spice. were the bills reversed i'd still be saying the same thing.

all spice brings a magic to their food that i have not found outside of napa valley (okay, st. helena, and to be fair, i haven't been to france, but since i'm a california patriot, i suspect i will still claim napa (or all spice!) as the best food in the world, heh). the menu itself is stunning, suggestive, and evocative of excitement. it's very hard to narrow my choices down to a reasonable amount of food, and in fact, I have never succeeded in this and always end up with an unreasonably large dinner. the plates are not huge, so we get a lot of different flavors.

anyhow, i closed out my wednesday last week despairing that there was no fine dining worth eating in all of san mateo county, and all spice reminded me that not only was i wrong, but that there's fine dining excellence that can only be found in san mateo (i've never found indian fusion in napa), walking distance from my home, no less.

(aside from the constant itching, of course) is that when i par-swallow a bug while riding my bike, there is plentiful available phlegm with which to eject the offending insect.

ever since the fantastic french sandwich i had in le françois, i've been constructing and enjoying french-style sandwiches around the house.

today, we had some leftover humboldt fog in the fridge, so i packed that in my cooler and drove to work. on the way i stopped at my local grocer and picked up a fresh baguette, a little prosciutto, and some fresh "local" watercress. at work, i combined these ingredients into a sandwich:

it turned out way better than i expected. it is fair to say that i am not a frequent consumer of watercress. in fact, i had to try some at the grocery to know what it tasted like. my sandwich brings it to life, melding its creamy flavor with that of the cheese and ham to create a symphony of flavors that is french at heart but wholly californian.

yum.

i actually have two bottles of wine in my cube, but no glasses or corkscrew. alas.

this prosciutto is fresh in the sense that it was deli-sliced just an hour ago.

this prosciutto is not fresh in the sense that prosciutto is basically rotten ham.

then i realized -- it's from 1989! before everything was artificially enlouddened!

it's like archeology. now, if only this wasn't such a blatant rip of "the mind is a terrible thing to taste".

whoah.

actually, the skinny puppy album was released exactly 1 week after the ministry one.... so maybe it's not a ripoff but the sound of the times. weird.

also weird: check out the release date for tmiatttt. wow!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/16/bilderberg-2011-tipping-point

mon douche!

i surrender. after a mere 4 days, i'm back on the prilosec. i was great up until yesterday's bike ride, which seemed to trigger a massive blurgh which lasted all day.

in related (gooder) news, i laugh at my skin itches. oh, pitiful allergies, you think that you can match the itchiness i defeated on martinique? ho ho ho, you amuse me. still no love for the allergy meds. now, minor brushes with bushes and exposure to pollen cause giant itchy patches that in the past a tiny amount of antihistamine would suppress. but do i care? meh. i can take it now, and if i get lucky, the old meat sack will adapt and by this time [ some time in the future ], i wont even notice my allergies any more.

while biking down sawyer camp on tuesday, i came upon some kind of senior group hike. there was one middle aged dude in front of a column of about 100 really old people.

when i reached the point man, i pointed, terrified, at the shuffling column of zombielike aged hikers, and shouted, with great desperation, "LOOK OUT!!!"

i rode off laughing, but i don't think he got the joke.

i just accidentally read a youtube comment.

jesus I'm embarrassed to say he was are president. >_>
Tdeppe1966 1 week ago 11

wow, it sure was tough to get the words properly aligned in that last example, and the background box still isn't right.

i won't bore you with the details of how i got the words lined up, but it involved vim, proving again that truly je suis des etats-unix.

the divergence of french and english grammar is accelerating as i delve deeper into my lessons.

it was a very nice mapping in the past:

je     suis   au        restaurant    et     les    plats    sont    bons.
i      am     at the    restaurant    and    the    plates   are     good.

but now, that one-to-one mapping is totally gone:

hier,       je      suis       y         allé       et     les    plats     ont      été      bons.
yesterday,  i                  there     went       and    the    plates             were     good.

particularly the placement of "there" in between the past participle construct makes it difficult for this native english speaker to form the sentence above, and that's a pretty simple one off the top of my head. it's going to take a lot of work to get fluent.

not to mention the difficulty I have typing the name of my own country:

Je     suis     des         États-Unix.
I      am       from the    States Of Unix.

Well, maybe that's not so wrong after all.

the mac spell checker is not familiar with the word "bloviate", a favorite word of mine,.

of no pills.

i've got stomach juices blurbling up, sinus juices dribbling down, and there's a big party where they meet in the back of my throat. but seriously, i'm great, how are you?

tortillas
1 bunch of really thick asparagus, spray with oily mist
2 filets of sword fish, marinate for 30 minutes in the following:

juice of 3 juicy limes
1 tbsp of olive oil
1 tbsp fresh cracked pepper
1 tbsp ancho chili powder
1 tsp eaton's jamaican crushed pepper sauce (zow!)
1 tsp smoked salt (trying hard to get rid of that crap)

sear filets over high heat on grill, turn heat down to medium. pour marinade over filets. grill over direct medium 4 minutes per side.

after you have flipped the fish once, put on the asparagus.

once you've taken off the fish and turned off the gas, put the tortillas on. salt the fish.

remove tortillas and asparagus once tortillas are warm.

make tacos with several spears asparagus, chunks of mercury, and fresh salsa. goes great with margaritas.

the more i want to buy some. now i'm having cravings.

the problem is that to ship $50 worth of pork pies to me (and they are very reasonably priced), I'll have to pay $60 to fedex.

not only is shipping quite expensive, also the pies are shipped fresh, which means whatever pies i do not eat immediately i must freeze, which is a tragedy, since they were fresh when i got them and my freezer will do them no justice.

i am trying to find the optimum order whereby the shipping is linearly related to the cost of the pies, and the number of pies ordered does not greatly exceed my appetite for a couple of days (hopefully i can just refrigerate them, without freezing).

this is a difficult task. if only there were some kind of "computer algorithm" that could help me.

about a decade ago, i was happily taking prescription allegra-D for my allergies. it helped quite a lot and it cost me about 10 bucks a month. then, a competing (but totally different) product, claritin, became over the counter. my insurance company dropped coverage for allegra-D (american health care! best in teh world! usa! usa!) and the price of my prescription skyrocketed to something like 150 bucks a month.

so i switched the claritin-D, which was a much less effective product for me. the insurance company figured "both cure allergies so we won't cover the expensive one now that you can cure allergies without a prescription". of course, while the intended effect is the same, they achieve it by different methods, one of which worked better for me than the other.

then, before long, our government (freedom! freedom! freedom! oy!) decided that i couldn't get claritin-D without showing ID and registering myself in yet another government database, and I certainly couldn't get more than a 30 day supply at a time. so that was the end of my decongested life, as i switched to regular claritin + congestion.

about a month ago i noticed that my old pal allegra was now over-the-counter. so last week i bought a 30 day supply and switched. i noticed pretty quickly that i was falling asleep all day, sometimes behind the wheel of my car. hop on over to the allegra faq:

Can Allegra make me drowsy?
No.

Oh, well I guess it must have been something else, then. Except that the very same day (yesterday) that I quit the allegra, the all-day-drowsiness stopped.

So now I'm stuck with 25 days worth of allegra, which magically makes me drowsy, and even more oddly, doesn't work as well for me as claritin does, even though the reverse was true 10 years ago. go figure (though perhaps I'm remembering the effects of the pseudoephedrine from allegra-D of yore).

so instead of switching back to claritin, i've switched to nothing. i've been allergy-med-free for two days. i'm a bit itchier than normal, as always happens when i quit the allergy meds. but two weeks in the caribbean has hardened me against itchiness, and now i can take it. in the past, this level of general itchiness would have driven me back to the claritin within 2 days. but now? no sweat. even if there were sweat, the antilles conditioned me to accept a much higher level of sweatiness...

while i was at it, i figured i'd ditch the prilosec, too. i've been feeling less need for it for over a month, but to be on the safe side i kept on it while on vacation. almost immediately i'm less comfortable, but the discomfort (so far) is balanced by the satisfaction of having super mario and tasty, tasty ethanol as my only drugs this week.

the drink that i traveled to martinique to make.

backing up a little bit, the queen's park swizzle calls for a "swizzle stick". the esteemed rumdood.com maintains that the drink cannot be properly made without it, and i am not one to substitute such things.

so i tried to construct one, and failed: the hole i drilled in the chopstick destroyed the chopstick. that left only one option: travel to martinique for two weeks, drink tons of local rum, eat lots of local food, swim, snorkel, sunburn, and if at all possible, bring back some swizzle sticks.

while i was on martinique i saw lots of "swizzle sticks", or bois lélés, as they are called locally. i saw lots of them for sale, and none of them in use. i certainly saw no swizzles on any cocktail menu. locally, they could theoretically be used to stir one's ti' punch, though for that task the only tool i saw employed was centrifugal force as the bartenders swirled the glass in the air to mix.

so we brought back a couple bois lélés, wooden, plastic, small, and large. and finally, i used one to make a pair of queen's park swizzles:

despite the fact that they're made with industrial rum and not delicious martinique rhum agricole, they turned out great. very refreshing, not hard to make, and with el dorado 15, full of great industrial rum flavor. next time i'm thinking of using martinique sirop de canne instead of the simple syrup, though the 2:1 demerara simple syrup that i used was pretty tasty in its own right.

all in all, a pretty good excuse to go to martinique. now i've got a new one: i miss martinique!

like the queen's park swizzle, our visit didn't last long enough, despite (both) being absolute soaked in rum.

i had a vision: an important vision, a plan for my coiffure.

i've rocked the long hair, the mohawk, the buzz, the self-buzz, the baldness... now what?

and then it hit me: i will embrace the non-bald side of my paternal hair genetics, take on the Big Wavy Out Of Control Hair look of my late Uncle John, pictured here:

so that's my goal. uncle john famously combed his hair with a birck, which, when your hair is suitably long and wavy, is a fine tool. in some respects i'm already there. that's the beauty of BWOOCH -- once you've got a little of it, it's smooth sailing from one style to another until suddenly you've reached Metal and you get a haircut to remain in the sweet spot.

Too far! Retreat!

needless to say, any kind of facial hair would just distract from the magnificence of the stuff on top, so that's to be avoided. particularly because i can fashion a beard that's quite distracting. so the whole MJF look is right out.

Maybe some other time.

for reasons of creative freedom, my (initial) trip report will be here, and not on the blog.

i'm entering stuff day by day now, but who knows what the final product will look like? i won't be sending many updates about it, you'll just have to reload the page every once in a while to see what's changed.

at the sandpiper in barbados, the shitter had an ocean view. i could take a dump and gaze out on to the caribbean, not to mention anyone who was swimming in it near my hotel room.

alas, the view from the throne at home is not so scenic, nor is there any oceanic white noise to drown out the sound of my struggling bowels.