Uncle Bumblefuck Is Making You Eat This Summer

If you're like me, you're getting older. Time seems to shrink. There is ever more shit to do with the same amount of time and fewer joules of energy to do it with. Something has to give and one of those things is usually quality food preparation. 

Most people I know really don't cook, even if they think of themselves as food people (what in our parents day people called Gourmets, which is a term I think needs to make a comeback because "Foodie" always makes me feel like someone took a shit in my mouth). They blow ungodly sums at the deli counter of Whole Foods, order one of the explosion of Blue Apron type meal services or eat out nearly every night. 

There are a number of problems with this. 1) that shit is 'spensive 2) that shit is no good for your mind, body and soul. 

Yelling at people, unfortunately, does not change human behavior. But good alternatives to current behaviors can.

With this in mind let's begin.

Summer is by far the easiest season to eat well in with very little work because grills and vegetables. Here's some very simple recipes that can help you eat the shit out of this Summer with no brow sweat. 

Ranch Dressing

Everything tastes better with Ranch on it but most bottled Ranch sucks and contains all kinds of shitty chemicals that you don't want. Luckily making your own healthy and delicious ranch dressing is easy and can be made in bulk because it lasts for at least a week. I try to have this in the fridge at all times because it allows me to throw together a decent dinner salad with almost no forethought. Got a can of garbanzo beans, some bacon, medium boiled eggs, sliced turkey, cucumbers, bell peppers, sunflower seeds? You got dinner.

Ingredients

16 oz. Sour Cream (Full Fat ONLY, please)
1/2 cup Buttermilk
Whole milk
1 bunch dill, minced fine
1 bunch chives, minced fine
1-2 cloves of garlic, minced super fine
Black pepper
Salt

Make

Combine everything but the salt, black pepper and milk and blend with a whisk or immersion blender (the best $25 you'll ever spend in the kitchen) and then thin the dressing with milk to desired texture and then season with salt and pepper. Allow dressing to meld in the fridge for a day for best flavor.

Med-style Eggplant Caviar

Here's one of my favorites. I know, eggplants are fucking gross but this eggplant recipe is actually really good and it is extremely simple to make either in the oven or on the grill. Pick up some pita bread, an eggplant and you're in business in under an hour with 5 minutes prep time.

Ingredients

1 big assed eggplant
Olive oil
Whole milk greek yogurt
1 clove garlic
salt

Make

Halve the eggplant, cut fairly deep 1" crosshatches in the face of the cut eggplants and then season with salt and drizzle with a good amount of olive oil and toss in a 375' oven or a grill on a low setting for 45 minutes to 1 hour until the center is nice and soft.

Top the roasted eggplant with 1 cup or so yogurt mixed with 1 crushed and minced clove of garlic, salt and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Scoop onto warmed pita and cream your jeans.

Chicken Marinade a la Arabe

Here's a marinade I like to throw chicken breasts or thighs in at the beginning of the week with no real plan other than that I know, at some point in the week, I will need to solve dinner by throwing them on the grill and then topping a salad, a sandwich or a pita with them.

Ingredients

1 lbs. boneless chicken thighs or breasts
1 cup Greek yogurt
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic, smashed and chopped
1 Tablespoon paprika or other chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon ground corriander
Black pepper
Salt

Make

Mix everything together (add some lemon or lime juice if you're feeling crazy). That's it. When you marinate the chicken sprinkle the chicken pieces with salt and then toss in marinade. Refrigerate for 6 hours minimum and 3-4 days max. This also works on whole chickens as well.

For Breasts grill on high for 5 minutes or so a side (longer if they're giant gross grocery store breasts) until the chicken has shrunk by around 20% visually. For thighs or whole spatchcocked chicken cook on medium low turning every 5 minutes and baste with lime juice. Thighs should take 15 minutes and a chicken around 1 hour.

Rice and Tea

Here's a quickie about two very large subjects from cultures that are deep, wide and old. It's not my intention to give you an exhaustive tutorial on these topics but rather address the fact that most people don't know the basics concerning preparing these delights of the East in a way that produces pleasure.

Let's start with rice.

Item one is selecting GOOD rice. There is no excuse for cooking shitty rice. Event at twice the price, "expensive" rice is still retardedly cheap. If you like long grain rice I go for Indian and Pakistani brands as they tend to produce fragrant, long, beautiful, firm cooked rice. A far cry from the broken, starchy Uncle Ben's type garbage. If you live coastally, finding an Indian grocery should be a fairly simple matter. Even if said Indian grocery is quite a drive from your house you can make the trip count by stocking up on spices (Indian/Pakistani groceries tend to have a broad selection of very fresh and very cheap whole spices like whole Black Peppercorns, Cumin, Fennel, Chili powders, etc.), top quality legumes (Lentils, Split Peas, Chickpeas, Mung Beans, etc.) for all your Dal and soup making needs as well as a very good selection of bulk black teas which we will get to in a minute...

Brands I like are Swad, Royal and Zebra. When in doubt ask the people who run the place and ask for the best aged Basmati they have and then buy a 10 kg sack of it. Stay away from parboiled or "diabetes" rice, which these places also carry, because these suck. Aged Basmati or Jasmine rice is what you're after.

If you prefer Asian style "sticky" rice or Sushi rice, as it is generically called, get yourself to the biggest Asian grocery you can find and ask which brand is best. I buy big sacks (10 kg) whenever I make it to the Trans World Market when we venture down to Amherst, MA to visit friends but when I run out I go for Organic sushi rice from the bulk section of my local hippy market.

Whichever type you're cooking up, the basics are the same: Wash, Rinse, Water, Cook, Rest.

Wash/Rinse

This step is key. Pour the amount you want to make into a large bowl and cover with water. Next make your fingers into a rake shape of sorts and then run them back and forth vigorously through the rice for 30 seconds, then pour off the water and refill with fresh water and repeat until you don't get any milky starch suspended in the rinse water. With aged Basmati this may only take 2-3 wash and rinse cycles. Sushi rice... well it could take a while, but keep going until it runs clear. Failure to do this will lead to off flavors and aromas in your rice. This, you do not want!

Water

Now pour the rice into your rice cooker (or rice cooking pot). If you don't have one, get one. A simple small, cheap rice cooker will last a lifetime and make rice preparation MUCH easier for the non-rice obsessed. If you don't have one, choose a thick bottomed pot that is no more than 8 inches wide and that has a tight fitting lid. Now level the rice, place you thumb in the pot with a "thumbs down" pose where it just touches the top of the rice and fill with cold water until it reaches the middle of the first joint of your thumb. That's it.
Yes, there are MANY MANY other ways to prepare rice that involve soaking, boiling, basket steaming, straining, etc. Once you master the above technique feel free to nerd out on other methods, but , for now back to the task at hand...

Cook

If you have a rice cooker now simply cover the vessel, hit the start button and walk away. Yep. That is why you want a rice cooker. If you are cooking it in a pot, set your heat to medium-high and cook uncovered until holes in the rice form where the steam is escaping then drop the heat to low and cover tightly with a lid and cook for 10 minutes or so and turn off the heat. Do not open the pot, stir or in any other many molest the cooking rice, which brings us to...

Rest

Now the hard part. Allow your rice to rest, covered for at least 20 minutes before serving. The result will be firm, fluffy rice in the case of Jasmine or Basmati rice and non-soupy/chunky rice in the case of sushi rice. Very important.

Notes

If you seek flavored rice in the case of Basmati/Jasmine types you can add salt to your rice before you cook it, substitute chicken stock for water, color the rice with a small amount of Turmeric, add ginger and garlic, etc. etc. just make sure to stir it into the rice before cooking or it will end up on top of the rice, which is no good.

Tea Brewing

Thankfully, brewing good black tea (if you want to drink green tea, knock yourself out, but I won't comment on the making of that swamp gas/sea weed tasting bullshit here) is MUCH less complicated.

First, start with, like all things, good quality tea. For bagged tea I like PG Tips, Taj Mahal, Red Label or Yorkshire brands.

Now boil cold water that you have gotten from the tap after the water has run for 1 minute to oxygenate the water, then pour the water over the tea bag in your mug immediately after you take it off the boil. Very important! Next steep the tea for 2 to 2 1/2 minutes and remove the tea bag. Add cream, sugar, honey, chai spices, whatever and enjoy.

Isaac Newton, Occultist and Founder of Modern Science: a Slight Return

 

Here's a fun Nova episode about Maynard Keynes, his obsession with Isaac Newton and how the inventor of calculus, modern physics and optics was revealed to be a raging occultist. This guy would kill Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and eat his liver with Fava beans and a nice Chanti.

Saké UPDATE: Blew It.

Alright, let's start with the basics.

Ingredients

1 gallon boiled or otherwise de-chlorinated water
8 lbs. (dry weight) organic sushi rice
1/4 cup dried Koji rice
LV 118 yeast or other white wine yeast
2 gallon sanitized fermentation bucket with airlock

Procedure

First off, when I list off an amount of rice by weight I am saying "dry, uncooked rice" OK?

Anyway, start by washing (very thoroughly) 1 1/2 lbs of rice, steaming it with 2/3rd the amount of water it normally calls for and then allowing that rice to cool. Meanwhile turn on the light in your oven. This should make it about 75-85' F which is just right for Koji growing. Now spread the rice into a clumpy layer across the bottom of a small casserole. Grind a few tablespoons of the dried Koji up with a mortar and pestle or a CLEAN spice grinder and sprinkle over top. Cover it with a damp cloth and place it in the oven. Don't forget it's in their when you're pre-heating to pan roast a big assed rib steak, mkay?

I used this stuff. It was about $10 a bag, which should last me 8 batches if I don't back slop.

So after 2 days the rice should be white and fuzzy and there should be liquid in the bottom of the pan. Bueno. Now steam 2 1/2-3 lbs of rice, allow to cool and then combine 1/2 your water, the koji rice, the steamed rice and the yeast in the bucket. Break up the rice with your fingers (thoroughly washed/scrubbed) and hands and pop on the lid/airlock.

Wait 2 days.

Do all of the above again.

Wait 7 more days.

My pictures are shitty on purpose. It's my personal style.

 Strain through a brew sack and bottle if all the rice has broken down.

Well, that's how I should have done it.

Instead I did 3 Koji/rice cycles because I have a tiny rice cooker. I doubt this effected anything negatively.

I also added apple slices (don't ask) and then was forced to let the fermentation go 20 days because I was short bottles and time and headspace. These two things lead me to having 1 1/2 gallons of Rice Kefir.

This is not the worst thing that could have happened since my impetus to make my own sake was Sandor Katz unpasteurized sake recipe on his blog from a month or two ago. I wanted all those good microbes all up in me like a yoga hippy. So that's great.

However the resultant sake is SOUR as fuck. Lactic fermentation. This was likely caused by the A) higher than desireable temperature during the fermentation. You should shoot for 45-50'F but by the time I got my shit together this Spring it was in the high 50's to high 60's with a few 80' days. B) Those fucking apple slices. Wild yeast, my ASS or C) letting it go too long.

Of the above factors, I think that letting go too long (from what the internet full of Fellow Traveler Bumblefucks has told me) is the biggest bukkake moment in my string of bad decisions. Basically 10-12 days max beginning to end, bottle and refrigerate (or pasteurize). It might be a little sweet but it won't be sour. Soon I'll have some bottles so I can dance that theory. 

Oh yeah, and the fasting idea from the last post? Didn't take. Who knew?

Dumbing Down Things Even Further

If you're nervous that this might be the title of another of my screeds against the short-attention-span-theatre of Western civilisation, breath free my friends. It is not and I will tell you exactly why.

I was hiking down the hill this morning, past the great lines of 200 plus year-old grave markers, with a bit of a bee in my bonnet. I intended a screed of screeds against stupidity and thick headedness of all sorts. You see, I had just spent 36 hours in NYC for a bit of pre-birthday alone time and arrived back home with a bad taste in my mouth about the dangerous increase of spiritually dead materialism I saw at work there. By God I was going to set the world to right with the strokes of my digital pen! 

Then a strange thing happened: as the tombstones ticked by a question appeared in my head I had heard said by Ur-permaculturist Mark Shepard in a presentation about selecting food producing trees that thrive in local conditions: "Why would I spend my time helping out something that wants die or trying to kill something that wants to live?" The point is that trying to change anyone's mind with a screed seems, well, stupid and thickheaded at this point in time. THE wisdom of Permaculture is to work with nature, not against it.

Onward.

What this post is really about is how I have doubled down on the simplification of my cider making procedure.

Ever trying to cut down on things to buy, clean and sanitize I elected to simply allow my gallon jugs of cider to spontaneously ferment and then simply poking a small slit in the their tops with a sharp pocket knife to allow CO2 to exit but not allow the vinegar bugs to enter. Not that I am that worried about them at this point since sour beers and kombucha seem to all the rage these days thus contamination and laziness would be once again cloaked by the current mode.

And so it went for two weeks when I drilled the tops, slid the siphon tube in and filled 2 champagne bottles, 2 twenty-two ouncers, 1 Pellegrino litre and a bottle of Mexican Sprite. The results were just as good, if not better, than the previous batch. Different, lazier, method. Same great Pet Nat.

I was curious if I was perhaps high on my own supply. While I was a wine buyer for 3 1/2 years and have a decent pallet, I am also aware how one's mind can cloud things so I took a few bottles along on my trip and gave them to a few people who make their money with wine. Results have been more than favorable. Valhalla. Do try this at home.

This weekend I will be bottling up my first batch of Saké. It probably should have been filtered and put up last week but I ran short of bottles, so we'll see how that turns out. Ultimately there is $8.00 worth of rice at stake and, worst case scenario, I'll have $25 worth of rice wine to cook with for the next year or two. C'est la vie,' say the old folks, 'it goes to show you never can tell.'

What else?  

I dunno. I've been thinking about fasting. 

Let me explain. The spring of my Senior year of high school I got really sick. Fever. Hallucinations. Sweating. The whole nine yards. When I eventually got completely better several weeks later, my sense of smell had been completely altered. Most things had no smell at all while the few things I could smell were mostly things like the exhaust from old, pre-smog, automobiles. 

You can probably see how this condition might make food seem unappealing. It took almost a year for my sense of smell to grow back and during that time I ate much, much less that I had previously and, also, I experienced a lot of personal and spiritual growth. These two things, obviously, were not likely related. However I can't shake the feeling that they were. Pretty much all religions have periods of fasting to help attain spiritual growth in their orthodoxies AND science more and more says that there is a role of fasting in extending human lifespan. Hmmmm.

Anyway, I got a fucking TERRIBLE Flu in NYC. Yep. Chills, sweats, fever, hallucinations. My past 36 hours have been spent in a liminal state of shamanistic illness that I emerged from this just a few hours ago and it reminded me of all of this. I'll give it a try and see what happens.

Weekend Weirdness: Meet Viktor Schauberger

Comprehend and Copy Nature: The Legacy of Austrian Forester Viktor Schauberger.

Uncle Bumblefuck Attempts Shoyu, Saké and Accidentally Makes Pet Nat

I got pétillant naturel, dawg.

Item One: Cider Successsssss

I hate to follow directions. Obviously, not when I'm replacing critical suspension components on the front end of my 2007 Chrysler Town and Country, but most of the time I have an allergy to doing what people, especially "experts" tell me to do, particularly when it comes to making food type things. The rationalization for this is that failure during the pursuit of a goal teaches you far more than following directions to the letter. In fact, said failures often teach you WHY you follow instructions to the letter. 

Anyhow, the first time around making cider I bent a lot of cider making rules without breaking them. I didn't use carboys or brew buckets. I added no yeast nutrients or acidifiers or additional sugar that almost all recipes call for. However I stuck to the plan fermentation-wise and used Lavin 1118 "champagne" yeast and added a bit of pectinase to make the cider less cloudy and boost the alcohol a tiny bit. 

The results were fine. It was clean tasting and completely serviceable. If someone gave you an ice cold bottle of one at a BBQ you would drink it and not think anything about it. Most folks would count this as a success but I was determined to do better or totally screw it up trying. 

With this in mind I picked up another couple gallons of cider and, instead of pitching yeast and popping on the airlocks, I let the gallons sit on top of my fridge until they started to spontaneously ferment then added pectinase, a few pinches of Lavin 1118, the bubblers and called it a night. A few days later I noticed that the bubblers were conspicuously not bubbling. Fuck. 

As it turns out, when I shoved the airlocks into the holes I drilled into the caps, I tore the lids and they all had 1/2 inch cracks letting all manner of who-knows-what into my fermenting daddy juice. Not. Fucking. Good. Rather than abandoning the batch to cider vinegar I covered the tears with painters tape and let them go for two weeks until they started to slow down fermentation. Upon opening the caps I noticed that they smelled WILD.  Well, too far down the path to go back now, I figured and proceeded to bottle them up and hope for the best. From the juice that spilled on my hand, as I clumsily racked the cider into a duke's mixture of scrounged glass bottles, it seemed weird, but tasty. 

Rattled as I was because my well laid plans had gone distinctly awry, I neglected to dose the bottles with sugar to carbonate them, figuring that, since the cider was still nominally fermenting, there would be enough natural sugar left to make them fizzy. Phrased another way: Fuck It. 

Anyway, a week later several things happened. First, I decided I needed to do some quality control testing on my confused, half-assed cider and cracked open my 12 oz. tester bottle. It was DAMNED GOOD. The light carbonation had added a refreshing bite to it and the weird aromas of my feral cider came together under confinement into grapefruit and pineapple flavors that rivaled the best Pet Nat sparkling wine I had ever drank. Alchemy! 

Sow ears => Silk purse. 

Speaking of Pet Nat: I am an idiot. 

5 or so years ago natural sparkling wine (or Champagne for you vulgar uninitiated) was all the buzz in Brooklyn wine snob circles and they dubbed it Pet Nat which is short for it's French name pétillant naturel. I was aware of it, drank a bit of it and pretended to know exactly what it was. 

Honestly, I didn't give a shit about Pet Nat. 

I was more into rye whisky and cheap beer at that point, having tired of the increasingly douchey wine scene that was attracting the same type of trust-funder "Me Too!" fuckturds that were busily ruining the food scene in New York City. I assumed that it was natural wine (wine made from the naturally occurring yeasts on the grapes, rather than farmed commercial yeasts) that was put in bottles with Dosage (sugar of some sort) and capped. Fin.

Nope. You bottle incompletely fermented wine and let the natural sugars in the juice carbonate it. Yep, Uncle Bumblefuck had, through lazy half-assedness, accidentally made Pet Nat cider. Who would have guessed?

Onward.

Turd City

Shoyu or, for the rest of us, soy sauce. 

With an eye towards teaching myself how to grow Koji so I could make Saké, I decided to do a trial run and make some bulgur wheat koji and turn it into olde fashioned artisan soy sauce. 

Basically, I sprinkled ground up koji starter over some abandoned cooked bulgur wheat in the fridge,  covered it with a damp towel and threw it in the oven with the light on which, by divine caprice, makes the perfect atmosphere for growing koji. After two days it got real fuzzy and I added pressure cooked organic soy beans and let it go another two days in the fuzz chamber. With all the ingredients looking suitably inedible I mashed in whole wheat flour and rolled it into a log and then cut it into the turdlets you see above. 

After a further 3-4 days they started to smell alarming and stunk up my house with weird aromas. Seemed like a good time to throw them in a jar with a strong brine and see what happens! Updates to come. Probably.

Moldy rice or Koji? It's both.

Lastly, I just began my saké last night. 

If you look online you will notice that the process of saké making is pretty fucking anal. Lots of steps and precise procedures. Well, fuck that. I set out to make a farmhouse style saké which is dead simple by design and that design is meant to stick it to the man and fuck the police.

"Wait a minute. How does one 'stick it to the Man' with saké?' you might ask and rightly so, since it sounds, frankly, crazy. 

Well, first off, you must know that making your own booze in Japan is illegal. While America may be an embarrassing dumpster fire, it is still a dumpster fire where you can make your own booze (except distilled spirits. But it's not like anyone at the BATF really cares if you're making vodka in your basement). 

Secondly, you need to know that a traditional Japanese farmhouse drink, called Amazake (which is steamed rice that has been broken down with the amylase enzymes of rice koji) is basically Saké that hasn't fermented yet. 

Thirdly, imagine that you are a Japanese farmer who likes his saké but doesn't want to pay for it and the saké police come around and finds your stash. Because you've made a crude and cloudy rice wine you coolly and calmly tell the Man that "Oh shit! I totally forgot about my last batch of Amazake. What a shame!". Plausibly deniability to the people, people. 

I'll update later with this recipe and how it's coming along. Until then I'll leave you with this:

 

Spring has finally gotten sprung here in Southern Vermont and my forty-wonderful birthday is coming somewhat soon so I figured I'd get Hobbit as fuck and renew my old Spring ritual of rereading the Lord of the Rings. 

$6.80 very well spent.

Basics: Italian Sausage

"...if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."
 
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie,  Mrs. Dymond (1885)

Time to get your sausage fingers on.

One of the single most useful things you can learn to do, if you cook a fair bit, is to make your own Italian sausage. Pasta sauce, lasagna, risotto, sausage, kale and bean stew, etc., etc. are built on the central pillar of sausage. So much so that their flavor and quality more or less depend on how good the sausage used in it is. Unfortunately, if you've spent much time in the average grocery store meat aisle, you've discovered that most of the commercial sausage out there is complete shit.

This is totally fine.

You can easily leave the world of crap sausage behind and never look back. Of all of the "artisan" food trends out there, making really good sausage is, by far, the easiest to do yourself, without any special equipment, in a few minutes.

What lies below is a all-purpose Eye-talian recipe suitable for most applications. You can easily customize it to your taste by adding or subtracting ingredients. Just remember that not all the stuff in the "Optional" section play well with each other. Fennel pollen is a stand alone. Parmesan, parsley and lemon zest go well together. Rosemary can be added to the existing recipe to make it *nice*, just don't use too much!

THE key to successful sausage it to use GOOD ground pork. Go to a real life butcher shop and get freshly ground pork shoulder or buy a frozen pack of pork at the farmers market, just don't buy the donkey-dookie ground pork they sell at the Stater Brothers, OK?

Italian Sausage:

1 lb. ground pork (80% fat 20% lean)
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed and minced fine
2 Tbsp. decent red wine
2 1/2 tsp. whole fennel seeds, lightly toasted in a dry pan until fragrant
1 rounded tsp. Kosher salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. sugar

Optional

Crushed red pepper flakes
Fresh rosemary pulled off the stem and finely minced
Fennel Pollen
Grated Parmesan
Chopped parsley
Lemon zest

First, you're gonna need a big mixing bowl. Plop your ground pork at the bottom of it and simply add all of the ingredients on top, saving the red wine for the last. Now mix the pork and friends together using a dough kneading motion, giving the bowl a quarter turn after each single kneading action. When the sausage firms up and starts sticking to your hand, you're done.

Yeah, that's it. Seriously.

Are you now as angry as I am about how shitty pretty much all the sausage commonly available in these United States is? You should be. It's the direct result of fucking Cultural degeneracy, people! Take the power back. Make some sausage.

p.s.

If you'd like to make linked sausage, get you some 32mm hog casings from the internets or butcher shop and cut off a 3 foot section. Soak this in a warm water for 15 minutes while you cut the top (the mouth to the bottom of the shoulder, like an inverted funnel, which it is going to be.)  off a stout 1 or 1.5 liter water bottle (Fiji bottle work good and the water has free silica in it, or so I've been told) and round off the edges with a bit of sandpaper. Wash your new homemade funnel and slide the hog casing over the bottle neck like you were trying to get a Trojan on a wiener. If wiener jokes bother you, stuffing sausages in NOT for you.  Tie off the end, fill the funnel 1/2 full of meat and start jamming the meat through the neck with your thumb while holding the casings taut with your other hand. Keep doing this, trying to avoid air bubbles as much as possible, until you're out of meat. Tie off the other end flush with the end of the meat and then twist the tube of sausage into 4 equal links.

Finally fold the sausage links over one another till you get this kinda thing:

Refrigerate, uncovered for a few hours to allow the casings to dry out and then snip into links for grilling. Not too hot! Medium heat or they'll blow the fuck up.

Enjoy.

Heavy Horses

Mid-1990's NOS Raichle Eiger Boots, baby hand for scale.

I skipped out on doing a happy weekend post last week. Life, it seems, had other plans for me that involved driving through a snow storm to go to a Raptor center full of misfit owls.  I'll say this, if you are ever up close to an owl you'll notice that they give off a strong vibration. Not spooky. Just intense. If you get bored look up all the mythological shit mapped on owls by the ancient cultures of the world. It seems that they all agree: Owls are heavy, man.

Anyhow, 20 years ago I was big into hiking and backpacking. In 1995 my friend Darren and I somehow managed to make 17 backpacking trips. That year I did 340+/- miles of switchbacks and ridges wearing a $35 pair of Chinese Wolverine work boots I bought at a Walmart in Carson City, NV two Summers before.

This is of note for several reasons:

1) These days doing some sort of sport or activity is really just an excuse to buy a bunch of expensive gear that you probably won't use because the point of the activity is really to obsessively pund on and accumulate gear, not to do the thing that the gear is designed to do.

In 1995 I made $2,300 under the poverty line (I'm not just flexing poverty nuts here, the poverty line will figure into the story in a bit). When you make $12,700 a year you can't afford nice gear. In fact you can't afford any gear that isn't a hand-me-down, from Walmart or bought at an Army/Navy. More to the point, the very fact that I went hiking so much was exactly because it was free and I only needed a $35 pair of work boots, a $15 surplus rucksack and a $3 Nalgene bottle full of tap water to do it.

2) After putting so many miles on a pair of broken down shitkickers I had come to the conclusion that I could really use a nice pair of boots that wouldn't soak up water like a ShamWOW! or allow a mesquite thorn I stepped on to stick into my foot.

Cue my tax refund for 1995. I'm not sure if this is true anymore but back in the mid 90's if you made under the poverty line the IRS would give you back enough tax money to push you above the poverty line. At the time I wasn't thinking that it was some sort of scam was meant to cook the income stats, I was just pumped to get enough money to buy THE NICEST pair of boots I could lay my hands on.

Enter my first pair of Raichle Eigers.

Darren and I drove his blue metal flake '73 Camaro with a tunnel ram to the new REI 20 minutes down the 55 freeway to secure said pair of boots on a Thursday afternoon when we were both off work. I was an idiot. A cartoon hayseed bumbling around a pristine footwear dept. that smelled like the lobby of an Ace hotel in a filthy pair of 501's stained with sweat, dust and sagebrush. I ogled high dollar boots from Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I had a party boner for a pair of Zamberlans but, like all the other Euro boots, save one, my flat, wide Hobbit feet would not fit inside them without footbound pain or enough room for my feet to rattle around like a pinball. Not good.

My frustrated but diligent Al Bundy finally suggested trying a pair of Swiss Raichles that were the boots that REI rented out to weekend warriors dabbling in dirt and blisters. They were heavy leather throwbacks to the era of exploration. No Gore-tex, no lightweight synthetics or molded footbeds. The sales guy relayed to me in a harsh whisper that they were the boots worn by the Swiss army mountain warfare battalions and that they were about to be discontinued so he would take $40 off the $265 price tag.

Put this story on pause for a minute. In 1996 $265.00 was just 10 bucks short of my monthly rent. Not my share of the rent. The whole fucking apartment. Imagine spending your monthly total rent on a pair of boots. Heavy man. Like an owl playing a xylophone made from dragon bones.

OK. Obviously, between the $40 discount and the story about them being issued by the Swiss Army, I bought the boots.

In the coming months learned to I love and hate them in equal measure. They were heavy. This is not hyperbole. I doubt that most people own a pair of shoes that weighs more than 3lbs for both shoes, combined. These motherfuckers were 4lbs. 7 oz. PER BOOT.

Also, being made from heavy duty full grain leather, they were a stiff and inflexible blister factory. I wore them everyday, all day out of necessity. Every evening I unlaced them and shucked my swollen, beat up feet from their hard, black shells. It was 5 months until they became comfortably formed to my feet or, more likely, my feet had formed to them.

I have a friend named Aaron. He taught me how to cut beef a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away and he had a story he loved to tell with great relish from a time when he was working the floor at a particularly rough and tumble slaughterhouse staffed by ex-cons. One day he was skinning a huge steer with a particularly grizzly old con when he accidentally slashed his partner's hand to the bone with his skinning knife. The gentleman looked at his hand, looked at Aaron and then, while stanching the bleeding with his mouth, said "Shiit Aaron! Looks like you and me are married now!"

That's how I felt after 5 months of blisters and bloody socks with my pair of big black anachronistic boots. We were married. I wore them most days for 5 years until the soles worn through and I was forced to send them off to get resoled. 3 months later they returned from Seattle with a new set of Vibram soles, cleaned and waxed, looking nearly brand new. In 2003 I moved to New York City and they became my default Winter boots. Through the snow, ice and salt of 12 Winters I abused them, took them for granted. The leather was scuffed and stained with white rings of sno-melt. The soles had worn nearly smooth and cracked. I hadn't seen or noticed them and they had suffered. When I sat down to clean and wax them a month before I moved to Vermont I was ashamed.

 A New Hope

You never know what something means until it's too late, it seems. After having my boots as a constant companion for 20 years I was coming to terms with the fact that they were not going to make it another 20. After cycling through anger, denial, etc. I decided to throw myself onto the mercy of the universe and set up an eBay alert for Raichle 11.5 boots and see what happened. What happened for two months was nothing. But one morning I awoke to see that not only had someone listed a pair of Raichle's in my size but even the same obscure model, of which there was almost no information on the internet. $130 flew from my paypal account and for a week I waited like a child for a box to plonk down on my front step.

When the day finally came I took the box and hid it in the closet. For days I could not bring myself to open it so contorted were my emotions with worry and disbelief. Obviously something would be wrong with them. They wouldn't fit. The leather would be dried out and crispy like an old saddle. On and on the spirals of neurosis went. When we're young we don't know what thing mean but we also don't worry them to death either. So it goes.

I cracked the box on a Saturday afternoon.

The boots were perfect. Someone had obviously worn them to the store, once, and promptly stuck them in the back of the closet never to be seen again. The only things missing were the wads of paper stuffed in the toes. I slid my feet in and carefully laced them up. The smooth white leather lining caressed my feet. Magic and bliss. Until I started walking around in them.

Holy SHIT those motherfuckers were stiff as a wedding night prick! The love/hate relationship had been made anew.

I'm now 3 months into breaking my new Eigers in. I wear them dutifully everyday, all day and I have the bruises, blisters and weird calluses to prove it. In the beginning I was afraid that maybe, because I'm now an old man, my feet wouldn't endure months of aching feet. Perhaps I had just gone irretrievably soft. Then there was my daily climb up the hill from town to my house now made 4x harder by the small boat anchors tied to my feet.

Maybe I would just die of a heart attack, thinking to myself "Is this how it ends?" as I sank dizzily to my knees, head thrumming with proud moments and regrets as everything faded to grey.

Well, good news all the way around!

One, I have not died and I am now, in point of fact, in much better shape because of those heavy bastards than I was even 5 or 6 years ago, well before I officially become a sooty old geezer. And two, while the boots aren't exactly like wearing bedroom slippers, they are almost comfortable and 2 full months ahead of schedule. Just in time for Spring here in Vermont and the miles of hiking trails just a few minutes from my front door. Oh, and those old boots? Well, as it turns out, I have found a shop that is willing to resole/restitch them, replace the nonexistent leather linings and fix the cracked and stained scree collars. Unfortunately, good work doesn't come cheap but, when I'm more flush with cash this Summer I'll send them away for a few months to be renewed while I get to know these Heavy Horses a little bit better.

For draft horses, everyday is Hump day.

Weekend Cider Update: Mistakes Were Made. Plus Saké!

Here's a one sentence update on my cider making project: It went good, then it went bad.

A few technical items before we get to the fuckery:

1) I added a 1/2 teaspoon of Pectin enzyme that helps make the cider less cloudy to the juice about 1 1/2 weeks in.

As a natural wine nerd I have nothing against cloudy drink but it became pretty apparent that, if left untreated, the final product was going to be downright murky. Not exactly what you want when you're trying to convince people that your weird homemade cider is not a horrible tasting neurotoxin. Plus, pectinase helps free up some extra sugar and thus a bit more alcohol, which is nice.

2) The fermentation took 3 weeks, about 1 week longer than I was planning. This is actually good because a long, cool fermentation produces less headache inducing elements than when it goes warm and fast.

3) The end result was nice. Not super apple-y but clean with a crisp, white wine mineral mouthfeel and finish. In all honesty, surprisingly good! I'm picking up 3 more gallons tomorrow when we head to the store.

What would I change? Well, I'd like to add a pound of sugar per gallon to get a bit more alcohol. the apples up here are well suited to good tasting cider, it turns out, but they don't have much sugar. I'd guess that my first attempt was around 3-4% where most cider is around a beer-like 5-6% and the lack of alcohol makes the mouthfeel slightly off compared to quality commercial dry ciders.

Johnny Appleseed, real estate speculator, gentrified eastern waterways by planting fucking apple trees.

So, what did I fuck up?

In the actual MAKING of the cider, nothing. It couldn't have gone better. I was fully expecting that I was going to end up with murky turd-water or a marginally drinkable cider that had more in common with kombucha than Crispin. Anyway, where I failed was in assuming that champagne style bottles took regular American-sized bottle caps. Spoiler alert: They Do Not. I found this out by tearing the glass lip off the top of my first bottle, completely grenading my heavy duty capper thingie and spraying my kitchen with shattered glass. It was a real donkey fuck and now I have blue painters tape over the top of all my bottles as I wait for my 29mm caps, new capper and 29mm capping bell to arrive. Lesson learned: do not assume anything when it comes to cheese eating Euro equipment. 

Anyhow, my first fermentation project, all technical issues aside, was a success which has won me enough proof-of-concept brownie points to order a big-assed brew bucket in which I plan on making a pilot batch of Nigori Saké with some organic sweet rice from the hippy bulk aisle, some Koji from the internet and the same champagne yeast I used for the cider.

Warning: Sake ahead.

 Don't worry, rice wine is much more complicated than cider making and there will be MANY more entertaining opportunities for me to completely dick it up along the way. Have a great weekend.

Things Worth Living For: Salt-fired German Beer Humpens

Here's a fluffy, Feel-Good, non-confrontational post to lull you into the weekend, it's about mugs.

I honestly can't remember how I ended up buying my first German beer stein. It might have been after going down a deep, dark rabbit hole about traditional European high salt fired ceramics. I do, after all, have a university degree in the ceramic arts. Not the tiddly-winks basket weaving kind of a degree, but rather one that involved, among other things, building kilns from dumpster scraps, welding, formulating experimental purpose specific clay bodies, mold building, slip casting and using the ashes of specific hardwood trees to replicate a 2000 year old Chinese glaze. An engineering/chemistry/materials science/playing-with-fire degree or a sort that I abandoned in the end to make giant color field paintings, but I digress.

Firstly, what makes these mugs interesting, to me anyway, is that the way they are made. They begin as a slug of grey clay that is then swaged into the distinctive sort of bullet shape inside a die with the help of a plunger being pressed in at many thousands of PSI. (Ironically, this is exactly how the copper jackets of rifle and pistol bullets are made so the bullet shape may not be a coincidence.) The newly formed mug body is then trimmed and cleaned up by hand using a metal tool like a lemon zester and a damp natural sponge. On the mug on the right you can actually see the remains of the sponge mark at the bottom in the center, which I find un-endingly charming.

Next they're taken to a room where they sit and dry out for a day or two (this step cannot be rushed and, in fact, should be as slow as possible to prevent the clay from cracking because of the differential between the density of mechanical water in the thicker base versus the thinner lip. If these forces become to extreme you will have a shearing effect that will form a nearly perfect circular stress-riser around the circumference of the mug and the top 3/4s of the mug will just pop off. This is avoided by slowing the drying process with high humidity and giving the clay time to equalize. A process not unlike the salt equilibrium period when you are curing prosciutto, jamon serrano or country hams. Looks like that degree paid off after all...)

After drying to "leather hard" they are taken to an actual human who forms and attaches the handle by hand. And I mean "by hand". See that handle shape? it was formed by squeezing and drawing a piece of clay between the inside of the thumb and the knuckle of the forefinger knuckle area of the palm of some German guy. It's literally the outline of his hand. Once the handle is drawn it is then attached by smooshing the clay of the handle into the clay of the mug. Again, check the top of the mug on the right. You can see the thumb marks! Again, very charming but also very functional as the portion of your hand, when gripping the mug, is exactly the same portion of hand used to form the handle!

Ergonomics, people! These things, despite being fairly heavy and full of a half liter of beer (that's a pint), feel weirdly light in the hand because of this thoughtful and ingenious process.

A vision of the future me

Lastly, the mugs are taken to a series of two kilns. One is the low temperature bisque firing that removes all the mechanical water (as opposed to the water that is bonded, chemically) from the clay, pretty boring, and the second is the high salt firing, where things get exciting.

So once the kiln reaches around Cone 9 (2300' f), the neighborhood where the various minerals in the clay begin to vitrify (or fuse together to form, essentially, artificial stone) there is a massive injection of rock salt mixed with a bit of water through ports in the sides of the kiln. Because of the high temperatures inside the kiln the salt explodes and atomizes, turning into a vapor that coats the mugs. Then something really interesting happens: everywhere the salt vapor touches, the clay becomes molten in a thin layer of the outside. Yeah, like fucking LAVA, molten. The salt acts as a Flux that chemically lowers the melting point of the surface of the clay. This forms the glaze, or glassy surface, of the mug making it suitable to put beer or in my case, herbal tea in. Without the glaze the stoneware would be porous allowing millions of little crevices for bacteria to hang out and be gross in, an undesirable trait in a beer stein.

Well, that's it, your Friday beer themed fluff post has been served. Have a great weekend.

Yes, they come in Liters too.

Aesthetics 1

Choose good things. Do not give your time, money or attention to things that are anti-aesthetic, artificial or anti-human. Let them wither and pass.

And so begins the beginning of my series that will investigate the thinking and works of Bill Mollison, Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott among others and how they can help us see our way to a new appreciation and wonder of the world we live in: Where it's been and where it can go. I think you'll like it.  

Cavender's

I've done a lot of things in my life but driving across the country in a Uhaul with my best friend who was about to have a baby and was moving to the literal other side of the country is one that I will not soon forget.

We ate Hot Fish and Meat-and-Threes in Nashville. Pulled Pork pizza in Memphis. Nu-Mex combo plates in Albuquerque. And nearly threw up after plowing a buffet in Reno.

We stayed at KOA campgrounds, converted witchy-poo hippy barns filled with crickets, Rock and Roll motels and even a hotel-casino inside a military base that was (and still is) the worlds largest munitions dump.

But amid all those stranger things, the thing that sticks out the most to me is the three days we spent with Lon's relations in rural Oklahoma where we rode around in trucks, baled hay and almost died trying to fix an anhydrous ammonia tank that was hooked up to a giant tractor.

Then there were the steaks.

A brief aside here.

I have always thought of steak rub as bullshit. My way of thinking is/was "If it needs steak rub, it is shitty beef!" and I, generally, stand by it. If a steak is of good quality you only need Kosher salt and freshly cracked pepper to make it taste good. Simple.

Where the line gets blurry however, is Cavender's ALL Purpose Greek Seasoning which Lon's great uncle (?) introduced me to during the first night we visited. Rather than, like most rubs, make your steak, chicken or pork chop taste vaguely of chemical residue, Cavender's just makes evrything you put it on taste really good in a way that you cannot put your finger on, even if you know intimately what you are looking for.  My wife has even used it to make quickie trash salad dressing and it was Delicious.

I think what makes it so good, so inscrutable, is that it is completely balanced unlike most rubs and seasonings on the market these days that aim to bomb your palate with one dominant flavor like black pepper, garlic, lemon pepper or bacon. Cavender's is more like just enough garlic, oregano, thyme, pepper, rosemary and onion powder to make what you're eating like itself, only much better. I think here of Cavender's being like a really nice blouse and a hint of Carmody's Smokey Eye vs. getting a Miley Cyrus skank makeover, if that makes sense. Other seasonings are skank makeovers that remove the natural good flavor of the meat and replace it with something terrible and alien.

Yes. That is Snow.

Anyway, I thought of it because I am planning on seasoning up some local pork chops with it and grilling them this evening.

Oy Vey! The Lion of Zion Beef Patty Mina, Mon.

I have repeat offended on these.

I like fusion. Not like DHS Fusion centers or the kind of Fusion you get from overpriced, vaguely racist, New American cuisine type scam restaurants that were all the rage when I moved to NYC a decade and a half ago. No, I mean the kind of stuff that you find anywhere that multiple newly transplanted ethnic groups find themselves sharing the same area. Indian Chinese is a favorite fusion of mine. You can find Indian Chinese food anywhere in the world where there are both Indians and Chinese people and, from the 8 or 9 places I've eaten at over the years, it is exquisitely strange and delicious.

A more mixed bag is the whole oeuvre of Asian-Hot Dog-Taco-Kim Chi type stuff that you'll find in all the hipster cities. Sometimes it works well as exemplified by the East Side Kings food carts in the back yards of Austin's East Side bars. Sometimes it's just a cluster fuck of flavors being mindlessly devoured by idiots, as exemplified by the whole Asia Dog thing in Brooklyn from 7-8 years ago. So it goes.

Anyway, I had been revisiting the 1992 classic The New York Cookbook while I was also infatuated with the Zahav "Israeli" cookbook. The result was a Beef Patty Mina.

A beef patty, if you aren't familiar, is a Jamaican street food that is one part English hand pie and one part Indian samosa, sort of. Basically, you get a filling of curry and Scotch Bonnet flavored beef filling inside a yellow pocket of savory pie crust. And they're weirdly addictive. And kind of gross.

Satmars near my old loft on Flushing ave. VERY good Babkas are one block back, on the left

A Mina is a meat and veggie pie filling inside a crust made from soggy stale Matzo crackers that is layered inside a pie tin or cast iron skillet, egg washed and baked. Yep, Jewish trash food. The problem is that I liked the idea of the Mina but, frankly, hated the bland spicing of the Mina filling in the Zahav recipe. Why would you put cinnamon in a fucking ground beef filling? Right. Also, I wasn't about to make beef patty pastry dough for multiple reasons that involve laziness and my Godzilla toddler. The clear solution was to marry the Beef Patty filling with the Mina crust and call it good. This is how fusion should work, btw.

Yes, Mina is a TRASH FOOD.

 Quite proud of my elegant solution to my twin cravings, I set about making the filling. My recipe seemed odd, but legit since it came from the above mentioned NY Cookbook and from a Jamaican "Jerk King" guy. It involved beef, lots of onions, habanero chiles, curry powder and... bread crumbs. I knew the bread crumbs were wrong. Wrong texture. Very un-beef patty like, at least NY beef patties, yet I made it anyway.

One the other end I was also soaking Matzoh to line my greased cast iron pan where I promptly entered FAIL mode once again by using multiple layers of Matzoh to make the crust instead of one. The result of both fails was a dinner that was "fine." By that I mean, it was edible and even kind of good but not at all what I was shooting for in my mind. But, hey, my loss is your gain as below I give you the corrected "with all my powers" Beef Patty Mina recipe for your perusal and contemplation.

Ingredients

Beef Patty Filling

1 lb ground beef on the leaner side
1 onion, finely minced
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons AP flour
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon mild curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 cup beef broth
1 tablespoon scotch bonnet hot sauce or to taste

Mina Crust

1 package Matzoh crackers
1 egg, whisked with 1 tablespoon cold water

Begin

Heat up a large skillet on high heat and add the oil. Once the oil is hot but not smoking, add the beef. Chop up with your grandma spoon and cook until it's brown then add onion and cook 3-4 minutes until soft and a little brown. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute. Add all spices/salt and cook 1-2 minutes then add the flour and reduce heat to medium and cook for 1-2 minutes until it starts to stick then SLOWLY stir in the beef stock until a very thick gravy consistancy is reached. Add hot sauce and mix. Turn off heat and let sit for 30-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 425'. Grease up your cast iron (12" or so) with butter and dip 4-5 matzoh crackers in water and let them sit for 3-4 minutes until soft. Cover the bottom and sides with ONE layer of cracker. Yes, they will break. Do your best to use larger pieces but make sure, no matter what, to cover the whole interior of the cast iron with crackers then add the filling and top with one layer of crackers and then brush with the egg wash. Toss in the oven and cook until the top is golden and glossy. Remove from the oven and let it rest for 5 minutes then CAREFULLY flip the Mina onto a plate like a Spanish Tortilla. Serve!!!

Addendums

You can add a 1/2 cup of leftover KFC mashed potatoes to the beef patty filling to get a slightly more Shepard's Pie type thing going on.

Also, you can add a knob of ginger, minced up, with the onions at the beginning to make it more zesty.

To get FUSION on FUSION you can add a layer of mozzarella on the top of the filling of the Mina before adding the top layer of Matzoh to yield a NYC pizza slice place classic cheesy beef patty. Gross.

P.P.S.

No, I am not sure whether I am using all of the internet meme images that appear in my blog posts Ironically, post-Ironically or if I actually think they're funny on their face. These are strange and confusing times we live in.

Low Infrastructure Cider Making, Courtesy, Thrift and the Andy Warhol Death Cult

In two weeks this could be 4 x 750ml bottles of elegant cider?

So an old friend of mine turned me onto a beer brewing blog called One Pot Brewing. As the name might suggest the whole reason for being of this blog is to test out the theory of minimalist brewing.

This is significant because one of the things that has always kept me from home brewing is the fact that it classically requires A Lot of gear. Wort chillers, miles of copper piping, a number of huge pots, high BTU propane turkey burners, expensive glass carboys, airlocks and on and on and on.

My issue with all this gear was threefold: 1) It is expensive. 2) It takes up a lot of space with junk that rarely gets used even if you're WAY into beer brewing (I mean how many 5 gallon batches of beer can you possibly drink without getting a fatty liver?) and 3) What if I got all that fucking gear and then decided that I didn't enjoy brewing enough to keep doing it?

As a jack-of-all hobbies with a wife that has seen me deep dive into many nerdy interests only to abandon said interests a month or two later, never to return to them again. Now, as a Dad of a mega-toddler and husband to a woman who is understanding to a point, I just can't bring myself to spend coin, junk up the house, make a giant mess and burn a lot of time on my new hobbies. To upset my domestic tranquility for the sake of my wee tinker drives is not a good idea if I want to continue to nerd out without significant oversight, if you catch my meaning.

Anyway, I was intrigued with the guy's minimal equipment approach to brewing. However the prerequisite of gear was still a bit too intense as I have other things I am more interested in pursuing to use up the amount of marital capital required.

However, the One Pot guy also had a very minimal hard cider recipe that required very little gear, allowing me to dabble without having to explain multiple giant boxes from Amazon on the doorstep. Basically: pour store bought cider in a fermentation bucket, pitch champagne yeast, stir, ferment, siphon off clear cider into bottles and cap the bottles. Easy!

Again, I have some other projects going that are already edging towards the redline of acceptable tinkering so I decided to remove the fermentation bucket from my cider production as it eliminated a sizable box squatting by the mailbox that needed to be explained.

The set up

My thinking here was that, once upon a time, when I was deeply bitten by the distilling bug (and something I fully intend to return to this Fall when the apples start to come in) I was gifted a couple cases of cider that had started to spontaneously ferment in the jugs.

An important aside here is that fermenting liquids produce a fair amount of CO2 gas as the yeast coverts sugars into alcohol. This CO2 needs to be vented in such a way that it can get out but undesirable microbes, that could make the fermentation go funky, cannot get in.

My solution was to poke a slit in the tops of the cider jugs with a very thin, sharp knife. The idea was that the back pressure of the CO2 would keep out the things I'd like to keep out while allowing the CO2 to leak out without the jug tops blowing off, covering my kitchen with stinky, half-fermented, cider. My gamble worked marvelously. Nothing blew up. The cider fermented completely without turning to vinegar and the resulting distilled applejack was delicious and VERY strong. Proof of concept: achieved.

So yesterday we made our weekly trek to the grocery store and I picked up a gallon of locally pressed cider. I already had an airlock from my previous failed Kimchee project and a packet of champagne yeast that I had kicking around. The set up, in my mind, was to drill and undersized hole in the cap of the jug of cider through which I would pour the yeast using a small funnel and then stick the airlock stem in the hole which would stretch around the stem, keeping the whole thing air tight and thus safe from contamination.

I let the airlock soak in a very mild bleach solution to sanitize it. As it soaked I sanitized the drill bit in the same solution and then proceeded to drill the hole, jam yeast in there and then capped the whole thing off with the airlock.

This was last night.

As of this morning the cider is lightly bubbling up, a good sign, and I can see a light layer of dead yeast collecting at the bottom of the jug indicating that everything is going to plan. Whether or not this will work, from the point of view of an uncontaminated, clean fermentation, remains to be seen but I am hopeful.

In the end, the stakes are pretty low:

Worst case scenario is that I will end up with a gallon of raw cider vinegar (which I have already made on a smaller scale with an old partial jug of cider that had been forgotten in the fridge) which we can use to pickle vegetables from the garden this Summer. The $6.00 investment in a gallon of local cider that we can get $35.00 worth of vinegar out of is still a win. The domestic bliss bonus points will not be as numerous but, seriously, it was six bucks.

Best case scenario is that I will get a nice, clear hard cider that I can rack into empty sparkling wine bottles with a few sugar cubes and cap to achieve a natural sparkling cider which my wife is already looking forward to sharing with house guests on our deck. Time will tell. Check back in a few days for an update.

Addendum

I'd like to say a little about the notion of maintaining domestic tranquility cited above. By this I don't mean to reinforce the sort of 1950's Leave it to Beaver passive aggressive, "honey-do list" kind of martial Battle of the Sexes horseshit. What I'm saying is Don't Be A Dick. This is something that most people try to do everyday when interacting with others as a part of evolutionary behaviors. By this I mean that most self-aware, non-idiots in the world try not only to not irritate others with self centered behavior, not only this but they actually attempt to go out of their way to be kind to others as much as they can. Common courtesy, I believe they used to call it. Why? Because people with manners will be saved from being eaten by a saber toothed tiger, while dicks will not not be because everyone finds them irritating and selfish. If you plan on being a rude prick you should be well prepared. This may explain why Silicon Valley Tech Bros and Wall Street types are becoming luxury versions of doomsday preppers.

The people that we live with deserve better than the strangers we encounter on our daily rounds. A deeper common courtesy, tailored to their particular likes and dislikes. In this realm, things like not talking endlessly about work, making a mess in the kitchen, then not cleaning it up or, in my case, not spending a bunch of money junking up the house with a ton of stupid shit that rarely, if ever, gets used.

1999 me really, really loved this movie.

Thrift, Limitations and the Warhol Death Cult of Consumer Equality. 

Embedded in this courtesy is also Thrift, which I mentioned in an earlier post. A lot of people tend to buy things they don't need, as a matter of course, to fill the emotional holes in their lives or to get a brief "thrill" that breaks up the hours and gives them something to look forward to. This is completely understandable. This has been our training. Marketers and advertisers have paid billions upon billions of dollars to condition us to do this. Rather than prattle on with some sort of warmed over Fight Club rant about consumerism I'd like to offer up a different take.

 Limitations, rather than being a hindrance to human creativity, are the fount from which it comes. Said a differently "necessity is the mother of invention." While you can't get much done without some truly basic shit, you can do a lot without buying ALL the shit. Limitations are the midwife of the above cider recipe.

If I told you to go out and buy the same $200's worth of shit that most people tell you to get, would my words be worth reading? Probably not. I would just be another, nearly identical, turd floating in the soup terrine of the internet. Diversity, sweet diversity, is the product of unique circumstances. Circumstances are inherently limitations, all. This is science. Common sense. The way of all things.

Mediocrity is good. Mediocrity works.

Andy Warhol, if you read him, was a fan of sameness. Non-diversity. Everyone should be like everyone else. Everyone should be famous for 15 minutes and everyone should like everybody. 

These are the platitudes of impossible progressive fascism. We will never be same. We will never be equal. We will all be the products of our limitations, environment and circumstances.

You and I are made of our limitations. Sometimes we wish that we were, for instance, taller, richer, thinner, talented at the things we like to do but suck at, etc. You see what I'm saying here. But we aren't. We are who we are, for better or worse and we deal with it.

Part of the reason I am making cider is because really good cider is cheap in Vermont. I eat a lot more cheese than I did a year ago for the same reason. I will grow certain vegetable varietals this Summer because the Summer is shorter here than California or Morocco. On it goes. Are these reasons/circumstances good or bad? Neither. They're different and difference is what makes the world a beautiful, complex place worth living in. Without difference you're just another dumb asshole buying a Coke.

Andy Warhol, apologist philosopher of the Corporate Age.

 The consumerist nihilism of people like Warhol is, quite literally, the belief system of a death cult. A banal corporate mall of sameness and "equality". I don't want a Coke. I don't want to be equal. I want to be who I am and who I will become living inside my limitations.

Cider Update 02/21

Well,  I may be eating my eating (or drinking?) my words. While my cider has been bubbling away I did a little research and it seems that most people who make hard cider from store bought cider jugs add a half-cup of strong tea to their cider to give it body and structure. This, I obviously did not do.

However, I have a few things going for me:

 1) The One Pot Brewing guy did not do this and he used frigging apple juice, not raw sweet cider, and things seemed to turn out well using Champagne yeast, which I used as well.

2) This being Vermont, most apples grown here are of the MacIntosh types, which are a sort of Grandmotherly, tart all-purpose apple much more in keeping with cider making than the Golden Delicious type found in typical grocery store ciders.

3) I can add Hibiscus tea to the cider during bottling to both give it a groovy pink color and tannins just like black tea but with the added benefit of also giving tartness and what I am hoping is a very complimentary flavor. I'll taste it in a week or so and decide. Besides, I need the time to empty some champagne bottles of their vinous content so I have something to bottle them into.

In Europe, Bums Drink Cider. Really.

 All of the above said, I think that once I have ironed out my recipe I will be getting a 5 gallon glass demijohn. Why?

Well, reason one is that I have had to be watchful of my cider as the expanding cider has snuck up into the bubbler a few times because there is not enough of a gap betwixt it and the fermenting cider.

Reason two is that I will want to do 5 gallon batches for the sake of not dicking around and wasting time piddling with a bunch of tiny batches. After all the point of this is to have a neat hobby that both scratches my Wee Tinker itch and provides me and mine a steady flow of inexpensive, quality drink. Again, the math roughly goes like this: $6 a gallon divided by the 4 x 750ml bottle yield is $1.50 a bottle. Even with the cost of caps ($6 for 144) and Capper ($9) that is still $5.25 a bottle but once the first batch is done that cost will again go to $1.50 per 750ml or cheaper, as Dutton's (a roadside plant and produce stand outside of town) sells gallons for $5 each.

The third reason is that I spotted a nice glass demijohn for very cheap at a local junk shop.

Stay tuned.