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.

Notes on Fear

Fear, if you don't know, is how they sell you things.

Clorets are a good sample case for this. They're good partially because they're both absurd and very smart. The absurdity is that almost any minty chewing gum is sold, I would assume, to people who in part fear having un-minty breath. The genius is that they jumped into that fear of bad breath with both feet and created a product specifically targeted at that fear.

Now in Toilet Brush Flavor!!!

As mundane as this example is I think it proves a larger point that marketing, generally, is based on a modified incarnation of the Underpant Gnome Economy:

1) Provoke a particular fear or insecurity in the target demographic.

2) Offer the provoked subject a product that assuages or removes the fear, temporarily.

3) Profit.

If this scheme seems banal, boring and deterministic well, it is. Long ago the spotless air-conditioned rooms full computers replaced the thoughtful, gifted empaths like Don Draper.

Not only that... they replaced a lot of stuff.

What we know today as "Big Data" or any of the other adjectives that are pasted on the lifeless hulks of computational units, servers and routers that lurk in dark bunkers all over the world like Cthulhu, began not long after WW2.

The RAND corporation, originally a creation of the Air Force (that stood for Research ANd Development, by the by.) developed Rational Choice Theory based on the mathematical ideas of John Nash (Yes, the Beautiful Mind guy). These ideas turned the individual person, the communities that they live in and their larger societies into "Consumers" that chose between one thing or another based on what seemed "rational" for them to choose. Thusly the individual or the multitudes could be manipulated into "choosing" things based on what was known about the things that mattered to them.

While one could certainly go on for hundreds of thousands of pages detailing all of implications and technologies that haven fallen out of the above paragraph I'll offer my own short digestion.

1) You and I are considered consumers, not just by marketers, corporations and ad agencies but by think tanks that influence political strategies and campaigns on both side of the aisle as well as the military and intelligence services.

2) These so-called consumers can be manipulated to make choices based on provocations that produce fear in the target demographic(s). 

Handbook for 18 year-old virgins

 As an only child I was a shy early on, afraid of talking to people I did not know intimately. I preferred to hole up with a Golden Book about insects or loiter in the kitchen during holiday parties and other get-togethers. The orginal target market for the Well for Boys, as it were.

This, of course, very much rubbed my father (who, among many of other things, had once killed a Vietcong sapper with a drywall hatchet in an alley during the Tet Offensive) the wrong way.

He would go out of his way to make me interact with strangers, mostly by sending me to pay for stuff like the bill at a diner or gas at the gas station, as a way to confront my fears.

More importantly, it worked. I grew to become a confidant young man one knock-knee'd trip to the register at a time. A man who has kicked through an unending rain-forest of dicks to reach my present age of 40.

I relate this not simply out of my own desire to self-aggrandize but to relate to you a sort of "Fear is the Mind Killer" mantra my father would repeat to me each and every time he would send me to a register with a 20 dollar bill or the yard foreman to order four dozen bags of sheetrock mud: "They can't eat you."

"And three dollars and sixty-three cents is your change.."

 If this seems both a) an inaccurate representation of potential outcomes and b) vaguely humorous it's because it was meant that way. He, after all, was the man who told me about the man-eaters of Borneo and their penchant for "Long Pig". His point was that fear, like the idea of a 48 year-old waitress eating me at the worn Formica register counter, was patently silly.

Well, that and that he couldn't always trot out the melodramatic "A coward dies a thousand deaths. A brave man, only one." he saved for moments when I was like "Not only no, but FUCK NO I'm not giving that woman the money and WHY, exactly, are we in this Santeria shop in the first place?"

Anyway, pay the bill but let them know that you aren't buying. They can't eat you.

Salmon Cakes

Not reported to the nice young man at the Detroit customs house

It's best to begin at the beginning:
My Mom is Canadian.

Yes, your faithful scribe is, indeed, a partial creation of the great state of Kanuckistan.

More to that point, I was educated for a brief period of time by the educational directorate of the Province of British Colombia during the first grade and to that end, I can say a few useless words in French Canadian. None of these words have done me any good when visiting Montreal.

Anyhow, as I write this I am listening to Natalie Merchant solo albums which, somehow, seems like the Canadian thing to do even though I'm completely sure she is British. Somewhere in a Toronto suburb there is a coffee house playing Tigerlily unironically, no doubt.

So, when my Mom comes to visit our Godzilla toddler she, for reasons that are not clear to me, brings with her many cans of Premium Sockeye Salmon, or Saumon Sockeye if you speak the mother tongue of Jack Kerouac: Franglais. I should go on to point out that my mother's side of the family are a sort of self-hating Franch Canadiens. Her maiden name is Desjarden. French as a Parisian vegetable market. Yet they insist on pronouncing it "Dis-Jar-Den" and, wait for it, they hate the Quebecios in a way that is almost like the low level racism people in the Midwest have for drunken Indians. I digress. 

The point is that I am usually swimming in primo canned wild Salmon. The result is this recipe for an exquisite seafood sandwich much like a crab cake but, you know, one made mostly of crab or in this case salmon. Sub in crab meat and add Old Bay instead of dill and you're on your way to making a damned fine crab cake. 

Add caption

Recipe

Salmon Cakes

1 418g (or 14.5 oz.) can of wild red Salmon
1 cup finely crushed Ritz or Saltine crackers
1 small onion, finely minced
1 tiny shallot, finely minced
1 egg (good eggs only please)
2 teaspoons dried Dill
3-4 grinds of black pepper
2 big pinches of Kosher salt

Tartar Sauce

1/2 cup quality mayonnaise
1/4 cup copped dill pickles
3-4 dashes hot sauce

Molson Golden

Begin

Get out your largest mixing bowl, open the can of Salmon and drain most of the liquid then dump it into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Mix well making sure to smoosh up the Salmon bones. No, canned Salmon is not boneless or skinless. Taste it for seasoning (this is why I said Good Eggs not the Salmonella bomb cheap eggs in the 18 packs. Also, seriously, good eggs are cheap. Buy them.) and add salt, dill, etc. if lacking. Set aside in the fridge for an hour to allow the flavors to marry. 

Cook

The preferred instrument is a big cast iron pan with a lid that fits. Preheat the skillet on high for 5 minutes and then drop it to medium-ish and add oil to the pan and swish it around. Form the patties (sorry, "cakes") into 4 inch wide by 1 1/2 inch thick rounds and plop them into the pan and cover it for 4-5 minutes. Flip them gently and cook for another 4-5 minutes, covered, on the second side until both look like the photo to the left. 

While they cook mix up the Tartar sauce and fry your potato buns in butter. To serve place the cakes in the buns and top with aforementioned tartar sauce (bonus points for shredded Iceburg lettuce) and serve with potato chips.


A note on substitutions:

The crackers in this recipe can be replaced with an equal amount of crushed Salt and Vinegar potato chips (omit salt from recipe), seasoned bread crumbs, panko, Chicken in a Biscuit crackers or even Potato Buds.

 Secondary considerations:

These patties can be made smaller or into other shapes and cooked then beer battered and deep fried to arrive at any number of unknown temples of bliss or, alternatively, made into patties and then dredged in crushed Salt and Vinegar or regular potato chips or, perhaps, even Pringles. Do so at the risk of your own mortal soul because beyond this point, as they say: "There be Dragons".

"Yo Dawg, you got them Pringles in there?"

 

French Fry Omelette

No sane person loves cold soggy fries.

So I went to see John Wick 2 this weekend.

I don't want to get into the movie itself but I'll say that it was totally fine. If you were expecting the Godfather part 2 instead of a mechanistic, video game styled shoot 'em up with a liberal sprinkling of vaguely Masonic imagery than you might want to readjust your expectations.

What is really happening here is that we met our friends at the heinous dumphole known as the Hampshire Mall in Hadley, MA. Pre-cinema drinks were had at Arizona Pizza which is basically where you would eat if you died and woke up in Hell... and Hell was a mall in 1993. TGI Fridays meets a gross, big screen studded, self-reflexive parody of TGI Fridays staffed by UMass 19 year-olds.

We were late, as most people with bionic toddlers often are, so we missed out on ordering food but did have time to guzzle a few pints of murky craft-brew diabetes water. Long story short there were quite a few leftover French fries that one of our friends inexplicably took home and slid into the refrigerator, likely never to be thought of, let alone eaten, ever again.

Yes, this is a real picture of the Arizona Pizza hell place.

The next morning, nursing a "let's get drunk enough to discuss the semiotics of John Wick 2' type hangover, I awoke with a desperate need for weapons grade Brunch Garbage food. Eggs? Check. American Cheese? Check. What else... wait, what is in this wilted foam deli carton? AH HA! Half a chicken burger and a shit load of flaccid french fried potatoes. Valhalla.

To write this down as a formal recipe seems insulting to real food that needs a recipe to describe it's preparation so we won't do that.

I managed to find a serviceable sized small frying pan (non-stick) and some butter. As I waited for the pan to heat up (medium setting) I whisked an egg together with a pinch of salt and roughly chopped the aforementioned limp potato abortions.

A large knob of butter was added to the pan along with the fries which I then forgot about for several minutes while I hunted for a seltzer to quench my prodigious cotton mouth. There was none but the fries had gotten quite crispy. Revivified by the healing power of butter and heat to a delicious, soul greasingly golden brown. I added the egg, gave it a moment and then sloppily flipped the omelette and added a slice of white American cheese. After about a minute I folded the egg mess onto a plate and discovered one of the best shitty breakfasts since the ubiquitous New York City bodega bacon, egg and cheese sandwich.

I don't care if it sounds deeply sad, I will say it anyway: This great and terrible item is the best thing that has happened to me in the past 90 days. Except for my new pair of boots and a couple other things we'll discuss at a later date.

Update:

I found out after I wrote this post that the French Fry Omelette is the most popular street food in Tanzania where it is known as "Chips Mayai".

Tanzanians know what is up.

Check it out HERE

Video Games

 I"ll start here by saying that I really, really loved video games as a kid. Because I was a relatively poor kid I never had an Atari or Intellivision or a Colecovision or any of those early home gamer systems which only made me love them more. I sought them out, no matter how shitty, at the supermarket, the mall, friends houses... whenever I had a chance I would play them.

Now, in my high school years I came to, predictably after all the DARE program propaganda, enjoy certain mind-altering substances. As it turned out a friend of mine had just gotten the program Doom on his folks 386 computer if anyone remembers such things from the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We played it. A lot. My favorite weapon was the pump shotgun with which I dispatched all manner of ugly, alien hell-beasts. It was great.

Then one time we played it on Acid.

After about 15 minutes of playing it I had a moment that was a very deep and profound moment of "What the FUCK am I doing?!?!"

Here I was shooting horrible, misshapen alien demon things with their guts and blood splattering all over the walls of the strange megalithic dungeons when I was living in a miraculous universe of beauty, patterns and rhythms ever expanding into new and increasingly complex arrangements on a planet that is home to an infinitude of wonders and curiosities: Pyramids, giant squid, Sequoia trees, tardigrades. Not to mention mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, engineering, metaphor, symbolism and music. That was that.

 Funnily enough, I had a very similar moment at the same friend's house with industrial music. "Why am I listening to this mechanical, lifeless death soundtrack when I could go outside and lay in the sun?" Or something like that. Memory editorializes the past.


These are wholly unremarkable stoner thoughts, obviously. However, these realizations changed the path of my life. While I did, now and then, play video games and listen to industrial music but, mostly I didn't. I had gotten a bad taste in my mouth about these things that I just couldn't shake that saved me from wasting countless hours of my youth gunning down fictional bad guys and instead I wasted them hiking, reading books that were over my head and writing shitty poetry. Are those things better than playing video games? Maybe. But that isn't the point.

The point is that, as I tried and failed to point out in my Benign Sedition post, technology is something to be a little skeptical of, especially when it is being marketed at us in a way that makes us seemingly crazy not to just want, but to crave it. Or, for that matter, to feel ostracized from our culture simply by not immediately and mindlessly taking it on board. To state it another way: "Is this technology working for me and my enjoyment of my life or is it keeping me, acting as a layer of abstraction or mediation, from enjoying my life?

As I have said earlier, I'm not going to burn my phone or laptop and I'm not going to throw a brick through my TV. But I am using them much less and doing stuff like cooking, reading books, going to the library and taking baths. This experiment is rather recent but I have been less stressed out, slept better and, generally, enjoyed my life a lot more.

Ordering of the Passions

I've been trying to narrow down what the core causes of the general irrational madness I have seen grow and bloom in American culture during the past few years. This is a tree that has born the fruit of narcissist selfie culture, emotionally kinky oversharing on social media and, lately, the grotesque types of emotional overreactions leading up to and following our recent presidential election.

I swear that this will be the last post that has anything to do with politics for a while, and really I'm just using politics here as an extreme example of the larger issue, which is the fact that, as a society, we seem to be increasingly addicted to unchecked emotive responses to the world around us rather than engaging our minds to figure out what is at the root of our responses and understanding them.

What the fuck am I talking about?

Well, I'll have to start by saying that I have been reading a lot about the "Dark Ages" and its antecedents in West, East and Middle East. No, I'm not secretly gearing up to begin a Dan Carlin style Hardcore History podcast. I've been researching the transition from the Bronze to the Iron age in those cultures, particularly looking at the development, establishment and spread of advanced metallurgical technologies.

This research has yielded all manner of choice factids and surprising nuggets. For instance: the earliest "Iron" weapons in the East were daggers and swords with alloyed copper cores, bronze blades and GET THIS cutting edges made from ferric meteorites! Mandate of Heaven, indeed! This technology also came not from China but to China from the Steppe peoples who likely got it from the Vedic civilizations of the Indian sub-continent. It is known, for instance, that the Vikings were trading furs along the Silk Road for ingots of carbon steel produced in India that they, in turn, fashioned into the famous Ulfberht swords as early as 600 AD. I digress.

Chinese Alchemical Smelting Furnace

Anyway, aside from the aforementioned cocktail trivia, the real meat of getting into and understanding the evolution of metallurgy involves understanding that 1) these people were practicing science and 2) science of that time was not a highly specialized endevour as we know it today, where you can make a career from being an expert in a particular species of flatworm, but rather a broad and interdisciplinary science that encompassed astrology, "magic", philosophy, chemistry, psychology and a broad swath of interests we'll, for the sake of brevity, call the Occult. This scientific system is most commonly referred to today as Alchemy.

"BULLSHIT!!!!" I hear you say. "Those people were a bunch of superstitious old fools who thought they could turn lead into gold and were busy trying to get little men to fly out of their test tubes. That is not science! That is crazy people shit!" Point is taken. Yes, that is what the average person thinks about when they think of Alchemy, if they indeed think of it at all and I am not going to go into great detail here trying to show you that that view is a tad myopic. Instead I'll just note that quite a number of people that are revered by scientific history were, in complete fact, raging Alchemists.

Sir Isaac Newton: Fucking Alchemist

   Again, for the sake of brevity I'll name one: Sir Isaac fucking Newton. Yes, the guy that Newtonian Physics are named after. The Co-creator of Differential Calculus. Optics. Color Theory. Head of the Royal Society. That guy. Total Alchemist.

What does any of this have to do with people rage hating on Twitter, snapping selfies and all that "greater societal ill"?

I am getting there.

So, I had to (for the sake of research?) run down and try to understand Alchemy in an effort to figure out where all this pre-scientific science shit was coming from. Hold on tight now, it's going to get a LOT weirder before we end up landing softly on my point of this whole post. Now realize I am going to have to grossly simplify things and leave out a bunch of shit but, in the main, what I am about to say is truthful.

Alchemy, at least in the West and Middle East, is the product of the teachings of what have been called "the Hermetic Texts" written by Hermes the Thrice Great who, in turn got these texts or the core ideas for the texts from Egyptian who in turn likely got them from, wait for it, an ancient technologically advanced civilization that was destroyed by some sort of great disaster like a flood. Yes, we're getting into some weird spaces here but please note that these are not my beliefs, this is what the history of the Hermetic wisdoms are claiming: "All this Shit Came from Atlantis, man."

"Are you claiming that "Mr. Science", Sir Isaac fucking Newton, believed that science and a bunch of other shit came from the lost civilization of Atlantis? Are you out of your mind?" Yes, I am saying that and no, if anyone is crazy here, it's Isaac Newton.

I totally ordered the shit out of my passions when I chose to not put a Black Science Man meme here.

 So we now get closer to my elusive point.

Coming with all this science from Atlantis comes a lot of other stuff. The Hermetic traditions permeate Western thought in the Middle Ages and some ideas that look a lot like Hermetic stuff also end up in pre-millenial Chinese thought. One of these concepts is sometimes called "The Ordering of the Passions" which basically boils down to this: strive not to be a slave to your emotions and desires but rather their master, drawing energy from intensity and channeling it into thoughtful, well reasoned creative acts.

Let's all read that again and then contemplate all the examples we've seen lately of actual grown up adults (who should fucking know better) acting like spoiled children having a temper-tantrum:

"Strive not to be a slave to your emotions and desires but rather their master, drawing energy from intensity and channeling it into thoughtful, well reasoned creative acts." 

If you can argue with that, you can argue with anything.

Big Sexy on opening night of La Fama BBQ

Recipe

Mac and Cheese Sauce or the Alchemy of Cream

The origin of this recipe dates back to Hurricane Sandy when I and my crack team of culinary commandos boarded an Avianca 757 at JFK the day after the Hurricane and flew to Bogota, Colombia to open the very first American BBQ restaurant in South America. Steve "Big Sexy" Harit, who I had stolen from the restaurant of that bald Greek guy chef bro with much relish, was tasked with developing the recipes for the sides. I won't recount all the amazing things he pulled completely out of his ass in a strange country full of strange ingredients but one memorable recipe is this one here. It is simple, easy and WAY better than any Mac and Cheese I have had before or since.



Ingredients:

1 quart heavy cream
1 onion, halved
2-3 cups shredded cheddar cheese or cheese du jour
Salt
hot sauce

Begin

Take one half of the onion and coat it with oil and then set it, flat side down, in a cast iron or other pan over high heat. Disconnect smoke alarms. Cook the onion half until it is moderately blackened. This is called an Onion Broule'.

Now place onion is a sauce pan with the cream and simmer for 5-7 minutes to get the good oniony flavor crystals out. Remove onion. Season with salt and hot sauce to taste then add the cheese and whisk it into the sauce. Taste again for seasoning then toss with your undercooked (if the label says 7 minutes, do 4 minutes) pasta of choice, slide into a casserole and cover with breadcrumbs. Bake 10 minutes in a 450' oven or until crumbs are golden, NOT burnt.

Pairing

 Colombian Beer (Poker or Club Colombia in the can), cheap cocaine, Aqua Diente sin Azucar.