Coldplay/Hot Knivez

"Half the Batali" from Hot Knivez on Vimeo.

Satori on Skynyrd

Truth be told, I pretty much stopped eating meat about the same time I became truly committed to the concept of secular humanism. (Catchy opening, no?)

I think there’s more of a connection there than I first realized. When I stopped eating meat, people asked me how I “survived” without meat. What did I center my meals around? The same was true with humanism. “Don’t you feel a hole without God in your life? How do you get on without a moral compass?”

Well, I believe I do have a moral compass, of course (frankly, it's why I'm writing this in the first place.)

To boot, I believe in the m.o. that’s worked so well for the White Stripes, the whole Oulipo artists’ group and the free jazz-leaning Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, to name but a few examples: not lamenting such so-called “limitations,” but instead luxuriating in them.

Do I miss eating meat?

Sure.

“Sure” as in, even though it killed a part of my soul -- and maybe my marriage -- yes indeedy, I did enjoy those sweaty bouts of adulterous coitus. (Not speaking from experience here!) "Sure" in the same way that we relish telling stories about when we whipped someone but good, even as the thought of such violence secretly sickens us now. (We tend to not talk about when we got whipped, of course.)

So: sure. And he who says he doesn’t miss meat – he who’s tasted it, at least -- is probably lying. But righting (and writing) what you feel was probably a wrong in your life isn’t a subtraction, to my way of thinking, but rather the most admirable of additions.

* * * * * * *

My first brush with the concept of vegetarianism came long about 1982, if memory serves me. I’d gone over to a friend’s house, as had often been the case, to listen to records and watch a Showtime broadcast of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. My friend, Gary Helton, was a kid who had grown up fast. He grew up across the two-lane blacktop from my friends and I: a nascent neighborhood wholly apart from our own. There were tales of guys who drank beer and some that sold weed. One guy'd even dropped out of school, and it was said he bought condoms by the box. To our more Levitt-like burg, this land -- this "Brookfield"! seemed positively exotic.

Anyway, this friend, he had a ‘stache before the rest of us, drank before the rest of us, smoked before the rest of us, smoked pot before the rest of us. Perhaps predictably, he also dropped out of school before the rest of us.

One day, after dinner at his house – steak (bottle of A1), baked potato (butter, dabs of dour cream), iceberg salad (French dressing), dinner rolls (premade) and sweet tea (homemade, as I remember), we retired to his brother’s room to look at his records and to scarf, rather Tom and Huck-like, some stolen brownies.

More specifically, we went to look at his Lynyrd Skynyrd records. I can still name them in order today, as I used to do the planets, the better to impress my parents’ friends: pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd, Second Helping, Nuthin' Fancy, Gimme Back My Bullets, Street Survivors, and Skynyrds’s First…And Last, Gold and Platinum, Best of the Rest. (I don’t count any post-plane-crash stuff excepting the last three cleaning-the-vaults releases.)

So anyway, this friend, belly full of beef and butter and brownies, pulled out the holy grail of Skynyrd records, the out-for-three-days-only, pre-plane crash and too-close-for-comfort “flames cover” of Street Survivors, and, after making me wipe my hands on my jeans, allowed me to hold it. Holy damn. We stared at it for a bit, and I remember he would look at me, and I'd look back at him, and then we'd both look back down at the record, drawn in by the tractor beam that was forbidden music -- dirty music, cuss-friendly music, older kid's music -- back in the LP age. Guitarist Allen Collins, on the cover stage left, was wearing a Tom Wolfe-meets-Jimmy Page white linen suit with tails, along with what looks like a T-shirt sporting an iron-on decal of a striated, Japanese-style sun. Guitarist Gary Rossington rocked worn corduroys and a black and blue shirt, befitting the band’s rough-hewn image. Lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, in a thumbed nose to redneck literalists everywhere (see “Sweet Home Alabama”), sported a Neil Young T-shirt, circa Tonight’s The Night. Steve Gaines (who, along with Van Zant, perished in the crash), had on a plain red shirt tucked into a pair of Okie-befitting plain tan pants (eyes closed, he also boasted a spooky halo of fire). Bassist Leon Wilkeson sported a “My Grass is Blue” T-shirt and a top hat, which, being only ten years old, took me a few years to figure out.

But wildass, feral drummer Artimus Pyle? Ol’ Artie was sporting white-on-white tennis shoes, white blue and gold knee socks pulled high, cut-off jeans shorts, and, the piece de resistance, a blue T-shirt with a semi-circled “VEGETARIAN” written in white “Keep On Truckin’” style iron on letters.

I’m not even sure if I knew what Pyle was trying to get across at this time. What I know of now as a vegetarian was – well, it simply didn’t exist at that time, at least in my neighborhood. The crew I ran with thought of vegetarians as people who ate nothing but raw vegetables. Truly, people did not understand that you might not want to eat meat (or, conversally, you would choose all those raw vegetables). They thought of such folks much in the same way the thought of atheists: Lord have mercy -- they know not what they do.

(excerpted from larger work.)

ADDENDUM: Sonofabitch. As is just my luck -- and the luck of veg-friendly, Southern folk everywhere -- Pyle just got (re)arrested for failing to register as a sex offender, having pled guilty about a dozen years ago for indecent liberties on two young children (Pyle claims he was set up by an ex). File under: bad people wearing good T-shirts.

All things must...I'll pass.

Found this great little "cookbook" at the flea market the other day, a Scholastic Book Services tome called "Cool Cooking: Recipes of Your Favorite Rock Stars. There's good stuff in there, too: The Delfonics have a bean pie recipe, and there's a shrimp curry recipe by Elton John (no word if Bernie Taupin wrote it).

Beatles-wise, there's a tempura recipe from the Lennon family, egg salad from Ringo, as well as a pre-vegetarian pizza recipe from Macca.

George Harrison's can't be beat for ease of preparation, however. You'll find the recipe below, in its entirety:

BANANA SANDWICH


ripe banana
bread
peanut butter (optional)

Slice a ripe banana lengthwise and lay it on a piece of bread. If you like, you can spread the bread with peanut butter.

Salt showers

Why is it that chefs -- alright, mostly TV chefs like Emeril and Top Chef's Howie -- insist upon sprinkling salt from damn near shoulder level into the pot or pan? Is it an attempt to add a little "flavor" to a recipe their dinner guest -- i.e., you the viewer -- will never get to taste? Is it because it's easier for Little Susie (or Sammy) Homemaker to get a handle on just how much a "pinch" should be?

My fiancee and I, taking in a minor league baseball game a while back, text messaged a baseball-mad friend of ours with this question (albeit probably in junky text-messaging lingo):

Why, after an out, do baseball players throw the ball around the diamond?

Some would say it's to give the pitcher a few seconds of respite.

I liked his answer better, though, and I think it fits here:

"Cuz theyve seen people do it on TV."

Where's the cow? (Er, beef?)

Ever wonder why we call lamb "lamb" and fish "fish," but why we call cow "beef," pig "pork," and chicken and the like "poultry?"

Well, me too. Turns out the answer is, likely, that no one's sure of the answer. But you can find some discussion on the matter right'chere (you'll need to cut 'n' paste, as link function is on the fritz):

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmuttonpork.html

"When all else fails, boil it."

I hit up the local market -- okay, so it was a Food Lion, but I did buy a mess of sweet potatoes, onions, and rutabagas earlier that morning -- last Saturday, and while there bought a jicama.

I took it to the counter, where the clerk, a young woman in her early 20s, looked a little flummoxed.

"Is this a mushroom?"

"No ma'am...I think it's a 'hee-com-ah.' (I like to call people younger than me "sir" or "ma'am," turn the tables a little bit.)

"A who?"

"Hee-com-ah," I said. She consulted her rotary wheel of produce codes.

"What is it, though?"

"It's kind of like a potato," I said. "It might be under 'gee-com-ah.'"

"What...how do you cook it?"

"I'm not quite sure, I said," explaining that I was planning to go home and look online, maybe roast it or make a nice slaw.

She looked at me like I was crazy. She then called her friend over.

"Look at this...jicama. You ever heard of that?"

"Looks like a turnip," the woman said. "How do you cook it?"

"I'm not all that sure," I said. "I just saw it and thought I'd try it out." She too looked at me like I was crazy...what kind of person, she must have thought, buys food just to experiment with it? When they don't even know what it is, really?

"I didn't even know we had them," the first woman said.

"Well, *someone* must eat them," I said.

"Spanish people," the woman said plainly. "Well, anyway, good luck with that."

"Thanks," I said, walking away, feeling like a cultural pelt collector.

"I say you just boil it," the second woman called out to me. "When all else fails, boil it."

Henderson the Brain King

This is old news, but I love this quote from Fergus Henderson:

“You want to discipline the parsley with three or four chops, not whip it into submission.”

Something about "disciplining" an herb, showing it who's boss, appeals to me. We must tame all our food in one way or another, after all -- even the herbivores among us.

Fergus, of course, is British chef who's become a minor foodie superstar due to his use of all sorts of offal.

I'd argue that it's been done in the American South (and, moreover, France) for eons, but then again, Fergus does have (perhaps) (actually) one of the coolest accents I've heard in ages (yes?) (splendid.)

Spaghetti and Loneliness

One of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami,has finally gone on record -- to the Harvard Book Review -- about what I think is one of my favorite short stories in quite some time. As you might imagine, most of the world thinks it "plotless."


(To which I say: does your life have a plot? Or even a given day, really?)

Anyway, enjoy. (Hopefully)

PS: The story is here:

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/people/efros/personal/murakami.txt


JB: I'd like to talk about your story from the New Yorker, "The Year of Spaghetti," and the different things that spaghetti means in your work.

HM: I wrote that story more than twenty years ago, when I was much younger. I was in my early thirties at the time. That is one of my favorite stories. I remember how it was when I wrote it. I like spaghetti myself, very much. And I lived in Italy for a couple of years, so I ate spaghetti every day, as a meal. I just wanted to write some story about spaghetti, about making spaghetti every day. It's just an idea. And when I remember cooking spaghetti I remember other things, what happened as I was cooking spaghetti. It's strange, but many things can happen when you are cooking spaghetti. I don't know why.

JB: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also begins with someone cooking spaghetti.

HM: Yes, that's right. The same thing. I cook myself, and I cook spaghetti very often. And it takes time to boil the water, so many things happen.

JB: It's funny that both of them are about cooking spaghetti and being interrupted.

HM: While you are cooking spaghetti, you think about many things. So many things happen in your mind while you are cooking spaghetti. And you are getting kind of philosophical while you are cooking spaghetti.

JB: In the story, spaghetti is also related to loneliness, and it's a similar scene in Wind-Up.

HM: Before I was married, I cooked spaghetti just for myself. It's a very lonely task, to cook spaghetti for yourself. So I think its kind of natural that you think about loneliness when you cook spaghetti for yourself. You know, when you're making a sandwich for yourself you don't think about loneliness so much. But when you cook spaghetti, it's different.

JB: Because of that waiting...

HM: That's right. And eating a sandwich by yourself is not so lonely, but eating spaghetti by yourself is different. You have to be conscious about your loneliness when you cook and when you eat spaghetti alone. It's a fact.

Spice spam

Got this in my e-mailbox this morn:

Cooks, epicureans and foodies can now manage their spice cabinets via the Internet like many consumers who have turned to the Web to balance their checking accounts, check their stocks and control their music libraries.

It seems the good folks at Spice Islands recently decided to launch an online program, Register Your Spice, "to empower cooks to get the most mileage out of their spices while the goods are still good."

The new site, located at www.spiceislands.com, is a proactive portal that makes sure that cooks know the freshness levels of their spices at all times and also sends cooks recipes to utilize their spice purchases in new, interested ways.

The (spice) rub is that, when replacement time approaches, the site distributes an e-mail reminder to "encourage cooks to use the spice or replace items for the utmost freshness."

Their dried spices, of course. Couldn't you just...I dunno....taste them?

Queens of the Poached Egg

In the new Rolling Stone -- new to me at least -- Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme (pronounced like "hominy" without the "in"), has this to say:

"I'm optimistic, except for this blog thing. We should charge people to be on the Internet. People don't care what you had for breakfast. If you think they do, think again."

Lunch, perchance?