Archive for January, 2007
This article in the International Herald Tribune explores one facet of using up trash to create beauty. We all know that it can be done by artists, and that article shows some artistic takes on using junk. I think the chandelier above, illustrating the show is beautiful, but so many times these things are made way too large for most private homes.
It did spur me to think, however, of the resource of all the imaginative people who come here once in a while or habitually. I hope there are more habituals than commenters, but I can only do what I do, which is turn out original content on a fairly regular basis.
This is what I propose. I would like you to photograph something you made or will make from things that would otherwise be thrown out, burned or landfilled. Send it to me and in about one month I will write an article that shows as much as possible of what you’ve done. Please be sure to entitle your email “Waste not beauty” so I will know that you are not a Romanian scammer or a Nigerian widow who wants me to accept seven million dollars. A suggestion is to establish a separate Yahoo! or Hotmail address just for responding to requests like this, so you can be in total control of who knows your real address. I don’t have a different address from decobabeone at hotmail dot com or my Yahoo! address, because my server does not offer email addresses.
I will also contribute some designs I produced through my long career as a designer. They are more about ecology than beauty, but a clean earth is beautiful, no?
Use the Hotmail address by repairing it, and send me your stuff!
January 30th, 2007
It has changed me. Or perhaps I should say it has made me want to change. I finished reading Iris Murdoch, a Life a couple of days ago. I knew even before finishing it that I couldn’t be the same any more. This British book is big and heavy and not a walk in the park to read. It took me a month of nights to read it. There were times when I said “Ugh! She’s horrid! I don’t like her!” and almost put it down, but I couldn’t. Yes, she had done things I thought unethical, immoral and cruel, but I knew that in the end she was one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. Not to say that someone couldn’t be an intellectual and all those terrible things as well, but she was in the end considered the embodiment of good. She had helped define what is good through her lifelong study of philosophy. She had helped dispose of earlier philosophies which placed mankind at a level of hunger– for subsistence, for power, for victory for its own sake. So I read on.
Since I am an American, Iris Murdoch was not a name that came before the face very often. I remember that I had read one of her novels, but I cannot remember which or why I read it, not to mention what I thought of it at the time. I have a sneaking suspicion I mixed her name up with another British writer I knew and liked and was surprised to find what I did.
So I trudged on through this book, checking every once in a while the photograph on the cover, as if she might tell me something helpful, checking the photographs inside to see what the other people in her life looked like, what her house was like, what had been chosen to reveal her to us. Relief, in fact, was sought from the intensity one finds in her journals and the accounts others give of her actions and relationships. I wanted quite often to snatch her back from situations she continued and then for which she suffered and eventually from which she learned. I was saddened by the last parts of her life. I believe that no one who knew her regretted it, but how can we know?
In the end I felt a failure in some ways. I was never courageous enough to enter relationships with mage and stay in them for years. It never occurred to me to want to experiment with every possible kind of relationship one could cultivate. And so, I didn’t grow to be her. I never learned enough Latin and I learned no classical Greek at all. I did not learn German and French and Russian so that I could speak with intellectuals of those countries without barriers. In fact, compared to Iris Murdoch I am an ignoramus.
And yet, like Iris Murdoch I can change. I was left after reading this book more hopeful than ever. Iris Murdoch said that the central power in human life is Good. You can seek to be good and to do good and to reward good. She lived that life and did those things because she was open to every kind of learning that there is, and Good is what she learned. She kept journals that explored “what is it that I seek,” and as she discovered it, she wrote in them what it meant. When she understood better what Good might be, she went back to old journals and annotated them to reflect the map she was making of her path and she struck out unfair things that she had said about other people in her ignorance.
The one fault I find in this book is that a woman who was extremely influential in Murdoch’s life is not named. I presume it is because she is still living and has refused to be named if the influences are described, but since this person is of a great age by now, it seems frivolous not to admit the relationship as well as the influence.
The links in this post will take you to Amazon in the US and the UK where you can look at this book and some of the novels she wrote. I ordered a number of them today, based on the critical parts of the biography. You can buy them from Amazon, or write down the information and seek them out in local shops. I urge you, though, to try to read this book.
It’s probably too late for me to learn classical Greek, but I may go for French.
January 29th, 2007
From when I began hearing about this breakthrough bread made with a sloppy, wet dough, there was a thought that nagged at the back of my mind. Finally, after hearing the 200th person write about his experience with the recipe, it dawned on me that a couple of years back I was involved in this conversation on a cooking and food newsgroup:
Sara: “I make pizza about once a week and we like our crust very much.”
Anon: “How long do you knead your pizza dough?”
Sara: “I can’t say that I do. It’s a pretty wet dough and you couldn’t do much about kneading it. I let it rise in the fridge for a long time instead.”
I tried what she said she did and yep, you didn’t need to knead and a long cool rise made it taste immeasurably better. It became a standard chez moi. All you had to do was remember to mix it up far enough in advance. It is more Neapolitan style than Roman– thicker and breadier, but it has a superb flavor and is dead easy to shape.
The recipe is simple beyond belief and I even mix it in the food processor. Amounts are fairly flexible, you can use fresh or granular yeast, and you need not knead at all. I am sort of getting into that rhyming thing.
500 grams (17ounces) of ordinary all-purpose flour, or 00
one packet of granular yeast or one cake of fresh yeast
2 teaspoons of salt
4 tablespoons of good olive oil
about 1.5 cups or 12 ounces of warm, not hot, water– the amount will vary according to the ambient humidity. The temperature will be warm to the wrist id using granular yeast, and about body temperature if using cake or fresh yeast.
Put the flour and yeast and salt into the food processor. Pulse it to mix it. Set the processor to a continuous process.
Through the feed tube, start adding the warm water, staring with about a cup and let the dough form, then continue to add water until the ball of dough relaxes and becomes a thick batter instead of a ball. Add the olive oil and let it incorporate for a couple of minutes.
Open a sturdy and large Ziplock bag and scrape the sticky batter into it. Press it to remove any air, then seal it really carefully. If you don’t you will be sorry, because it will open and fill your refrigerator with sloppy and fat pizza dough. Put it into the fridge and leave it for 12 hours or more.
When you are ready to make a pizza, start the oven to preheat at the maximum temperature so that it never clicks off, then take the bag out of the fridge and open a tiny gap in the zipper. Pat the bag and it will flatten the dough. Take a flat baking sheet and place baking paper on it.
Oil your hands really well. Scoop out 1/2 of the dough and plop it into the center of the paper. Using your oily fingers, press the dough out to about a 12″ or 30 centimeter circle, leaving a small ridge around the rim. The more fingerprints left in the dough, the better. If you have long nails, wear surgical gloves that you oil as if they were your hands.
Now add what you want on top. This one is my basic. It has dried oregano sprinkled over the base, then thinly sliced fresh garlic, then drained tinned tomatoes that I squish through my fingers and distribute around, and finally slices of mozzarella that is fresh and comes in brine. I use less than 100 grams for one pizza. Overloading a pizza with toppings in criminal. Be sparing. Depending on the tomatoes, I sometimes add a very small amount of salt.
Open the oven door and quickly slide the paper upon which sits the pizza off the baking sheet and onto the bottom oven rack/shelf. Close the door fast. Pizza needs the shock of the superheat to puff well. It should take about 15 minutes to cook, but I don’t know your oven, so have a look at it once in a while after 10 minutes. When the cheese is melted and bubbling, it’s certainly done. Slide the baking sheet under the paper and remove it, then slide it off of the paper and onto a cutting board. Drizzle it with good, fresh olive oil, and eat!
While the pizza was cooking, I took the remaining dough and using a new piece of baking paper, I formed a slightly thicker circle and sprinkled coarse salt, sliced garlic and freshly ground pepper over it before drizzling it with oil. When the pizza came out of the oven, I slid this focaccia in and cooked it to almost browned. I didn’t cook it all the way, because I knew I would be heating it again as I used it for little sandwiches in the following days.
As always, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The upshot is, the kneadless bread is not a revolution. Sara was making a version of it at least 3 years ago!
January 23rd, 2007
That is how many days I have sat down to the computer and typed in something to say to you. If I had exercised instead every one of those days I would be able to climb the mountain across the street without puffing. If I had cooked something fattening, I wouldn’t be able to cross the street to get to the mountain. If I had studied Italian at a higher level, I would be able to talk to Italian scientists and musicians. If I had opened a bottle of prosecco and sipped it away, I wouldn’t be able to type in English, let alone in Italian.
One hundred and nine posts. One hundred and nine days.
I don’t regret a single one. Thanks for reading.
January 22nd, 2007
This is my recipe for Sugar High Friday, as directed from David Lebovitz’ wonderful site. Only for David. I am not a real sweets lover, and then mainly fruit based sweets, this one had to be chocolate. I like chocolate, but I am not usually its slave. I used Valrhona chocolate because it is what I always use, trudging home from Eurochocolate every year with a kilo or two. Everything I make tastes better made with Valrhona.
Tonight my kitchen is a morass of butter and sugar bits that flew free from the mixer, cocoa powder that fluffed and dusted and slid from there to everywhere, and as I type I can hear the crack-crack of hardening caramelized sugar syrup. I am nipping at pieces of prosciutto to get the taste of sugar out of my mouth.
I tried to think of what I would like if it were chocolate. I decided I would like something slick, something crunchy, something creamy and that it should have chilies, but not inside the chocolate.
With the chilies in the spun sugar, the shy can eat less and the bold more. It actually is quite nice!
The chocolate
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
4 sq. melted Valrhona Le Noir Gastonomie chocolate
2 teaspoons rum
2 eggs
½ cup sifted Valrhona 100% cacao powder
2 more eggs
Cream the butter and the sugar together until really well blended.
Add the melted chocolate and the rum and incorporate them well.
Beat in 2 eggs, one at a time, beating 5 minutes to incorporate each at medium speed.
Sift the cocoa onto the mixture gradually while continuing to beat.
Add the next two eggs, one at a time, beating again five minutes after each egg is added.
Lightly spray molds with oil, then fill them with this mixture, using a large spoon, then use a palette knife to flatten them and to remove excess mixture. Chill in the refrigerator for several hours.
When they are firm, turn them out onto waxed paper and then slide them onto a pool of heavy cream on a serving plate. Mine needed the urging of a dip into warm water first.
The spun sugar
2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 teaspoon corn syrup
6 small very hot chilies, cracked open
Vegetables spray and/or oil
1. Use a Silpat if you have one. If you want to make forms, then spray oil onto the outside of an upturned bowl. I used plastic, just in case I had to toss it.
2. If you don’t have a Silpat sheet, and why don’t you, use buttered foil or the shiny side of freezer paper.
3. Place the sugar, 1/2 cup water, the peppers and corn syrup in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, over low heat. Stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved. Raise heat to high and bring mixture to a boil. Continue cooking until the temperature registers 310*F (hard-crack stage) on a candy thermometer. If you do not have a thermometer because the battery man didn’t have it ready the two times you have returned to pick it up, have a glass of cold water ready for testing the syrup. When it is ready, it will be a lovely amber color and form a hard crack ball in the water. Remove from heat, and briefly plunge the saucepan into cold water to stop the cooking. Let stand to thicken slightly, about 1 minute. It was less for me.
4. Dip a fork or balloon whisk (preferably one that has had the wires cut off leaving many straight wires, but I couldn’t bear to torture mine like that) into the sugar syrup and wave back and forth to draw out long, fine, threadlike strands over the baking sheet. The syrup will begin hardening almost immediately. You may have to use your asbestos fingers to pull at it as it cools. Just break off the larger pieces that makes. With practice you can form the strands into a forms and shapes or a dome by drawing them out over an upside down oiled bowl.
Makes about about 2 cups.
Lay the spun sugar you’ve made over each mold on the serving plates.
So, here it is. Anybody hungry?
January 20th, 2007
Good thing, because now you need to imagine one of those triangular road signs that says there is trouble ahead. Put it right here in this space:
My internet connection exists but runs at about 30,000 bps presently and the posts and articles are stacking up as if Barzotti is right over O’Hare airport. Worry not, some good last chances to eat well before Lent and the diet are coming up.
January 19th, 2007
The official trip report from my Gaeta vacation has been published today on Slow travel. It resembles in many ways what I published here, but there is less personal stuff and some photos not shown before. Go see it.
Any time you need a break from your tropical island, snowy fastness or busy metropolis, take a look at the many trip reports at Slow Travel and see the world! Italy is a large part of the mix there, but every continent is covered by the intrepid Slow Travelers. Hikers, sailors, drivers, they all show “what I did on my vacation” and some are better than the travel magazines. I have been stunned to see Rar’s shots of Bolivia recently.
January 16th, 2007
Everyday I think about what I might have to say here. Everyday I sift through the things I have done and photographed and try to find one that fits the day or my mood. Everyday. Even the editor of Vogue doesn’t have to do that every single day. And she has help!
Your comments do any number of useful things. It inspires me to know someone is reading. It helps me to understand what interests people. I learn things I didn’t know before, or get a different slant on something I do know.
I write this blog for you. This is not a blog in which I ponder which $2000 purse I should buy, nor how will I get the attention of that cute boy in Geometry class (how will I?) There are not many of those any more. A blog is no longer an online diary. A blog is rarely True Confessions in the Digital Age nowadays. I’ve heard that if that’s what you want, MySpace is a place to start.
So, talk to me! Tell me when I am full of it or when I need to get out more!
January 15th, 2007
If you see a bit much oil in that photo, you’re right. Cut it a bit. If you think you see spaghetti in there, right again. Hey, I live in Italy! I also cut the eggplant ‘melanzane’ in cubes, and it wasn’t a long thin one. Maybe I am not a cook after all?
Eggplant in Garlic Sauce
from “Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen,” by Grace Young
Serves 4 to 6 as part of a multi-course meal
3 medium Chinese eggplants (or any long and narrow type eggplant), about 1 pound
2 tablespoons chili garlic sauce (available in jars in Asian markets)
2 tablespoons thin soy sauce (or light soy sauce)
2 tablespoons Chinese red rice vinegar (or good old Italian red wine vinegar)
2 tablespoons Shao Hsing rice cooking wine (or dry sherry or marsala)
1 tablespoon sugar
7 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/4 cup ground pork butt (or any ground pork)
2 tablespoons finely minced garlic
2 tablespoons finely minced ginger
1/2 cup chopped scallions
Remove the stems and trim the ends from the eggplants. Cut the unpeeled eggplants into scant 1/2-inch-thick by 2 1/2-inch-long strips.
In a small bowl, combine the chili garlic sauce, soy sauce, vinegar, rice wine, sugar, and 2/3 cup cold water.
Heat a 14-inch flat-bottomed wok or skillet over high heat until hot but not smoking. Add 3 tablespoons oil and half the eggplant, and stir fry 2 minutes, or until some of the eggplant continues to brown and soften. Transfer the eggplant to a plate. Repeat with the remaining eggplant and 3 tablespoons of the oil, transferring to the plate with first batch.
Add the remaining 1 tablespoon oil, and the pork, garlic, and ginger, and stir fry about 1 minute, or until golden and fragrant.
Return the eggplant to the wok. Re-stir the chili sauce mixture, and swirl into the wok. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium, cover, and cook 5-to 8 minutes or until eggplant is just tender. Stir in scallions and serve immediately.
It was good. Really good.
January 14th, 2007
This is a truly interesting man. Firstly, he smiles out proudly from his blog and that’s rare. He showed us a picture of his baby– rarer yet. I often wonder why I see flashy cars at the top of his blog, but then I like looking at flashy cars, so boh!
What does John Chow do? He tries to teach people how to use the internet to make a living or just some extra dough. Why is that good? Because there are innumerable people using the internet to drive us crazy or destroy things. If even half the spammers and virus designers could be redirected to using the internet in a reasonable or polite way we’d live in a safer world.
How does he do that? He writes about how it can be done in a way that we who are a bit behind the technological curve of the world can understand, or else he directs us to other sites that explain what you can do. He compares the various options and recommends the ones he thinks work best. More than anything else, I find him an incomparable resource for information and maps to the areas of possible internet commerce that you, yourself, can decide fit within your ethic or do not. If you think that SUVs are a blot on the environmental scene, then you shouldn’t do any of the possible and possibly profitable things that could earn you money from the sale of more SUVs, right?
There is a universe of territory between promoting what you find valuable and linking to porn or cheap prescription drug sellers. John Chow thinks there is nothing wrong with tucking yourself into the ethical parts of internet commerce. I agree with him, and I wish more of the people who try to seduce me into dating services and penny stocks would listen up. Does anyone actually buy anything from these spammers? Why?
John Chow has a more or less non-profit take when it comes to his own blog, but if he used it to make a ton of money, it would be OK with me. He’s offering something very interesting and worthwhile. I am a capitalist. I do not find business dirty, I just find dirty business disgusting. Mr. Chow seems on the side of the decent.
I do not find him, as one other blogger said, “Godly” but I do like his hair. If it were red, it would almost be mine.
Now all of the above words were written before Mr. Chow started blogging from the CES at Las Vegas. Now I have a slightly different attitude about his character. He’s very dazzled by the nouveau riche and splashy Vegas trimmings and maybe a tad too pleased with how well he has positioned himself in his milieu. That hand on the rear end of a passing girl, the lined up busty waitresses, the multiplicity of gang photos — to me they aren’t very cool. Tech heads, however, have their own definitions of cool, and he may very well be the acme of that genre.
What is cool is what he knows how to do and his ease in explaining it so that someone in a far country who has never thought about the subject can understand most of it. I hope all the spammers and virus writers have John Chow’s taste in entertainment and girls and are inspired to try out his methods of using the internet positively.
January 13th, 2007
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