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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Thursday, November 07, 2002

To hell with that wooden spoon in the brioche recipe, the KitchenAid did just fine working with cold butter - First, 6 tablespoons on the regular blade, after that the dough hook. The incredible dough hook. The tablespoon-sized patties of butter first work-softened, then warmed up and blended. The dough is now an hour and 15 minutes into the 2 hour rise and it reeks of yeast, rising sweetly. 7:58:36 PM    comment []

More precursors of the sandwich... This picture, an inviting mental screensaver, has been popping up in my mind's eye all day. It is Saucisson En Brioche (Sausage in Brioche), discovered in the google gaggle for "tripe". You have to start the brioche the day ahead. That's a project for the evening. Here is the complete lead-in for the recipe, which should give you an idea of how misleading parsing can be: Edouard Herriot, who was mayor of Lyon from 1905 to 1957, used to say that there were only two things that left an unmentionable taste in the mouth, politics and andouillette, and it is perhaps because of this opinion that the Lyonnais started to use veal. About three page feeds down on this site will give you the whole recipe (or get the Print-Friendly Version). 6:20:43 PM    comment []

It sounded good. "Quince & Persimmon Jelly". Liz said it sounded like something the characters of the previous Potter, Beatrix, might eat. Fundamentally British. After doing a teleconference at home this morning, I decided to take the long route to work to go to the one place that rarely lets me down, Lowe's They alone had watercress and had failed me only once before, on my long search for jelly jars a couple weeks back. No quinces. Wellspring let me down too just a few minutes ago on the way home. There are mangoes, kiwi, pomegranites, and let's all sing.  Back home, I started thinking In Hoc Signo Quinces and on a lark decided to google the original phrase. Number 1 hit, numero uno, contained this quote: Savage societies usually perish, not so much from lack of vigorous will or lack of physical strength, as from lack of ability to perceive the real situation. Drowning in superstition and stumbling in the darkness of ignorance, they are overwhelmed by the physical forces of violent natural occurrences, catastrophes and diseases which more civilized societies have learned to overcome. On the other hand, civilizations, for all their intellectual achievements and sciences, perish most often because of failure of the will, the diminishing of the savage and ruthless drive for survival and dominance which originally created society. They become "humanitarian", selfish, and soft. They become physically weak and dependent on paid armies and police to do their fighting. The fighting spirit of honor and self-sacrifice and heroism of their ancestors gives way to a growing love of ease and luxury and cowardice masquerading as "humanitarianism". When a civilization reaches this effete stage in its decay, only a very rare historical occurrence can halt the final collapse of the society as the decadence grows daily more apparent. Only when the dying society still has enough life-energy to produce a spiritual giant, a godlike throwback to the ancient heroism of its people who is able to shock and drive the civilization out of its natural historical night of sleep and death, in spite of the suicidal opposition of the dying peoples who long only for "peace" and the slumber of death, can a society once again rise for a while. Sound good? I hope not, the writer is this guy. 5:36:20 PM    comment []

Why hamburger is bad Not many people have sex with animals anymore and there's general agreement that this downward trend represents civilized enlightenment. Maybe the light lit up over the head of collective humanity the day Frank Zappa asked, "Who's plooking the green monkeys?" on Johnny Carson. There isn't an underground man-goat love fraternity, not that I've ever heard of, and these days you'll hear everything. If there is an organization , it is so far underground that it has to involve moles - and since they're blind they can't be sure what plooked 'em. Even religious groups that profess abstinence publicly haven't had a major scandal involving bestiality this year, we woulda heard about that too. I suppose that a monogamous relationship with a beast wouldn't represent much of a danger to the individual or humanity. It could be contained, maybe even ordained. Whatever desires and diseases they harbor would stay in the family, I say, ending this sentence with the mandatory "so to speak". Hamburger, and most ground meat is animal promiscuity. If one carcass with BSE or E-Coli taints the innards of the grinder, everything that follows is tainted coming out even if it wasn't going in. With ground fowl meat, the risk of salmonella is multiplied by the number of birds ground before the grinder is sterilized. This is not safe-grinding. Scotch aficionados, like The Raven, swear to the single-malts. That's a matter of taste, but single-beast meat grinds give you that too. I select strip steaks with an eye to the marbling, you can Yogi the good'uns with minimal carnivorous skill. Same with cuts you grind, you choose something that looks good. It is from one beast. You grind it yourself and spend the evening, perhaps the night with it. You'll never see a recall of pork butts, strip steaks, or tenderloins. That only happens when there's an orgy of mass-produced forcemeat at some minimum-wage packer's. Buy a grinder. Select Your own. Grind your own. The texture is better and it's safer. 3:06:05 AM    comment []