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

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Wednesday, November 20, 2002

To really conspicuously consume surrounded by your dysfunctional family next week, order or fix a turducken. Chicken in a duck in a turkey. Is it my dysfunctional mind or does anyone else focus on the "turd" in it. Who would come out and say it at your Thanksgiving table? Hey, Beavis, whaddya think of it? Visions of Satyricon...John Madden likes it! Alarm is going off - 170F - turkey breast in the smoker is done! It took 8 hours. 7:52:37 PM    comment []

Google returns no hits on Pocahontas Ham Base, but you can still buy it from The Sausage Maker. I'll have to do that soon because I'm scraping the bottom of my jar. Last night I got some kale, hearing it was high in anti-oxidants. General rule I've learned is that the worse something tastes, the more anti-oxidants. As I was cutting up the kale ("chiffonade" is was to downtown), Liz called and suggested I meet her for a beer. I started to defer, but she insisted and next thing you know the kale was in a plastic bag and I was drinking beer. Tonight, the kale is simmering with some instant barley, bacon, in water invigorated with the ham base. My mom taught me to cook the bejesus out of kale and that's the only texture that seems right now. Any vitamin content is long gone by the time you taste it, but it sure tastes good. The turkey breast is at 122F and taking some heavy smoke. Since no curing salts were used in the brine, I'm keeping the air temperature in the smoker around 200F to discourage salmonella. 4:14:26 PM    comment []

We're not worthy: I am getting some hits because of mentioning the name of an essayist who could legitimately condescend to mere excellence. If you got here looking for Theodore You-Know-Who, go New Criterion and read this. Better, try to stop reading it once you've begun. Project Turkey Breast: I was going to make a cranberry-orange rellish for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck tomorrow. The same recipe is everywhere, including the packages of Ocean Spray cranberries. Working from home today, however, I ran across a Durham Herald-Sun column by Don Mauer about brining turkeys. When the store had no individual oranges, just bags, I was drawn to the floor coolers now nearly overflowing with gobblers. An unfrozen turkey breast, $1.63 cheaper with my VIC card, literally jumped into my basket. It's in the smoker now, hanging by strings tied to a skewer secured by its sternum. The brine included kosher salt, ginger, honey, and lemon juice. A FoodSaver cannister was barely large enough to hold it, allowing me to "speedbrine" it in a vacuum. 1:07:15 PM    comment []

Root Hog, or Die We are only little gleaners. Little Von Neumann neurons scuttling about, linking little hyperlink synapses, turning the web into our neural net. Tiny clicking blogspiders we, nibbling hits of ego food for our vanity engines, unwittingly but knowingly creating an artificial intelligence machine that is witty, well-read, sophisticated, earthy, scientific, artistic, ethereal, aesthetic, urbane, practical, and wise. Good entries eat, bad ones starve. Let us petition our Googlemeister with prayer, bring us this day our daily bread... Thank you, Mrs. Lovejoy. 2:47:37 AM    comment []