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

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Sunday, February 23, 2003

There is a new Virtual Occoquan! There's no point in hiding the cheese, Mark Hoback has returned enlightened from a management seminar with his nose sharpened, and he's gonna find it no matter what. Rayne has also acquired supernatural powers this week as VO's poetry editor. Though I'm sure she had to learn to hold her nose at the cheesy smell rising from my oeuvre, The Nantuckett Limericks, submitted after a feverish burst of inspiration, she survived the ordeal and recovered by spending the day in church. Let's hear it for Rayne and Mark, for all they've done to make this virtual community nearly tangible. 10:23:28 PM    comment []

After the rosemary manicure, Liz and I stopped across the street at the Carolina Brewery for a microbrew and some deep-fried Creole Oysters. The batter uses Blue Sky Ale, made on the premises, and the dip is a tartar sauce with a bit of an attitude from chipotle. It left a pleasant warmth on the lips, like a kiss from a Goddess (or, for Liz, a God). Nice plate dusting, cilantro and either seasoning or bread crumbs. When this place serves a black bean quesadilla, they beef up the sour cream with a little lime juice and cilantro. Outstanding. 5:37:30 PM    comment []

Blair in 'prickly' meeting at the Vatican Tony Blair swept past ranks of orange-clad Swiss Guards yesterday and through the corridors of the Vatican City for a 'strictly private' audience with the Pope, one of the most outspoken moral opponents of a war to disarm Iraq. Blair and the 82-year-old leader of the world's one billion Roman Catholics have both used moral arguments to support their diametrically opposed positions on the need to attack Iraq. Italian newspapers warned that the meeting would be 'prickly'. The Hollow Men (T.S. Eliot (1925), stanza V) Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. How this applies to food: When you make salsa with nopalitos, the preserved pads of the prickly pear, you should probably wash them repeatedly. They are very slimy, worse even than okra! The Shadow knows. 4:40:16 PM    comment []

This bush is good for something. It has become my primary source of fresh rosemary. It is located in a courtyard behind The Pyewacket, where I quaffed the kind nepenthe of many a carefully drawn Guinness Stout. RIP, Pyewacket; long live rosemary. I carry a small pair of diagonal cutters in my glove compartment specifically to harvest a stalk or two when I'm in the neighborhood. It is a good thing to prune outdoor plants to help them grow properly. Doesn't the bush look a little raggedy on the edges, maybe like a pre-Nordic man in need of a shave? 3:00:14 PM    comment []

This is a very nice, if expensive coffee pot. People get so fussy about coffee. The latest Cooks' Illustrated rated a bunch of them and decided another vacuum maker was just too much trouble. This one isn't, it's all automatic and right now it's marked down to $99.95 at Bodum. They're usually about $140, but I don't think they sold many at that price. When Linens 'N' Things marked it down to $100 and I could use one of their frequent 20% coupons as well, I bought one. The coffee is great, never bitter, but there still is a way to make.... Floor Coffee! Floor coffee is not a good thing. You do not want to make floor coffee. I made my first floor coffee many years ago, soon after I got my first Mister Coffee. When coffee ends up on the floor instead of the pot, it is floor coffee. Technically, there are a couple of ways to do this with a drip coffee maker: Forget to put the pot underneath or put more water in the reservoir than the pot can hold. Newer coffee makers have a lever that detects the pot lid, so they won't release any coffee from the brewing chamber until the pot and lid are safely underneath. But the brewing chamber can soon overflow if you walk away and forget to place the pot underneath. Result = floor coffee. The root cause of floor coffee is that most coffee is made first thing in the morning, when one is not usually at their peak. In the haze, one is likely to fill the reservoir, be interrupted by a call from nature, then fill it again, turn on the coffee pot and leave the kitchen. If you want to never make floor coffee, you must never leave the god-damn kitchen until the coffee is safely made. The real tragedy of floor coffee is that your anticipation for a cup of joe rises incrementally with the brewing sounds and rich caffeine-laced aromas that promise release from the morning fog. It is not to be. Instead, you must divert your limited energies immediately to cleaning up an intimidating mess. That is the double-edged sword of floor coffee. The tragedy is multiplied if the coffee grinds you lovingly placed in the brewing chamber were your last in stock. Then you must drive to the store and focus your attenuated senses on a purchase. No money? Did you bring your ATM card? What if you have an accident? The Santos vacuum maker does not make floor coffee in the same way that drip makers do. Other than ordinary spills or drops, it would be very difficult for all the coffee to end up on the floor. However, if you do not place the upper flask firmly on the heated one, the water will boil furiously and escape through the interface. Anything in the vicinity will be soaked, albeit with plain water. The grounds remain usable. That is what I did this morning. I seated the upper flask and there was enough water still boiling to produce the wonderous beverage, though it was stronger than usual. Root cause: sloppy prep work. Ancillary cause: I left the god-damn kitchen! 9:45:04 AM    comment []

Mushroom Bouquet In a few hours, these will be picked and delivered to Liz, whose contagious appreciation of fungi, for better or worse, got me started on this silly mushroom adventure. Like many edible things, mushrooms are best fresh. The downside of that is that they dictate to you when it is time to eat. A fleeting thought: Are they also instructing me to order more mushroom kits, to propagate their species? Are there subtle mind control chemicals in their flesh that are capable of possessing a human mind, then dictating the movements of their "zombies"? In a word, no. I said the thought was fleeting. 12:12:16 AM    comment []