Put some cilantro on it!

Notes on a south-east drive

I and a few of my faithful friends cleared out my place on Friday, July 5. I packed all of my belongings into the back of my car and drove the next day to Las Vegas and stayed with one of the aforementioned friend’s parents. From there, I drove to Santa Fe, where I dumped my trash bags of clothes onto the floor of a room inside a semi-converted warehouse.

I did not move across the country, that much is clear. I only drove for two days, although by the end of the second day, I was very fatigued.

All that being written, here are the brief notes from my journey:

Arizona’s Interstate 40, with a few exceptions, is speed limited to 75 mph, which meant I cruised controlled at 80 MPH. Which is fantastically fast enough.
Highway 95 between Reno and Las Vegas was amazingly easy. I only almost crashed head-on while passing once (but I damn well accelerated my way out of that.) The daytime headlight zones really do need daytime headlights. Hard to judge distances without.
Having a peppy vehicle makes for almost breathlessly easy passing. Having a manual makes it that much seemingly safer and fun.
There is nothing between Hawthorne and Vegas. So, stop in Hawthorne for food, drink, etc. I confirmed this with the aforementioned mother of the aforementioned friend.
The state police presence is, I found, nearly non-existent.

That is all.

Sunsets and clouds at my former place in Santa Fe.

Swai: Grilled confusion fish

It was Friday, which meant the Hispanic grocery on Wells, Marketon, was having its one day sale. I looked at the ad and lo and behold, Swai was on sale. However, I had no idea what Swai is so I looked the confusion fish up.

The Iridescent shark (it’s not a shark) is actually a type of catfish (shark catfish, Wikipedia says.) It is, however, packaged as “swai.” Three names: iridescent shark, swai, and catfish. It’s a native to fresh water in southeast Asia.

Speaking of, which, one of its relatives, the Wels Catfish, is reported to jump out and eat pigeons. If only we had them in our fountains.

At $1.99/lb, I figured they must taste decent enough and if they’re anything like their North American cousins, the flesh should stand the test of the grill. So, I bought two packages, totaling 7.89 pounds. The fillets I bought were huge, the length of a small cookie sheet. I poured lemon juice on it, threw on some lemon pepper, pepper and garlic salt and let it sit for half an hour before throwing it on the grill.

The plain recipe is: here.

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Condensing the Highton 5-year plan

To read the original post on Jake Highton’s 5-year reading/culture plan, see it here. It contains all the back story. In short, I had planned to try to complete Highton’s reading list. It didn’t work out that way.

Also: Highton has set up a scholarship for students. Information here.

In 2013, I visited my former journalism teacher, Jake Highton.

He was professor emeritus shortly before I graduated, after grading students too harshly for too long.

He handed me two columns he wrote for the Sparks Tribune.

One, part of a three-column series on journalism schools, was titled “Five-year reading plan for journalists.” The column is more of an outline.

The second was a column on his world hall of fame for artists on June 21, 2007. The movies on the list, 15 in all, overlap some with his five-year-plan list. Those which appear only on the hall of fame will be marked by an asterisk.

Below are lists of all the titles Highton mentioned in his column.

“Consider setting a five-year plan to read the 75 to 100 most important books ever written. The lists will vary by individual taste and interest and no list can be definitive. But such lists are a foundation for a real education,” Highton wrote in the five-year plan column.

The plan isn’t just for reading: it’s for film and music and art.

HISTORY

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter
The Populist Movement by Lawrence Goodwyn
The Gulag Trilogy by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“Histories of Europe and Asia with special emphasis on England, France and Germany,” he wrote.

PLAYS

Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV (part one)
Tartuffe by Molière
Cyrano by Rostand
Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

NOVELS/FICTION

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Germinal by Émile Zola
Canide by Voltaire
Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
1984 by George Orwell
Crime and Punishment and Brother Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Christmas Story by H.L. Mencken
The Juggler of Notre Dame by Anatole France
King James Bible

NON-FICTION

Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Diary of Anne Frank
Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography by Albert Schweitzer
One Man’s Freedom by Edward Bennet Williams
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Working by Studs Terkel
Sigmund Freud
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Niccolò Machiavelli
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu

POETRY

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald
The sonnets of Shakespeare
Anthologies of American and English poetry
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

FILM

Citizen Kane
Casablanca
All Quiet on the Western Front
Grand illusion
Zorba the Greek
Dr. Strangelove
The Seventh Seal
Battleship Potemkin
La Dolce Vita
Fantasia
Birth of a Nation
The Grapes of Wrath
A Streetcar Named Desire
Grand Hotel*
Rashômon*
The Third Man*
Viridiana*
La Strada*
Wild Strawberries*
Jules and Jim*
Birth of a Nation*
(Birth of a Nation is marked in his column by the fact that it is racist. He quotes Pauline Kael: “One can trace almost every major tradition and most of the genres in movies to their sources in (Birth of a Nation.)”
Triumph of the Will*
(Triumph of the Will is marked by this comment: “Riefenstahl, perhaps the greatest documentary filmmaker even though she was a propagandist for Hitler.)”
*: These movies appear on Highton’s June 21, 2007 column, “Introducing World Hall of Fame for artists,” but not in his five-year-plan column.

ART

Van Gogh
Monet
Manet
Picasso
Lautrec
Goya
Rodin
Durer

MUSIC

Beethoven
Mozart
Bach
Handel
Stravinsky
Schubert
Rossini
Richard Strauss
Verdi
Puccini
Wagner

“All of that reading listening and viewing can be reflected in your writing: quoting, paraphrasing and alluding to,” Highton wrote.

Ruminating on travels long past

I’ve just finished reading Abbey’s Road by the namesake, Edward Abbey. The first half is travelogue, a travelogue done much better, I think, than the Scot Rory Stewart.

The second half is polemics and reflections. Abbey reflects on his time working for the National Park Service and gives insight to what became the narrative for his novel, Black Sun, a book well worth reading.

The travelogue, his journeys in Australia and elsewhere, can be beautiful. The contrast Abbey sees in his Australian counterparts is fascinating: seemingly an entire continent that is much like the American west.

Much of the latter half of the book (none of the articles are dated, which is a shame, considering how he applies his present at the time of writing to the narrative — which wife he was with, or wasn’t, how old he was at the time) was written while he worked as a fire look out. Then the raunchy, the sex-crazed Abbey comes out, possibly as a younger man. No, that’s not true. Abbey held true to his love of women throughout his life. It appears is writing about the constant obsession is more apparent when he was working as a lonely fire lookout.

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Taco Dog

Ostensibly, this is a blog about more than just food. About life! The food part of this post is about the taco dog: A hot dog with avocado, Tapatio and . . . Why not some cilantro? Honestly, I’ve yet to hear an argument against it. The other part is about my quest to read two books every three days, adjusted for length, or 200 pages a day.

I was off to a good start: I was really into Stefan Zweig‘s “Beware of Pity.” A good injection of drama into my otherwise ho-hum life. (I find there to be a very strong argument for soap operas, myself being a former subscriber to “Sturm der Liebe.”) It was like Downtown Abbey, with more Hamlet awkwardness and soliloquies thrown in. I’m currently being slowed by the often prose-poem of “The Hamlet” by Faulkner. But more on that later.

I had cilantro in the refrigerator. So I said, why not put some cilantro on it! Well, I exlaimed it. Didn't really say it. Then, I realized I had those pickles. Those free pickles which therefore taste better.

I had cilantro in the refrigerator. So I said, why not put some cilantro on it! Well, I exclaimed it. Didn’t really say it. Then, I realized I had those pickles. Those free pickles which therefore taste better.

On to food, before I return to books! I bought a whole bunch of hot dogs, while they were on sale, for a party I was having. I’ve been slowly using the ones that remain to eke out a frugal existence. When I still had a can of sauerkraut, I used it. Now, I have a few extra avocados (five for a dollar) and the two can go together. Mix in some Tapatio hot sauce and some secret sauce (as used on fish tacos.) Some mustard and a dab of ketchup and there. A quick, frugal meal.

I started out by warming up a bun and cooking up a hot dog, either on the grill or in the pan. Then, I cut up half an avocado. Dog in the bun, mustard and secret sauce on top or in the bun, avocado on top, followed by the Tapatio.

While you’re at it, look and see if you have any cilantro and if you find some, why not put some cilantro on it?

Quick. Easy. Delicious.

It’s west meets west meets surprise cilantro!

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The Experimental Indian

This article was originally posted on June 10, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Bryce has wanted an IPA for a long time and we have tried on multiple occasions. On these other occasions we have failed and created pale ales that were not of the India stature. This last time we tried, though, we knocked it out of the park. Well, not really. It’s really bitter though.

Leo and I went to the brew store at some point before April 6 (when we brewed it) and he picked out the ingredients, including many hops. We had an uneventful brew day — nothing in particular went wrong. We had even more hops lined up, sitting in a container in my refrigerator, but did not use them this time around. I’m not sure exactly what the hops are anymore: they were the hop pellets of brews past that kept on spilling out, the tops of their baggies cut away along with their identities.

I’ve no doubt they’ll begin to haunt me and my dreams.

We used the London ESB ale yeast, which seemed to be very tolerant.

One can see where the foam was at the top of the mug before settling down into a manageable head.

We let it sit, with much hop sediment, for over a month (closer to two months) before we kegged it. We first secondaried it and then finally kegged it. The beer is still cloudy, unlike the ciders which always seem to clear irregardless.

As it has aged in the keg, it has begun to foam more and more than it did when it was first put in, becoming harder to pour and the head is retained for one to five minutes before settling down.

On its head, there is a large amount of bitterness and underneath is a strong pale ale pedigree. The aroma is there, although it could be more, as could the hops taste itself. But, it is damn bitter. If you like bitter.

One of the problems I have found as a homebrewer is once one (Bryce) walked down the path of IPAs, his pallet seemed to be perpetually cleansed of the ability to taste any beer that was not heavily hopped. Alas, alas.

INGREDIENTS

1 lb. Caramel 60 L
1 lb Honey malt
6.6 lb light LME (liquid malt extract)
3 oz Northern Brewer
2 oz Nugget
2 oz Cascade
1 oz Czech Spaz

HOP SCHEDULE

60 minutes
3 oz Northern Brewer
2 oz Nugget

30 minutes
2 oz Cascade
2 oz Czech Spaz

Poor man’s lox: smoked sardines

I love fish, which seems to be a shame considering I was born and raised in the inland desert. While smoked salmon was a treat growing up, it has always been an unaffordable luxury in my adult life. Fortunately, there are many alternatives, including one of my favorite fish: the sardine.

Two of the three sardines in a can sit on English muffin halves, straight from the can.

Lightly smoked canned sardines may not have the exact taste, or consistency, that smoked salmon does. They certainly do not have the nice presentation it does. However, they are cheap (around a dollar a can for three sardines) and make for sustainable and delicious cheap eats.

In this case, I have been using English muffins as the base, although bagels or bread would certainly work as well. That and some cream cheese. Two adjuncts, capers and red chopped red onions, as seen in cream cheese and lox preparations, make good companions. Sometimes I like them, sometimes I like it plain.

That’s all there is to it. Kippered herring is also a good choice, as are other smoked canned fish.

Three sardines come in a can but usually one sardine is sufficient to cover an English muffin so I save the third for the next day.

The sardines' supple flesh has been spread over the muffins.

The sardines’ supple flesh have been spread over the muffins.

(Yellow) Curry fried rice

Since I’ve been unfortunately bereft of cash, I’ve moved much of my diet over to the produce that’s on sale for the week and brown rice. Brown jasmine rice, to be exact. The other part of my diet is using up whatever I have in the refrigerator. Recently it has been small dill pickles.

Eating so much rice quickly (soon I will move on the quinoa and the bulgur wheat I have stored) means I have to mix up what I’m doing with the rice. Early in the month, I made a conglomeration of black beans (I had cooked in the slower cooker,) chorizo and brown rice with ample amounts of onions, (home-made) salsa and Taptio (not home made.)

Curry rice with a wee bit of cilantro on top.

I then moved on to the stir-fry route with a failed General Tso’s chicken, made with broccoli. The sauce (made with apricot preserves) did not come out at all. (The point of the dish, to me, is the sauce, not the meat.) I considered it a failure. That left me with extra rice and no eggs. I didn’t want to just fry the rice — no eggs. Instead, I dug through the quickly-emptying refrigerator for my big container of yellow curry paste. Two pounds, to be exact, of spicy goodness. I poured some oil into the cast-iron skillet, put the curry in, let it disintegrate some and then threw in the rice.

Curry paste!

Had I other vegetables, or had I remembered the just-bought sack of onions sitting with the potatoes, I would have thrown them in. Good contenders range from potatoes to eggplant to broccoli and sprouts, peppers and tomatoes and squash. I then made a hole in the center of the rice, cracked for eggs, cooked and mixed them into the rice. I cut up cilantro I had bought for the purpose and threw it in, leaving a little extra to be used as a un-cooked garnish.

It serves its purpose. Now only, if I had vegetables left.

If you’re looking for a little extra somethin’-somethin’, then consider making some dill-heavy tzatziki to go with the curried rice.

The Voltron Ale

This article was originally posted on March 29, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Leo, Bryce and I are products of the late 80s and early 90s. When we were born has informed both our choices in diction and our nomenclature decisions, aka, references. The banality of evil is certainly, to a degree and extent, borne out of the History Channel of our childhood’s and its devotion to World War II. Certainly, the time I spent in Germany and my obsession with the German language and culture has influenced both our brewing and our terms, too.

Leo has said the three of us make up, through our various quirks and proclivities, interests and designs, gesticulations and interests, a single 1950s wife.

What this has to do with beer should certainly be explained: Leo wanted to make a domestic (American) golden ale. Not even a pale ale with its higher alcohol content, but rather, a domestic American beer. He made up the recipe extemporaneously at our local homebrew store. The beer was supposed to be a domestic. Together, we three brewing brothers, make up . . . domesticity itself. I’ve been told countless times I’d make a very good wife to some man some day, because of my love of cooking, of hosting, child-rearing, etc. Not to say I disagree. I don’t doubt I’d make a great housewife. I even love a good soap opera, albeit, in German, the language of true Liebe.

When it came to brewing Voltron, the three of us combined into . . .

We wrote the ingredients down and the process was the same as always, except we did not write the yeast down. We’ve assumed, through elimination and cross reference with the one-gallon cider batches fermenting in my closet, that the yeast was the Burton Ale Yeast from White Labs but we’re not sure. Maybe it’s the London Ale Yeast.

Regardless of which yeast it is, the beer itself (a truly beautiful amber color) has been infected. It’s not a bad infection, it’s a pleasant, sour infection but an infection none-the-less.

The beer is carbonated and kegged and has been quite a hit so far, although, it seems everything in the keg that doesn’t taste terrible is a hit.

The plan is to culture whatever we managed to create and both remake that recipe and also make something new. It’s a good infection, one we can harness into a whole new yeast strain and possibly bacteria strain through washing and culturing. Next up for that combination, we’re thinking, is something with fruit.
This is for a five-gallon batch.

Ingredients:
1 lb caramel 60L
1/2 lb Caramunich
1/2 lb flaked barely

6.6 lbs light liquid malt extract

Hops:
1 oz Fuggles
1 oz Cascade

There you have it. The Voltron. (We’re not sure what the hops schedule is so . . . Make it up.)

The Voltron in low light.

An Experiment in Cider Yeasts

This article was originally posted on March 25, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

One of our local homebrew stores was having a sale on yeasts a month, or maybe longer, ago. The yeasts were about to go out of date so they were marked down and low and behold, they were not many common yeasts. In fact, they were all White Labs vials, four of them to be exact. So, I figured if we didn’t use them immediately for beers, we could also use them in a ciders before they went and and see what happened and then wash the yeast, and reuse it when we’re ready to make X, Y or Z with them.

Our recipe is as follows:

4-ish gallons of Great Value Apple Juice
730 grams of corn sugar (2 lbs per 5 gallons, our normal Apfelwein ratio)
Yeast!

The yeasts are:

White Labs Berliner Weisse, WLP630
White Labs Saison II, WLP566
White Labs Belgian Wit, WLP400
White Labs English Cider Yeast, WLP775
White Labs Belgian Style Yeast Blend, WLP575

I also had a White Labs English Cider Yeast that had been sitting in my refrigerator for even longer but was still well within date.

As for the making itself: I boil the corn sugar with a enough water for 5 minutes, stirring until its dissolved, then chuck it into the cider. Sanitation, sanitation, sanitation.

I took industrial bleach and soaked all of the buckets, which had been sitting our for quite some time, and then soaked an additional bucket, which had somehow had its insides covered in algae Industrial bleach kills all. We washed them out a bunch of times, put iodophor water in and off to the races we went. First, though, we had to drill holes for bucket lids and sanitize them, as well as sanitize the lids.

So, I picked up 20 gallons and cider with the intention of using the gallons for the soon-not-so-great yeasts. Fortunately, we still had four 4-gallon buckets laying around as well as a 5-gallon. We hatched the plan, for five 4-gallon batches of cider, thus consuming the 20 gallons purchased and consuming the five vials of yeast hanging out in the refrigerator. Our calculations were a bit off: We forgot that, in addition to the sugar’s boiled water, a 4-gallon bucket can’t really take four gallons without spilling out the top. Nevertheless, we soldiered one, made our cider sheets, labeled the tops of the buckets (important, because we hadn’t been doing that as often, leading to a case of unknown-yeast cider in the keg, also remedied by the cider sheets) and put them in the spare room.

Our theory is: if they taste great, we keg them. If one doesn’t taste great, this is a super opportunity to try to start mixing ciders and seeing if we can create something tastier, especially because five different ones have all been started at the same time.

I can happily report they’re all fermenting and pressurized.

We’re calling them

“AW #?”
At this point, we really don’t know what batch we’re on and they’re their own, seperate thing, although they are using the Apfelwein (AW) sugar ratio.

Check back in a month!

20 gallons of cider in four 4-gallon buckets and one 5-gallon bucket.

All of the empty juice bottles.

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