Viewing Category: Food
I turned 39 at the end of December, and with that came a whole host of aches and pains. I thought I was just imagining things because I was eyeing my impending 40s with some trepidation. But then the spasms began, starting with my left hand. My left shoulder joint starting feeling like it was seizing up, and then the right shoulder blade seemed to be grating itself into little pieces. My back was killing me, each vertebra crunching against each other like little disks of sand. These were pains I had never experienced before, and the usual three-day window it normally takes my body to bounce back from a strain had stretched well into 9 days, no improvement in sight. In fact, things seemed to be getting worse, which didn't help my mood.
"So this is how it begins," I thought gloomily. "Total body distintegration. Just in time for my 40s." I mentallly flipped through the various exotic illnesses that could be afflicting me, my imagination fueled by the recent House marathon I had taken in over Christmas, none of them particularly amusing in this context. I feel into a dark mood, lacking energy and clarity. I stayed in the house for almost the entire week, talking to no one, pushing at projects in a vain attempt to keep my mind off the imminent physical collapse of my body.
Then yesterday, I grudgingly went to have dinner with a group of friends at a very nice Sze-Chuan restaurant in Billerica that serves what is possibly the best Chinese food I've had in the area. Grouchy and in pain, I nevertheless put on my best face to fulfill my social obligation. Why? I know from experience that when I put myself in a place where I'm forced to deal with different realities, new insights always arise.
As usual, the company and meal were excellent, which helped lift my spirits. My friends, however, noticed that I was having some back pain because I was making very odd contorted stretching motions. I explained myself.
"You've never done THAT before, Dave," commented B with some concern.
The other B nodded. "You should take some Alleve to make the swelling go down. That will help."
I nodded grimly. I'd taken some pain medicine, which is a rarity for me since I don't like putting drugs in my body. I also knew it was just a temporary measure, because this type of pain was something entirely new to me. The "Lion's Head" soup, a specialty that I normally enjoyed, failed to register on my tongue at all as I stewed in my thoughts. I noted with disconsolation that I'd finished the bowl without remembering to enjoy it. "Yes, I've been taking some Tylenol, but this back pain is something new I haven't experienced before. I'm worried it's something really bad."
P, who had come a little later than the rest of us, perked up at the mention of my back problems. "Oh, I had that a while ago, and it turned out that I was just really dehydrated."
This was an unexpected diagnosis, and I found the idea that dehydration and back pain were related interesting. I had noticed that I was drinking unusually little water recently, and I pressed for more details.
"I was googling for information on back pain," answered P, "and one of the first things that popped up was dehydration and chiropractice. Apparently, when you don't drink enough water, your body isn't 'lubed up' enough and your muscles shrink, which causes joints to rub together more. So I drank a lot more water, and the pain went away."
When I got home, I started drinking water to make up for lost time. Normally, you're supposed to drink at least 64oz a day. I had been probably doing less than 24 oz of liquid a day for several weeks, since I was just not feeling that thirsty. I drank water throughout the next day as well, and you know what? I felt better. The crackly pain in my back went away after about 12 hours. The knife-like pain in my right shoulder turned into a regular throbbing. I felt...juicier! Apparently I had been turning my muscles into beef jerky by not drinking enough water. The numbness and spasms in my arms and hands have also started to fade away. It might be too early to call, but I can say that drinking water seems to make a palpable difference in the way I'm feeling. A quick Google seemed to corroborate P's diagnosis:
The human body also has its emergency calls for water. These are localized emergency calls. We call these heartburn, rheumatoid joint pain, back pain, migraine headaches, colitis pain, fibromyalgiac pain, even angina pain -- signs of dehydration in the body. -- from Joint pain, back pain, arthritis cause by chronic dehydration, says doctor
Pain may be a warning of localized thirst; that is, the pain signal may be a warning of dehydration in that specific area (a regional thirst), for example low back pain, migraine headache, joint pain, and angina. Chronic dehydration may contribute to a reduction in lymph flow, which in turn may contribute to or cause varied problems. -- from Diagnose Me: Condition: Dehydration
I knew that drinking water was good for you, but I had never bothered to find out what could go wrong when you are a pint or two low. Dehydration is usually mentioned as a cause of death only when you're reading about shipwrecks, which is outside the realm of our everyday experience.
So the moral of the story: DRINK LOTS OF WATER. Or else!
UPDATE: There are many excellent reader insights in the comments below, presenting a multitude of views. Well worth reading.
My sister Emily recently sent me a link to the culinary revelation that is Meat Cake, a "less-girly cake" made from fine American meat products! Since we had our traditional Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks ago with Dad, this holiday weekend was a good time to do something different. The idea to make a Thanksgiving Meat Cake was based on the thanksgiving sandwiches I used to get from a Boston deli when I worked in Fort Point Channel. There's a similar Martha Stewart Meatloaf Cake too, but we drew our inspiration from the Black Widow Bakery version because it's steeped in awesomeness!
So here's how it went!
Building our Cake
We started with a basic turkey meatloaf recipe (without the apples). We doubled the ingredients to get two 9" cake pans filled.
The original recipe called for an hour in the oven, but the 9" cake pans we used make thinner patties and will cook faster. Since turkey tends to dry out fast, we used the "toothpick test" to check when the loaf was cooked. Our cook time was 25min for the first stage, followed by a quick glazing with cranberry sauce, finished with another 5min under the broiler to dry it out.
You'll notice the that our raw meatloaf cakepans have a dimple in the middle. We thought it would help compensate for the meatloaf's tendency to expand and rise in the middle. It would also provide a place for the stuffing layer to hold on to.
After the meatloaf layers cooled (about 30 minutes), we piled instant turkey stuffing between them and stacked them up. I have a spinning cheese platter that Em's boyfriend Robert gave me a few years ago for Christmas; with a circular piece of freezer paper on top of it, this worked well as an impromptu cake frosting platform.
Being lazy, we used prepared mashed potatoes from the local supermarket for the frosting. I've never frosted a cake before, so I just glopped the stuff on all around and then spun the platter, using a large sillicon spatula dipped in warm water to slowly smooth it out. It's a bit wobbly and uneven, but that just adds to its charm :-) A neat swirly pattern on the top formed, so we left it and garnished it with clusters of whole cranberries Em picked out of the canned cranberry sauce. We didn't have very many, so we just made a simple pattern, then garnished with a bit of paprika, ground pepper, and flakes of Morton's Kosher Salt.
Having our Cake (and Eating it Too)
After taking a zillion pictures of the cake---much to the disgruntlement of Em's boyfriend, waiting with fork and knife at the ready---we drizzled some plates with mushroom gravy and laid big slices o' turkey cake on them.
The verdict?
Turkey Meatloaf Cake is very filling, with all the sleep-inducing powers of a full turkey dinner. We all took 2 hour naps after having just one slice. The wine probably helped with that, too :-)
Turkey meatloaf doesn't really taste like turkey. I would describe the flavor as "meat"; ground turkey tastes pretty similar to lean ground beef and ground pork to me. It's not bad, but it doesn't deliver that great roasted turkey flavor one would get from a turkey sub.
Putting mashed potatoes in the middle would have given this a more authentic "layer cake look". I had been worried about the two layers holding together, so I avoided slippery ingredients in the middle layer. We noticed, however, that the mashed potatoes tend to stiffen as they cool. They probably would hold equally well as a center filling.
For next time, we're thinking of trying more of a baklava style layered cake, using real roasted turkey layered with stuffing, potatoes, and gravy, to get better flavor. But then we'd end up cooking Thanksgiving dinner again, and it's not really that different from turkey casserole.
Anyway, the big win is this: WE MADE MEAT CAKE! MUA HA HA HA!
This July 4th my sister and I attemped to recreate bien dang, which is a kind of ready-made boxed lunch that we used to get in Taiwan. My sister and I remember it from road trips; there was a particular rest station between Taipei and Kaoshiung that had pork chop boxed lunches that I liked. The box included interesting vegetables, eggs, and pickles, but it was the pork chop that I really looked forward to most. The photo above is our best approximation of a real bien dang.
I've been trying to recreate the chinese porkchop recipe based on experimentation, and I think I almost have the seasoning correct. However, there are a lot of variations in the recipe. One of my buddies shares a similar passion for pai-gu fan (pork chop rice, I think it means). And then there's this example that my sis found on Bribe Me With a Muffin; as a bonus, this blog yielded tons of Boston-area foodie information and clued me in to a firm called Design Continuum (they apparently did some work on the $100 laptop UI)...but I digress.
Our bien dang re-creation has a ways to go before we really nail it--they were a bit dry, and I didn't season the pork chops enough--however, we have made significant progress: you can read more on our documented Flickr photoset. Sis and I will likely plan a trip down to the Taiwan Cafe in Chinatown to recalibrate our taste buds; there are also several more Taiwanese restaurants that I want to visit. Yay!
We also went strawberry picking for the first time. I had no idea how awesome fresh strawberries were; as kids in rural New Jersey, my sis and I would sometimes come across wild strawberries in the field behind our house in Perrineville. Usually they were scrawny things with bugs inside, picked over by birds and rabbits. Not very appetizing, plus we were too small to know what a ripe berry looked like...we picked them all indiscriminately! Anyway, commercial strawberries are much more interesting...check out the strawberry picking photoset for a peek. We bought some baking soda biscuits and made strawberry shortcake; this was something I don't think we had growing up, so it was good to be introduced to something new. I asked the kids manning the strawberry picking booth how to make the stuff, and they were somewhat surprised that I had to ask how to do it.
To round out the July 4th Weekend, we also decided to make S'mores. I'd never had one, but I wanted to toast marshmallows so we got the stuff: marshmallows, sticks, Hershey's Chocolate, and Graham Crackers. Now, I'm not a fan of Hershey's Chocolate (it's mostly sugary and without character), but I had to establish the baseline for future comparison. The picture shows one exceptionally well-charred marshmallow that, despite its ghastly appearance, smelled quite wonderful My sister's boyfriend got to eat it; I got to take the picture.
Speaking of death and chocolate, sis and I were at the Mall and stopped by the Lindt chocolate store. They had (gasp) 99% Cocoa Chocolate Bars. I like the 70% and find the 85% rather harsh, but despite that I had to buy a bar. I haven't tried it yet; I probably will buy a few more bars of this first "just in case". I expect that the tasting experience will similar to licking a piece of charcoal, or it might be like ingesting the ashes from a very fine cigar. Yes, I really am looking forward to this.
We also consumed a fair amount of Pocky and fancy I-Mei Cookies, but that's a post for another day.
Last May my sister Emily had a tremendous idea for Memorial Day: relive the hot dogs of our youth. Actually, that's not quite correct...we wanted to relive the hot dog that our Dad remembers from his pastorin' days back in the '60s: the Rochester White Hot. Dad used to live in Upstate NY as an assistant pastor in Brighton before I was born. As it so happened, I went to both the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology for grad schoolin', so this bit of Americana overlaps both of our personal histories. I must have even been the same age as Dad when he was in the area...eerie!
Every time Dad visits, we ask him if there was anything he misses from living in the US. Without fail he says, "White hots. And good cheese." For a long time I thought this just meant any of the white hot dogs you can get in the refrigerated section of the supermarket, but Dad said these weren't quite right. We even went to a German deli staffed by authentic German frauleins and looked at the white sausages there, but even these were not the hots we were looking for. They were good, but they not the White Hots of Dad's memory. Not even close.
Em dug up this link to The American Museum of Natural History, which at one time featured a selection of ball park franks as part of their Baseball as America exhibition. Apparently, Rochester NY has a regional hot dog that's produced most famously by Zweigles. It's made of uncured, unsmoked pork, which is what gives it the white color. The American Museum of Natural History's description goes into a bit more detail on how the hotdog is served:
Split and griddled, this dog is served on a toasted bun and topped with a hot sauce (a meat chili made from a secret Rochester recipe), chopped onions, and any one of a variety of mustards.
Emily further recalled the joy of another Rochester brand, Nance's Sharp and Creamy Mustard, that she had once enjoyed at my house. It's one of my favorite mustards, though I wish I could remember who first recommended it to me. Em likes it too, so I was able to get a bottle of it at the local Hannaford's supermarket.
Dad was originally planning to visit this June (sadly cancelled), so Emily arranged to order a variety pack of Zweigles Hots from NewYorkStyleDeli.com. The prices are a bit high if you pick and choose, but the specials are actually pretty reasonable when you consider the hassle of shipping perishable food overnight. Our package arrived just prior to the Memorial Day weekend in a nifty red cooler with freezer packs all around it. NY Style Deli also included two paper Zweigles hats to wear while grilling...an unexpectedly awesome touch :-)
Here's a pack of genuine Zweigle's White Hots. Since they're uncured, they're highly perishable, so once you open the package you're pretty much committing yourself to eating them all or freezing them later. I don't really like to freeze hot dogs because it seems to do terrible things to their texture...I could just be imagining that though.
Our variety pack included some Red Hots, which we grilled for comparison. There were some skinless skinnier hot dogs too, but I didn't bother to take a picture.
Emily also found a recipe for the secret Rochester meat sauce mentioned by the museum. I don't have the link, but it was similar to this one on David Rosengarten's site. It's possible that this meat sauce is related to the "hot sauce" they put on the infamous Rochester Garbage Plate, a "specialty" that I never dared try myself when I lived in the area. I must admit I am curious now, looking at this picture. NewYorkStyleDeli.com sells a Hot Meat Sauce Mix for $2.99 too, but what fun is that?
With all our preparations complete, we had a problem: neither of us had ever seen or eaten an authentic Rochester White Hot. I wasn't even sure what one looked like. There was a small, low-resolution photo of the American Museum of Natural History site, so we used that as our model. Here are a few quick photos I took before eating. Unfortunately my indoor lighting setup is half-broken and I've been having some white balancing problems (my gray card may be too old), so the color is a little off:
I later re-read the recipe, and noted that pan-fried hots are split in half; not sure if that would have been more authentic. But they were still pretty darn good. If there are any Rochester natives reading this, send me a picture of the real thing!
Flavor Comments:
Nance's Sharp and Creamy Mustard, if you haven't had it, has a nice kick to it. It has a similar punch to that of wasabi, though not as overpowering as in the case of the really fresh stuff (you know, the kind that makes you think you're about to die). The mustard is also a little sweet.
The White Hots themselves I found rather mild. They're also not very salty compared to a lot of other hot dogs (Nathan's, for example), so the condiments you choose play a major part in defining the taste. Even when charred, the white hots stayed pretty mellow.
The meat sauce, as we prepared it, was also mild and fragrant. It's got a bit of cinnamon and thyme in it, and adds to the overall sweetness of the plate. It was not very meaty or flavorful by itself, but it added a welcome beefy taste to the hot dog that would otherwise be missing. I think even if the bits of beef were more charred, it would help; the sauce is simmered for a long time, so browing the ground beef very thoroughly might help next time.
I definitely wanted pickles and potato chips with this. It helps balance the slight sweetness. I reached for them immediately. I wonder what they use in Rochester?
For the bun, I probably would also choose a more neutral-flavored one rather than a sweetish one next time. I think for such a mild dog, the selection of bun would go a long way to making it "just right". We used some buns from the supermarket, and you know how those are.
For the Fourth of July, Em and I will be recreating bien dang, the taiwan lunchbox one buys when travelling. I remember these fondly from car trips and train rides we took when first arriving in Taiwan; they're also readily available for the lunchtime crowd in any town or city. I have been working on recreating the pork chop recipe so we can make these and maybe drive somewhere to eat them :-)
My sister found a recipe for an Italian pasta dish called Bucatini Alla Carbonara, and made it for us on Memorial Day. She told me she'd heard about the dish from one of her online buds, someone from Italy who loves this dish.
Here's another view of it, nestled on top of a lot of kitchen clutter:
It's nice to have Italian food that isn't Spaghetti and Meatballs, Lasagna, or Veal Parmigiani. I am convinced that those food items are the equivalent of Chinese-American staples like Sweet and Sour Pork, General Tso's Chicken, and Beef with Brocolli...sorta ethnic, but varying wildly in quality and completely lacking in authenticity.
I think the main problem with these foods is that people know how the dishes are supposed to look, which makes it easy to meet expectations through visual presentation alone. That doesn't mean that the food is good. It's often mushy, overcooked, oversalted, and lacking in distinct flavor. I think of most bad Italian food I've had as "red and noodly with sausage and green peppers", bad chinese as "fried and sweetish-brown with celery and carrots", bad mexican as "beany, cheesy, and crunchy", and bad thai as "coconut and lemon grass in brown sauce". At my favorite restaurants, the dishes have to transcend these stereotypes for me to feel happy. There are a couple kinds of food that I still don't really have a good feel for and enjoy most of the time: korean and indian; I am still developing my palate, I guess.
Oh, the Bucatini Alla Carbonara was excellent...good job, sis! You can make it for me anytime :-D
This is a puffy pancake made from 1/2 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of milk, a dash of salt, and 3 eggs. That's all...here's the recipe if you don't believe me. You bake the mix in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes in a pan lined with butter, and it puffs up! I'm told that this is a form of popover. I'm astonished that such simple ingredients can do this, and even more astonished at how easy it is to mess up.
Baking is essentially a form of chemistry, and thus there is a narrow window of excellence that's tough to nail. I would say that that this applies to all food preparation; I would guess that the vast majority of food we eat (at least here in the U.S.) is between 40-70% of its ultimate expression because of overcooking, errors in technique, or unbalance in ingredients. That's just my uninformed opinion, but it's one that generally keeps my apetite in check. Why get excited about eating something that isn't the best it could be? Those are the emptiest calories!
I never enjoyed chemistry that much in high school, with all the memorizing of reactions and so forth, but in the context of making yummy things to eat it is much more interesting. With the tiny ingredient list, making a puffy pancake is all about timing, temperature, measurement, and technique.
I wondered what would happen if I used a shiny stainless steel pan instead of the dark cast iron one. Mistake!
The result was a dense, very eggy pancake that crawled out of the sides of the pan. Not puffy at all. Very disappointing. However, it's possible that I overmixed the batter; I was reading that when making unleavened quickbreads, you don't want to mix the ingredients too much, as this releases more gluten. As the popover is leavened by steam as opposed to an active ingredient like baking soda or yeast, I guess the presence of gluten makes the dough too elastic and rubbery to rise.
And so the experimentation continues. What if I use fewer eggs? Or a higher temperature? Or try a different flour? Add baking soda? It's actually pretty exciting, sort of my own personal version of Yakitate! Japan (a manga/tv series about baking bread)...but I've gained 10 pounds since starting this experiment. Time to close the lab!
Continuing on the pancake theme, I also came across this set of cartoon instructions from a Japanese pancake mix, thoughtfully translated by everyone's favorite gaijin and robot raconteur Matt Alt. I've always wondered what those cute cartoons were saying; actually, I still do :-)
I've noticed a disturbing trend among American restaurants: the club sandwich has been downsized from three slices of bread to two, which in my mind makes it just another sandwich. I suppose it may be a return to authenticity, as this quote from food diety James Beard suggests:
[the club sandwich] is one of the great sandwiches of all time and has swept its way around the world after an American beginning. Nowdays the sandwich is bastardized because it is usually made as a three-decker, which is not authentic (whoever started that horror should be forced to eat three-deckers three times a day the rest of his life), and nowadays practically everyone uses turkey and there's a vast difference between turkey and chicken where sandwiches are concerned.
I was all set to complain about how restaurants like "Ruby Tuesday" and "Bugaboo Creek", two institutions which serve a particularly disappointing club sandwich, seem to be spearheading a move away from the three-slice stack of bread, bacon, tomato and turkey of my childhood. Authenticity be damned!
I first encountered the club sandwich as a displaced American kid in Taiwan. This was the late 70s, when the island was under martial law. This was well before any American franchises were allowed into the country; imagine a place without McDonalds, and that was Taiwan. In other words, a horrible place to live when you're a kid: no TV, no nice stores, no ice cream...nothing! Maybe it was actually good for me in some unspecified way, but it was rather depressing at the time. Our mom, sensing that we needed regular injections of Americana to bolster our spirits, took us to the only nearby Western restaurant, Foremost on (I think) Chung Hua Bei Lu in Shihlin, a suburb of Taipei. Foremost Foods was one of the only places that actually sold cows milk and western ice cream. The dairy was obviously reconstituted, watery, and a little funny tasting, but they also served burgers and club sandwiches. I don't actually remember eating many of them (sis might remember), but they anchored my sense of identity in some weird gastronomic fashion.
I often wondered how Foremost had come to be in Taiwan in the first place, a country not known for its love of dairy in any form; milk usually means "goat" or "soybean" (yuck). Well, the Internet is here today, so I found that the post-WWII US military presence in Taiwan probably had something to do with it; Foremost Dairies supplied milk to US forces abroad from 1932 onwards. Particularly interesting is this excerpt:
During World War 11, the U.S. military sparked Foremost's international growth and the creamery opened additional plants nationwide. Foremost Dairies became known as "the longest milk route in the world."
[...]
Wherever it set up a facility, the organization wanted to teach local people how to operate it and then share in its success.
While searching the Internet, I came across Foremost in places like Vietnam and Hawaii, the logo largely untouched. Taiwan itself benefited from the facilities and training Foremost introduced, creating a sustainable local business in a fashion similar to the Singer Corporation...or so I imagine. I find the remnants of foreign cultures fascinating, especially when they've established a foothold in a place where the original influence has disappeared. Asia is littered with this: Vietnamese cuisine, forks and spoons in Thailand, master sushi chefs in Taiwan...you get the idea. Then there's interesting ideas backwashing into the former colonial powers, like Cobra Beer importing Indian beer to go with curry served in the U.K.
Where was I? Oh yes, club sandwiches...I guess it wasn't about the number of slices of bread after all.
I was at Black Ink in Harvard Square last week, and was drawn to this green cafeteria tray with matching cup. I don't know why...I just had to have it.
My sis says I can use it to control the size of the portions I eat, much as we theorized with Mr Bento. We actually both have them now, but haven't taken any pictures of it yet. I guess I just like things that hold food...weird! :-)
Here's another shot of the tray. I may use this as a photo prop for the bizarre asian snacks that I've been trying. There are so many...they all deserve to be celebrated (and then eaten). I haven't been shooting many pictures lately, but now that it's warmer I'm feeling more in the mood.
[yes, I rewrote this article almost entirely...that's what I get for posting laaate at night when I was too tired to think straight]
A Russian-born friend of mine sent me a simple recipe for the beet soup known as Borscht. I've been very interested in cooking lately as a money-saving measure, and have been seeking out hearty soups as an inexpensive way to eat well. Borscht is one of those ethnic foods I haven't tried, and I've never seen it or tasted it. My curiosity was piqued!
Here's what it looked like (this is right out of the fridge, btw):
It's interesting to make a dish that you've never tasted or seen before, especially if you're also unfamiliar with the soup-making process. About halfway through burning my borscht, I was struck by how similar this was to creating an innovative software product. For the vast majority of development work, we can point to an existing product and say "it's going to be like that." Pre-existing patterns are a big time-saver. With the borscht, I only had a vague vision of a soup, but really no idea how it would come out. I knew intuitively that the combination of root vegetables in the "soup" form factor was appealing, but would it really work? While it's true I had a recipe, I was following it rather loosely, discovering key steps a little after I messed them up. It was invigorating!
Borscht has a lot of root vegetables in it: beets, potatoes, carrots, and onions form the base. First you boil the beets for an hour so they get soft, then take them out to cool. You cook the potatoes and carrots next in the red beet liquid in the second phase. After that, the final phase is to add the sliced beats back in with a few bay leaves with some onion and cabbage. In retrospect, it's an easy recipe.
Of course, while I was cooking it for the first time, I made all kinds of mistakes. I didn't know how to cook beets, so I just dumped them in and didn't wash them first. I figured I could toss the beet water afterwards, but then I read later that you keep it. So I had to separate the sand from it using another pot. I also discovered that beets are really easy to peel with your hands after you boil them, and they make an incredible red-purple stain on everthing they touch. I also added the onions way too early and they mushified. I added more onions later, and then I ran out of liquid while I was watching TV and the whole pot almost burned. Exciting! Then there were a dozen small details: how much water do you need to cook a given volume of beets? How much salt and pepper, added when? What shape do I need to cut the beets in for that authentic look? And really...am I making anything that resembles borscht, or am I opening myself up to ridicule by connisseurs of eastern european cuisine? I have certainly experienced that in the Asian realm, when I tried to cook pork belly stew for the father of a friend of mine who was from Shanghai in the old days. He had been very excited, but when served my made-up version, he was visibly disappointed. In his eyes, I had done the equivalent of buying a Del Monico steak and boiling it. Quel horreur! I remember once getting some lunch from the small independent cafeteria in our building, where they were serving "Asian Stir Fry". As I read this aloud off the menu in a slightly amused tone, I noticed that the chef couldn't quite meet my eye.
On the other hand, I had made something new, and it was good. The next day I tried the borscht again, my friend having said that borscht is really good when it's a day old. I was warned not to re-boil it because it loses the red color if you do. The flavors had mellowed out a bit, and a new tanginess was present. It's true...day-old borscht is better!
At this point, I looked on the Internet to see what borscht was supposed to look like, and was relieved to see that mine looked similar. There were variations in viscosity, in how the beets were cut, in the amount of cabbage, and whether the dollop of yogurt was on top (I forgotten to add that). But the color was right, and that was affirming. The beets have a very strong red dye that makes everything look the way it sorta should. Ah...closure!
The process of making borscht for the first time triggered a few thoughts:
I need to be seeking this kind of experience more often. Not just in the kitchen, but in everything. A lot of the time we're afraid of messing up or looking stupid. One huge advantage that children have is that they aren't self-conscious about it until they hit a certain age. I think this is what contributes to their ease in learning new languages; I suspect that if I was completely unselfconscious about imitating noises and repeating them over and over again, I could learn a languages well. The two languages I formally studied, French and Mandarin Chinese, were in atmospheres that were authoritarian and judgmental, and I had felt highly self-conscious and stupid. Next time, I am going to really immerse myself in the silly wonder of making noises and imitatating accents over and over. In an adult class I would get some funny looks. Maybe the best thing to do would be to find some 6-9 year-old kids to teach me language basics.
I have two "making" mindsets: invention and production. In my day-to-day business thinking for 2006, I've been thinking about production and process: that's knowing how to make something and making it. This is the skill I think of as being worth money and that's what I charge for.
I never thought of invention as something I could be paid for directly. My thinking before: would you hire someone to learn how to make borscht, or would you hire someone who already knew and could serve you up a tasty bowl at their interview? I had always assumed the later, and have tended to view my contribution to the workforce as being production-oriented. However, I just realized that a lot of my shifts this year are toward building credibility as an Inventor. That's not limited to making things like The Printable CEO either; my obsession with creating original content is related to it, as is my entire design process. I'll be keeping track of which billable activities are invention and which are production. I'd like to be getting more gigs based on my inventive credentials. My marketing efforts should follow.
Now that I think about it, the Production side of me is something I learned to value through work. Invention, however, has the deeper personal history:
When I was in the 10th grade, I vowed that I would do everything I could to develop a powerful associative memory. My theory was this: the more connections I could make between disparate topics, the more inventive I could be, and therefore fewer obstacles would truly block me. I haven't thought about that vow in years, but it has colored my way of looking at things strongly. I like the idea of outflanking things, of figuring out alternative and novel ways to hard problems. I find essential patterns and make connections that didn't exist before. This is at the root of my inventive powers; I developed the production side because I couldn't figure out how to really sell that.
I never liked chess because it is a bounded problem set. Sure, it's a very large set, but never mind that. The real game, which occurs on the psychological level, requires years of study and memorization. It's fascinating and very cool, but there are other things I would rather spend my time doing. Chess, in the long run, is a game for nimble pattern-minded individuals, and I can't compete on that level without investing a lot of time. However, I know just enough about the psychology of chess playing that I can enjoy it: I draw upon my readings of non-chess strategy and body language to make moves that have high dramatic potential, then I see how the other person reacts. I don't make stupid moves, so the opponent is kept on his/her toes. Over the course of the game I learn a lot about my opponent, which for me is a much more interesting activity than shifting pieces around on a grid. I lose, but I also win :-)
One of my favorite movies: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Some of you out there will nod, "of course."
Another friend was telling me about a sport in which you draw a straight line on a map, and then you must follow that line through any means necessary. Giant mountain in the way? Sorry, you've got to go over it. It's an extreme real-world obstacle course. I can't remember the name of the sport at the moment, but it struck me that this is so opposite of how I would ordinarily deal with a situation. I can think of a million ways to get around something, but I haven't developed my direct confrontation methodology to the same degree. I believe I've known this subconsciously; studying competitive activities and training regimens has been one of my pastimes in the past few years. I've also been a lot more willing to go into an unknown situation to test my ability to deal. I like training with this in mind now; in the past I haven't appreciated it.
I didn't expect borscht to be so intellectually nourishing. Highly recommended if you've never made it before.
Quickie post...a picture of some ribs I made last week to show cousin Jason how it's done. These were made under the broiler, as the deck is being worked on. It's Rib Recipe 5.0 Alpha 1. except using store-bought sauce (Bullseye™ Original Recipe) as the coating.
Too bad the background is so unappealingly gray. Thanks Jeff for knocking out the gray background :-)
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