Feb 26, 2010
the goods
of course, it is raining. this made the bike ride to the middle east excitingly treacherous. i went in, looked around for stacks of meat and, finding none, went to the back of the room where it the keeper of the lamb sat nursing a beer. he ducked in the back and appeared moments later with this:
diana: her true story is there for a sense of scale.
stay tuuuuuuuned.
diana: her true story is there for a sense of scale.
stay tuuuuuuuned.
hole in the wall mega street cred eating places
often, what i really want is a little place that isn't all hyped-up and which gives me the good stuff. it's always a struggle: tell everyone about it? or keep it to myself? if the latter, sometimes it goes out of business (taking irreplaceable deliciousness with it--see bay leaf cafe's toor dal soup, now gone forever from my (and your) life). fortunately, most of the institutions on this here list of hole in the wall eating spots seem relatively secure. also, i blame christine for this, even if she does have a nice ligature on her homepage.
Feb 25, 2010
comfort and joy
look at our little film series, all grown up. come see comfort and joy, introduced by gus, next monday, 6.30pm. www.food24fps.com has all the detailz.
Feb 24, 2010
whiteout
via dezeen.com
spaceoperaform's new installation in a salt factory. sheets of spun polypro that respond to the static charge on your body and part as you walk through them. they must make visitors charge up before entering.
grindin'
via youtube.com
it's the transformers! these blocks, ladies and gentlemen, are real. stop motion is such a wondrous thing. the video is great, but the making of video is even better.
THIS SUNDAY: more lamb than you can shake a stick at
how are ewe doing? (i stole that one)
this sunday, in the second of these lambfests, hundreds of pounds of lamb will give their small, fluffy lives for your delectation at the boston lamb takedown. amateur cooks get 15lbs of lamb and a few days to make something to feed 250 people.
aaron, sam, and i will be cooking. our innate sense of competition, always high, will likely reach fever pitch by sunday. the organizer bills it as a "takedown" but it'll probably end up more like an enormous potluck, heavy on tasty lamb-based things. come, eat (unless you're vegetarian).
the detailz: sunday, feb 28, 4pm, at the middle east (on mass ave in central sq)
the rather busy poster; buy tickets ($15 for lamb access + lamb-related merch)
vt
Feb 23, 2010
Feb 21, 2010
last days at mugaritz
via youtube.com
mugaritz is one of the vanguard restaurants (the owner worked at el bulli before setting up on his own). their kitchen burned down about a few days ago, and this video by this season's stagiaires captures some of the last days at the restaurant.
Feb 19, 2010
organ2/aslsp
john cage's longest composition at st burchardi in halberstadt, germany. the performance ends 639 years after it begins. this is a similar class (but different type) of persistence problem as that faced by the long now foundation in building the 10000-year clock. how do you keep something going for that much time? more tenuous connections: a canticle for leibowitz, anathem, and the book of the new sun.
Feb 18, 2010
writing as thinking
i am coming, once again, to the realization that i don't really know what i'm thinking and saying until i write it down and all the ambiguities of collapsing loops of logic become apparent. writing and revising, working these ambiguities out out word by word; it's a huge pain.
in other news, does anyone have a plausible explanation for why some plants reproduce with bulbs and corms (vs seeds alone)?
Our progress to noodles must not be hasty.
watching tampopo
anonymous person enjoying tampopo at food24fps (photo by robert ruffin). the blur on the screen is tampopo cutting some tasty-looking short ribs off the bone. success achieved, after many fruitless years seeking notoriety in the crimson.
aspiral
via forevergeek.com
a spiral clock where time is marked by the position of a little rolling ball. every 12 hours, the ball winds up in the center of the clock, where it falls through a hole and comes out again at the edge. handmade to your specifications for a mere £350 by aspiral.
Feb 17, 2010
spokeless bicycle
a working prototype of a spokeless bicycle made in a yale undergraduate mechanical engineering class. via the inventor.
burning man
just rediscovered some notes on burning man 2007 (the green man):
i packed for burning man in one day, but it was a day of lists and traveling from place to place being foiled in my intentions by people who had been there before me and purchased the last campstove/camelbak/tube of dr bronners/etc. rainbow grocery was full of people wheeling about dollies stacked with 2.5-gallon water cubes and looking pensively at serried ranks of dried foods. we drove out into the desert heavily laden with the stuff of life.
burning man, when i finally got there, was a place of rich contrast. by day, the light permeated everything, and so did the dust. the oobleck in the trough up front fermented slightly in the heat and left our hands stained a pale but persistent green. at night, the light came in neon shades of green, blue, and red, from electroluminescent sheets and wire and many thousands of glowsticks, but was immediately swallowed by the desert. periodically, huge gouts of flame would erupt into the sky and everything would suddenly look as if it was illuminated by sodium streetlight. giant art cars sailed slowly through the darkness in pools of light and music, heading for no destination in particular.
in the vast open space at the center of the city, someone had constructed a radial matrix of full-spectrum LEDs and turned it into a pulsing cylinder of light—i sat there for an hour watching these thousands of lighted spheres on the cubitron cycle through a series of displays. one night, we walked out at 2am into the eastern expanses of the playa and climbed up inside the giant sculpture made of cut-up 18-wheelers, then found a mirrored room hung floor to ceiling with strings of red lights such that, after climbing in, you seemed to be adrift in a matrix of dim red points stretching away into infinity on all sides.
a distant black lump in the night turned out to be a clump of couches under palm-frond umbrellas. i fell asleep there and woke up just as the sun rose over the mountains in the east. i saw more utilikilts than i'd ever seen before and made pancakes one morning with nothing more than flour, baking soda, powdered milk, and water. (they were decent, though dusty.) mike, from the camp and from deep springs, is a more accomplished cook than i. thanks to him, we had, one night, fresh sweet potato fries and a smoky, cumin-scented pot of lentils and carrots.
we left several hours before the temple of forgiveness was scheduled to burn, and took three hours to get to the edge of black rock city (a whole mile). by the end, we'd shut off the engine and put the car in neutral—rolling it at 0.3 mph wasn't hard. twelve hours after leaving the camp we got back into mountain view and then i drove back home to a city washed in morning sun.
Feb 15, 2010
save food from the refrigerator
via jihyun ryou
a system of nonrefrigerated food storage units. note the humidifier under the solanaceous fruit (they last longer in humid, cool environments than they do in the dry air of the fridge), and the apple-covered potato-storage unit (ethylene from apples retards the sprouting of potato buds).
Feb 14, 2010
the big lie about the life of the mind
via chronicle.com
another in a series of controversial articles about the institution of academia and graduate school. the article itself is not novel, but the stream of comments is an engrossing read. a bit too close to home for complete comfort.
Feb 12, 2010
a brief history of pretty much everything
via youtube.com
not quite everything, but with brilliant little comic twists. thx ben
Feb 11, 2010
Feb 10, 2010
metropolis
via vimeo.com
rob carter's paper cutout visual history of charlotte NC. monty python-esque and worth seeing.
Feb 8, 2010
tampopo, tonight!
TONIGHT: Mon, Feb 8, 6pm. TAMPOPO, in the Adams Pool Theater in Harvard Square (map). Free and open to the public. Introduced by Tom Levenson (MIT). The ultimate movie on food and sex. A struggling single mother, with the help of a cowboy truck driver, aims heroically high to make the best ramen noodles. Told in parallel, the story of an epicurean white-suited gangster and his girlfriend whose pursuit of pleasures involve doing interesting things with live shrimp in bed. Woven around this core are episodes turning social hierarchies and connoisseurship on their heads, culminating in triumphal noodles and a death speech about yam sausages. For more information, see IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. IMPORTANT: If you do not have a Harvard undergraduate (College) ID card, you must arrive at the Pool Theater by 6.15pm to be admitted.More details at www.food24fps.com
Feb 5, 2010
yours for just $450 at Feb 1, 2010
skillet pizza
the skillet pizza article (AFC story; detailed instructions; primordial origins) ran on the atlantic's food channel earlier this week and got picked up by lifehacker and adam kuban at slice.seriouseats.com. the latter is particularly cool, since i've always sort of wanted adam kuban's job.
if you decide to try this at home, use the original post since some of the instructions and formatting got taken out by the atlantic's editors and i think they're sort of useful. here again is the incredibly tasty result of experiment 7 (fresh tomato sauce, pesto, onions, basil, sourdough crust).
the breakfast report
nothing better than waking up in sheets line-dried in the cold. (and it's been cold.)
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