yanobe kenji

not everyone is cool enough to build large metal objects that do neat things. for example, how about this foot soldier, a "Weapon for conquest series, A "teleexistence" type, pants model trabelling weapon"? or this survival system train, "Kenji Yanobe's private train possessing various containers with the necessary functions for survival such as the oxygen generation container, water distillation container,and houseuhold tools"? the best one is the 7.2 meter tall giant torayan, "the ultimate child's weapon, as it sings, dances, breathes fire, and follows only those orders given by children."

yanobe kenji's giant torayan breathing fire, as advertised, at the rocking mammoth. image copyright by the man himself and linked from his own fine website.

coincidences

a year and many missed opportunities and assorted cancellations later, i finally met irene winter for lunch. she is an art historian, scholar of the ancient near east and cross-cultural aesthetics, macarthur fellow, great teacher, and undoubtedly one of my favourite and most influential professors--and she's retiring this spring. we spent nearly two hours at pamplona (josefina passed away in 2007 and the restaurant changed hands, but the place and the food remains sort of the same), during which time two jaw-dropping factoids emerged:

first: she and her husband bob are close friends of stanley and rose-mary crawford. stanley crawford is the author of a garlic testament, an unjustly neglected gem of american writing usually filed under gardening*--a semi-philosophical discussion of his family's move to new mexico, the construction (by hand) of their adobe house, and the pound weight of the real. did you know that to testify is to swear with your hands over your testicles? i didn't know that either. the crawfords were recently in cambridge for a book tour and came to dinner; my frustration is a palpable mist.

second: since purchasing the tivoli model one, i have been falling asleep to the well-tempered clavier, played by rosalyn tureck. conversation had meandered onto the subject of a baroque concert hall in munich (which i'm visiting in may) and baroque composers like js bach and how modern interpretations strip out the ornamentation in the scores when she let slip that not only did she enjoy tureck's interpretations, she was also close personal friends with her at oxford and after. i was momentarily incapacitated by this revelation.

* yet another instance of the inadequacy of categories.

automatic translation

compare this and this, two versions of the same article about matthew carter, designer of verdana, who apparently lives just down the street from me.

cheesefest

last sunday, i got up early to get breakfast with peter in cole valley, then marcela and patrick drove through and picked me up for the artisan cheese festival in petaluma. before showing up, i thought a $45 admission was a little steep but i may have broken even on cheese and assorted beverages within an hour of showing up. five hours later, i'd consumed about 3 pounds of cheese and 6-8 glasses of wine and beer and people distinctly under the influence were swapping cheeses and giving them away to anyone who displayed even a slight interest. the standouts:

golden star's sparkling jasmine tea: i thought this would be unbelievably affected but it was very good. only mildly sweetened with cane sugar, with a gentle scent of jasmine and enough tannin to keep it interesting.

rogue creamery's rogue river blue: powerful, creamy, and spicy at the back of the mouth. at room temperature, it overwhelmed even the glass of consecration (and that's saying something).

tumalo's classico sheep milk gouda: chalk white, dense, with a balanced saltiness. the guy behind the counter was closing down and, seeing me cut another chunk, asked if i wanted to take the entire wedge. i acquiesced with good grace.

russian river brewing company's consecration beer: this is one of the sour beers; i've never enjoyed them before but this is maybe one of my favourite beers. patrick and marcela, not incidentally have introduced me to two of my top beers to date (dogfish's midas touch and, now, consecration)

cici gelato: these people are in mill valley only, which is frustrating. they had a buffalo ricotta gelato made with bubalus bubalis ricotta. i always like the mild-flavoured, cream-based gelatos, but this one was magnificent.

wandering aengus heirloom blend cider: the heirloom blend was crisp, dry, and a little bitter. it's nice to lurk around googlers wearing schwag. the owner had two bottles of their pommeau dessert wine on the counter (a very limited production) but was steadfast in his refusal to open them until patrick looked very unhappy when told that it was available only in oregon. (it was unctuous and autumnal, in case you wonder.)

time is on my side

the day before i left san francisco, i saw a sign in the noe valley stained glass store asking for packing peanuts, two giant boxes of which were sitting in the garage trash area (the packing stuff from john's drum set). i told the owner to come over and pick them up. this year, he returned the favour by letting me tape up a box filled with a wagnerware skillet with dutch oven lid and the complete edward tufte which is now making its way slowly across the country toward cambridge, mass.

but more bizarre yet: i stayed with mervin and magali at irving street in the summer of 2005. when i moved out west, i left a wheel-less bike frame (a reynolds 531) in the basement. having a vague recollection that it had a horizontal drop-out ideal for conversion to a fixed gear, i'd been trying desultorily to retrieve it since moving back to cambridge last year. i finally bit the bullet and called the landlord yesterday; we arranged to meet at the apartment this morning and lo! was the frame not hanging in the corner, obscured by a stack of moving blankets? i walked with it over my shoulder back over the river and into cambridge.

LAX

in pursuit of a cheap air ticket, i took a two-hour layover in LAX. the wing operated by american airlines--which continues to be, purely by negligence, the second-worst airline i've had the misfortune of flying (the worst, by far, being aeroflot)--has two places for travel-stained and weary travellers to purchase beverages. at neither of these establishments can be purchased a cup of tea made only of tea. if your heart's desire is a venti cup of a refreshing blend of tarragon and green tea, or green tea and lemongrass, or berry blossoms and white tea, you're in luck. otherwise, be prepared to lurk like i did, unhappy and beverage-less, until boarding time.

strange days

i'm on caffeinated beverage #4 in blue bottle cafe (17-foot ceilings, ash counters) and have just purchased a flat-panel monitor online, piggybacking on wifi from the gbus parked across the street--reading these innumerable AJS and ASR articles will never be the same again.

after breakfast with nat, celia, and dan, i visited liz at cca and saw her stuff (she was at the ranch last summer, then at emma lake after, which was cause for much envy), then went to the galleries at 49 geary to check out the hopper/eggleston/frank exhibition at fraenkel (full of illustrious things but disappointing nevertheless). much of the building was full of white, high-ceilinged galleries full of forgettable art. fortunately, there were highlights, chief among which were the amazing michael david monochromatic oils at room for painting, room for paper. the photographs really don't do these pieces justice--oil thinly applied on gesso, then removed selectively to achieve shade and tone; apparently all imagery from memory and imagination.

michael david's july, 2005. image from room for painting, room for paper.
(i want this one. someone should donate $6000 to my art fund. i look at this and think immediately of "fern hill")

ulrike palmbach's hounds (2006). image from iconoduel's marvellous flickr set.

there were also hand-stitched life-size dogs made of stuffed stockings by ulrike palmbach at stephen wirtz gallery, a great tom killion steamroller print at john windle antiquarian bookseller, large-format photographs of abandoned landscapes by shai kremer at robert koch (also featuring edward burtynsky's shipbreaking #9 diptych, half of which is visible here), and marvellous mixed media pieces by hadi tabatabai at brian gross.

reason

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.

benjamin franklin

why i miss san francisco #1

ami thought i'd left early this morning but i was actually still snoring gently under a pile of sheets. so, around 11.30, we went to brunch at fattoush (a reliable standby) and then to the farmer's market where i tried a preserve made of nectarines and green almonds that was truly spectacular--it was just like saturdays used to be. it was misting gently, and raining, so i had no qualms about spending the afternoon sorting through email and listening to glenn gould playing the goldberg variations. around 4, i left for mission beach cafe to meet jon, by way of bi-rite (meyer lemon, brown sugar ginger caramel, ritual toffee). by the time he made it up from the peninsula, it was late enough that we deferred pie to try and snag a table early at minako.

patrick and marcela showed up 15 minutes after, and 45 minutes after that, we were seated--by now i know better than to ask why tables remain empty within while people stand hungrily without. lotus root kinpira, green beans in a sesame and miso sauce, fried eggplant cubes, miso paste marinated grilled mackerel, the spicy green roll, the fake eel and cucumber roll, hamachi sashimi with three mints (spearmint, peppermint, and yanagi tade, in a rice bran oil suspension), mackerel sashimi. and i still haven't had the 1969 plum wine that is in back, so clearly i have to return. after, we went back to patrick and marcela's to check on the caltrain schedule for jon and had some allagash barrel-aged musette, the schloss eggenberg brewery's dunkel doppelbock, and a bottle of year-old, bottle-conditioned mead that they'd brewed. this last was remarkable and head and shoulders above the other meads i've had: they made it out of cranberry, honey, pomegranate juice, tarweed and buckwheat honeys, and cardamom.

tomorrow, the sonoma artisanal cheese festival, followed by aziza.

the bay

i got into sfo early in the afternoon and emerged into bright sunlight at the 24th st mission bart. i write from ritual roasters, accompanied by my first good cup of coffee in 8 months. next up, tacos at pancho villa and a quick browse at dog-eared books.

i'm in love

but it's not what you think. see for yourself.

(and for context, see this, this, and this)

i would like

one of these in cambridge.

sunlight and wintry mix

some of us got lunch at casablanca, where the bread and meat are good and the grillperson is a pearl of great price. i had a slab of perfectly medium-rare skirt steak, charred on the edges and with a layer of charmoula on top (heavy on the parsley), a correctly soft-scrambled egg, and a small heap of fried polenta--a superb deal at 1.5x the price. after, we tried to get bread at the hi-rise just down the street but were foiled.

today is another 60F day, so i'm writing this at the top of the front steps with a large mug of tea and assorted readings on sociological methodology, much of which appears to be concerned with the ethics of field research. it is always a red-letter day when environmental context makes taking out the camp chair a moral imperative. the sky is full of stratocirrus clouds and it will be sleet and slush all day tomorrow.

public service announcement: today is the last day of the million year picnic 35th anniversary sale. 30% off everything in the store.

dorchester

60F today and sunny. for reasons unclear, we went into dorchester for lunch with dave. after winding slowly through the fenway, guided by a flawed GPS unit--every minute in a car confirms the wisdom of selling the trusty saturn--we showed up at an amazing house (painted somewhere between slate and federal blue). dave's apartment in it is replete with quartersawn oak trim, original stained glass, custom cast iron radiators, enormous old glass casement windows, and the rest. tracey managed to conceal it well but i had a major case of apartment envy that became more pronounced after i noted a vestibular space into which at least 60 linear feet of books could easily be tucked, plus an enormous yard in back and a deck overlooking the street and a large, mature maple. we got lunch at nikisha's roti shop down the street: a trinidadian-style flatbread stuffed with chickpea meal and fried on a griddle, then wrapped around curried chicken, potatoes, and chickpeas laced with hot and jerk sauces. not the same thing at all, but 3am prata at the shop on clementi road came to mind and would not be dismissed. on the way back, we detoured by way of the tropical market and the edges of the ashmont hill neighbourhood. many of the houses on the hill are well-built woodframe, set back from the street on double and triple lots. a large proportion had carriage houses attached or close by, ideal for a woodshop. i had plenty of time to ponder this while nursing a glass of water on the deck and talking about japanese denim weavers.

robert irwin redux

the revised and expanded edition of seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees arrived today, together with trickster makes this world and the gift (both by lewis hyde). the new edition of seeing is printed on cheesy coated paper and has a cheesy cover that makes it look like a tourist guidebook (minus) but has the benefit of more colour plates of the fabled irwin experimental paintings which were, hitherto, never photographed (distinct plus). it remains one of the best books i've ever read about the cyclic nature of research and development.

in other news, spice tonight restored my faith in pad thai when i asked for it slightly spicier and with more ground peanuts than usual. by all accounts, it is totally inauthentic (is it possible to be totally inauthentic? is authenticity a binary state? anyway.) but it presses all the right buttons nonetheless--slightly sticky, sweet, sour, salty, crunchy, soft, chewy, smooth, spicy all at the same time.

also, for the first time here, the boston (but really mostly cambridge) companion to the san francisco map of good eats:

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starving student food program

i got an email last night summoning me to somerville to collect the latest instalment in love+butter's starving student food program--i hadn't even got through the ham i got from them 3 weeks ago, despite frying thin slices of it up in every pan of sauteed greens since. having found, somewhere, a german cookbook from 1907, 2 pig livers, a pig belly, and a (small) pig heart, they decided to make many little pots of leberwurst over the weekend, two of which are now in the fridge. i had some tonight, spread thickly on toasted rye with crushed grain mustard, and it was great.

oleana

finally, after 7 years, i found someone willing to go to oleana with me last saturday night. (and it's quite nice, by the way, to find another eater in cambridge. i thought they'd all left for the west coast, but someone new showed up--thx hrt). service, though a distinctly secondary consideration, was competent, brisk, cheerful, and not servile, and the bread on the table was excellent and warm (sweet baguette and another one, za'atar-dusted, olive-oily, focaccia-like)--so oleana was already way ahead of the game. the order:

• goat cheese beignets with beet and orange carpaccio and beet sorbet. freshly fried and deflating gently on the plate. i tried to cut the first one and caused it to collapse completely. the second one expired whole in my mouth. the red beet sorbet was surprisingly good.
• swordfish steak with syrian lentils, fried pita, and tahini. the fish was good, but the lentils were remarkable. there was a slightly musky sweetness (we think it comes from pomegranate molasses) and onions sauteed to the point of liquidity (but not quite).
• lamb steak with fava bean moussaka. the lamb was good and perfectly-cooked, but the moussaka was, again, remarkable. instead of the usual slab cut from a tray, this moussaka was made as a single portion with not much bechamel, then wrapped in a layer of grilled eggplant.
• toffee date pudding, with dates, tangerine sections, orange cardamom ice-cream, and orange peel confit. (there's no way, in my mind, this combination of flavours can go wrong.)

obviously, the moussaka and the lentils stole the show. oleana reminds me of boulevard, a great restaurant in san francisco where also the accoutrements outshone the main dishes.

glutinous

more tasty treats! our housemate eliminated refined sugar from her diet a month ago, so the birthday cake tradition had to be slightly revised. instead of something similar to the 10-layer ice-cream, brownie, and cake construction The Women Of The House made for one of their number last weekend, we made a minimally-sweetened platter of sticky rice and mangoes. after washing almost 2 pounds of glutinous rice in many waters, we soaked it for 24 hours, wrapped it all in a cheesecloth bag and steamed it in the biggest steamer we had in the house, then turned it out into a baking dish. we cut an improbable quantity of hot, sugared and salted coconut milk into the still-steaming rice and let it cool and absorb the milk. in the meantime, a teaspoon of cornstarch thickened the last cup of sweetened coconut milk into a light sauce.

the rice absorbed a remarkable amount of liquid--i was sure we'd overdone it on the coconut milk but was, as usual, incorrect. fortunately the consistency was precisely right. covered with thin slices of ripened mango and a big spoonful of the sauce, it was exactly the kind of thing you shouldn't encounter after coming back from a run and before having dinner.

friday night taco (beta)

pancake sunday has a new friend. last night: a stack of freshly-warmed corn tortillas with spanish rice, black beans, shredded braised chicken, cilantro, chopped tomatoes and onions, lime, and shredded cabbage, and an enormous tray of enchiladas. and 24 coronas. the nap afterward was epic.

ideas in food

why do so few good cooks or chefs also write well? ideas in food embodies the philosophy of grounded, inductive, cyclic experimentation (much like robert irwin did), has really interesting ideas in food (and, of course, some quite beautiful photographs of those ideas realized), but the prose is turgid and pretentious to the point of unreadability.

elizabeth david, patience gray, and claudia roden (this fine new yorker article about her by jane kramer is well worth reading) all show that it can be done, and with grace besides. in case anyone thinks i only reference dead people, so does david patterson in this article for the nyt about the curious normalcy of san francisco food; particularly apropos since dinner club is planning an 7x7 blowout when i get there in march. (the anticipation is overwhelming.)

cause and effect

not so long ago, researchers (many of whom in the pay of the tobacco companies) still found it possible to claim that smoking and lung cancer weren't necessarily causally connected. in 1959, cornfield, haenszel, hammond, lilienfeld, shimkin, and wynder wrote a comprehensive, scrupulously researched paper revealing the shaky methodological ground on which these dissenting studies were built, and it is a spectacularly clear, well-written paper. for most of it, they restrain themselves from outright criticism even when richly deserved but, towards the end, clearly the temptation become irresistible:

A universe in which cause and effect always have a one-to-one correspondence with each other would be easier to understand, but it obviously is not the kind we inhabit.

a comparison to the people who insist that climate change is bogus would not here, i think, be invidious.

flavour update

yesterday, i went to toscanini's to meet ben and tory. the board was covered in bizarre and marvellous flavours including sherry (manzanilla), sage, and sour cream. the sage was great--distinct, unmistakable, not overpowerful. it was fresh, probably lemon sage, without the slight dustiness that other sages sometimes have.

soup of the motherland

not really, but close enough. i did the biweekly grocery run to harvest and whole foods (today in a cold but not unpleasant rain) and bought some pork soup bones and raw shrimp, both deeply discounted. i had a large pile of shells after shelling and veining the shrimp, so i browned them in some oil with ginger and the scraps of pork from the bones until there was a haze of crustacean-scented smoke throughout the house, then added water to cover and simmered them for an hour. this made some really magnificent shrimp and pork stock that will lie in the freezer awaiting the rainy days that we're expecting next week.

there was a bunch of broccoli rabe in the fridge, the heart of a napa cabbage, and some mushrooms. rearranging the freezer, i also found four pieces of flash-frozen haddock and two tubs of broth from the giant fish head i got from new deal some weeks ago. i took one of the tubs of broth and added a cup of the shrimp and pork stock, then braised the cabbage for 10 minutes. after that, the mushrooms and rabe went in then, a minute later, the thinly-sliced fish and shrimp went in for a few seconds before everything got poured into a large bowl over a mound of chopped garlic, ginger, cilantro, and shaved red onion. you just cannot beat this stuff.

leguminaceous

our internet service has been cutting in and out for days, but today is blue-skied and bright so everything is alright: the windows in the dining room are east-facing, and working here between 11am and 2pm is a sun-drenched experience.

of late, i've been cooking with beans a lot, in no small part due to my subscription to rancho gordo's RSS feed. last week, a remarkably happy combination of red kidney beans cooked separately and then combined with cauliflower and carrots dry-braised with large quantities of ginger, cumin, turmeric, cayenne, garlic, and cilantro. there was also finely-shredded kale scorched in a very hot pan with crisp-fried pieces of the ham from tw and diana. this morning, when i got up, i took out the last chunks of frozen pork belly from the ham and browned them very slowly, then poured on some hot water to make a barnyard-y ham stock. when i poured that into a glass to cool, the layer of fat that appeared on top was more than 2 inches thick. after toasting some brown mustard seeds in oil, i added half a red onion and 2 cloves of chopped garlic, then a cup of navy beans that had been soaking since last night with water and stock to cover and--an hour later--a mass of chopped napa cabbage. it's been a while since i've had a better soup.

having cooked with 7 different kinds of beans in the last month, i've become more aware of the differences in texture and flavour between the different varieties. i'm particularly partial to the anasazi beans, which have a creamy consistency and a mild but savoury flavour. but, frankly, every bean i've tried has been unfailingly good. they require no salt in cooking--garlic, onions, a bay leaf, cumin, cayenne, water, and beans inevitably produce deeply-satisfying, resonant flavour (when i add stock, it gets better but not so much so that i'll go out of my way to make stock for beans). i figure the cost of each of the meals above at about $0.70 per serving. this makes me wonder why some people won't even consider a meal satisfying unless it contains a sizeable proportion of meat, regardless of what that meat actually tastes like or how it's been cooked. (it doesn't even taste very good unless it is quality meat prepared appropriately--which is not to say that it has to be a premium cut; high quality pieces of neglected cuts are inexpensive. it's probably strong cultural conditioning: explicable but incomprehensible.

the old days

In the old days it stayed light until midnight
and rain and snow came up from the ground
rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.
Every time you’d see one, two more would appear,
walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.
Money didn’t grow in the leaves of trees but around
the trunks in calf’s leather money belts
though you could only take twenty bucks a day.
Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran
up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women
were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri
faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis
could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.
A few political leaders were executed for betraying
the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon
of Burgundy a day. People only died on one day
a year and lovely choruses funneled out
of hospital chimneys where every room had a field
stone fireplace. Some fishermen learned to walk
on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers,
my flyrod at the ready. Women who wanted love
needed only to wear pig’s ear slippers or garlic
earrings. All dogs and people in free concourse
became medium sized and brown, and on Christmas
everyone won the hundred dollar lottery. God and Jesus
didn’t need to come down to earth because they were
already here riding wild horses every night
and children were allowed to stay up late to hear
them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches
with Episcopalians serving Provencal, the Methodists Tuscan,
and so on. In those days the country was an extra
two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand
miles deep. There were many undiscovered valleys
to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed
though some tribes chose to found new nations
in the heretofore unknown areas between the black
boundary cracks between states. I was married
to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.
Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang
lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly
in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast
to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented
not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.
Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple
fluttering wings that played a kind of chamber music
in the sky. Pistol barrels grew delphiniums
and everyone was able to select seven days a year
that they were free to repeat but this wasn’t a popular program.
In those days the void whirled
with flowers and unknown wild animals attended
country funerals. All the rooftops in cities were flower
and vegetable gardens. The Hudson River was drinkable
and a humpback whale was seen near the 42nd Street
pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea,
its voice lifting the steps of people
in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.
I could go on but won’t. All my evidence
was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed
on by all the dogs that inhabit memory.
One by one they bark at the sun, moon and stars
trying to draw them closer again.

jim harrison

jim harrison

i can't stand his screenplays or the long books (i think these are just a matter of time), but his autobiography and short essays on food are more than satisfying--the best parts of these are the throwaway lines that i hope he spends hours refining. (it would be tremendously unfair if he just pulls those out, perfect and fully-formed like athena when she burst forth from zeus's brow.) he also enjoys, as i do, the parenthetical sentence. some scraps from the table:

Within either the classic Greek or Elizabethan concepts of drama, disasters of either business or marriage do not transcend the comic framework into the arena of tragedy. Tragedy is saved for those of "high degree" who fall from a "high place" because of hubris. (Marriage and business were not thought to be sufficiently high places, more like an ordinary porch with a bad step.)

"repulsion and grace"

I sat there and let the mud settle for an hour or so, finally so still that an iridescent-green hummingbird came within an inch of my blind eye, doubtless sensing the nectar there in the memory of childhood flowers.

the smog had cleared and the night's scent was oceanic, flower-laden.

You have to hold out for the wine, even blood, nights that are actually dark, bears that aren't teddy, gritty women like you really know, children who die contorted into question marks, the sun on people who have never bought lotion, the human voice not reduced to prattle, animals who have never been watched, the man who cuts all the ropes so he won't hang himself.

"heart food in l.a."

Due to lack of ambient light and air pollution, the nights remind you of your youth, the peerless air of the northern forest night. The stars were much closer then and you could see the cinders in their bright smiles and the Milky Way was a dense ermine floss, a cumulus of stars.

It is important not to miss the world that is actually there.

"borderlands"

A phenomenal percentage of discoveries on the theoretical level occur to scientists at the moment of waking, when the most abstruse of concepts gather functional dream images around themselves.

"versions of reality"

haroun and the sea of stories

haroun and the sea of stories is one of the childrens' books that adults should read. when i first came across it in secondary school, it made me read everything by rushdie i could get my hands on. with the exception of the moor's last sigh, most of it was disappointing by comparison.

He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become other stories; so that unlike a library of books the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

salman rushdie, haroun and the sea of stories

pancake poet

The heart of real buckwheats, after all, is fragile, gentle, slow-beating, and indisputably alive ... Made into a batter sparked to life with some sourdough starter, left to ferment and mellow overnight, then sweetened in the morning with a little molasses, and baked on a griddle, the resulting soft, flannel-textured flapjack, with its delicate flavor and nutty, tangy aftertaste, is the pancake ethereal.

john thorne, serious pig

table and ham

i went over to love+butter tonight so we could discuss the fancy new segmented table they would like to have built. we've probably worked out a rough idea of what they need, with a few neat little bits here and there from my thought-experiments with tables over the last 6 months of not having shop access. i'm pleased at the prospect of being involved (however minimally) in a table that uses steel as a main structural element, will break apart easily for reconfiguration and transport, and doesn't look like it came from ikea--in other words, what you get when modularity isn't a design afterthought. then they gave me some home-cured ham because i'm a starving student. nice.

empirical research update: the ham is superb thin-sliced across the grain, with cabot 1-year sharp white cheddar, cayenne, black pepper, and dijon mustard, grilled on iggy's sweet white.

true voyages

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land with a hundred different pairs of eyes.

marcel proust