Dec 24, 2009
Dec 23, 2009
Dec 17, 2009
a pune, or a play on words
i post this here at risk of making someone who shall remain nameless even more insufferable about these cunning objects than she already is.
brisk; tasty
two observations:
- took my bike to coffee yesterday at 8am when it was -4F with wind chill (-20C, if you're in a country where the system of measures is rationalized). not a good time to forget gloves or a hat.
- the swedish have a baked good called a lussebulle (named for saint lucy, who appears to be its patron saint) that shows up around this time of year, after the feast of saint lucy. the lussebulle is shaped out of yeasted enriched bread spiced with saffron and cardamom, two of the three most expensive spices in the world by weight. the subtle ostentation is very appealing.
more soon,
Dec 14, 2009
not single spies but in battalions
as the semester winds to a close, everything speeds up and slows down at the same time. this year, the end of fall is a little more fraught than usual: everything got bumped up three weeks so that we'd be done with exams and grading and papers before christmas. much better than spending the end of the old year and the start of the new one with many swords of damocles overhead. other benefit: this is the only fall semester i've ever spent here without the prospect of toiling to classes through snowdrifts. we'll still have the snow, but we'll be toiling through it on our way to things that are not class.
meanwhile, everyone has suddenly realized that there are two weeks left to the term and meetings postponed unpostpone themselves, distant papers come due, examinations on long-forgotten content loom, late work approaches its final deadline. and yet, classes are done so the days again stretch into the hazy distance, to be filled with grilled cheese sandwiches and other forms of toasted bread. should be productive, but instead am drinking calvados and canvassing the corners of the internet for parts for an even more improved version of a vacuum distillation device than this.*
* apparently the cooking issues team have a plan for an improved rotovap that dumps at least the rotating bit with the failure-prone, expensive gasket. the real question is: how many moving parts and tubes can you take away and still have it work in principle? the answer, i suspect, is quite a few.
Dec 13, 2009
the moor
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart's passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind's cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart's passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind's cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
[thx cp]
the last two lines, of course, are killer. the rest of it is mush.
Dec 11, 2009
scott nearing, on the good life
The good life is never stable, never secure, never easy and never ended. It is a series of steps or stages, one leading into the other and all, in their outcome, adding, not subtracting; augmenting, not diminishing; building, not destroying; creating, not annihilating.
unfortunately, not so easy to implement.
Dec 9, 2009
Dec 8, 2009
sand
-- you have sand in your left ear.
-- really.
-- just a grain or two bouncing around in there. nothing to worry about.
-- good to know.
-- couple of grains in this one too. been frolicking in the dunes recently?
silver line
in the bowels of south station, there is a sandwich board that tells you where to stand for the silver line to logan airport. this sandwich board (or one much like it) has been there since the airport extension opened--who can say why don't they replace it with permanent signage? maybe it's a good thing, since the sign is carefully hand-written on both sides, both of which look almost the same. i've failed to notice that they're actually different in four years of encountering the sign from one direction or the other. (look at the S and the H.)
Dec 7, 2009
Dec 6, 2009
ritual, valencia st
sightglass, 7th st
humphrey slocombe, harrison st.Dec 2, 2009
the death of uncool
It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.
...The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.
from brian eno
Dec 1, 2009
Nov 30, 2009
the buzz
Haagen-Dazs has those extra “a’s in its name but also has a nice promotion to help bees. Honey bees of course. From Nov 5 to 11 Haagen-Dazs will run a twitter campaign that benefits the University of California at Davis and its noisy, dangerous, sticky programs to preserve bees. This will cause a lot of buzz.
via tosci.com
Nov 29, 2009
the circle unbroken
via youtube.com
joan baez with a cast of muppets. note the pig in the upper left corner during the finale. [thx julian]
Nov 26, 2009
"it's like twitter. except we charge people to use it."
i sometimes feel like doing this to people who ask me to design stuff for them for free.
Nov 21, 2009
Nov 19, 2009
milton glaser on drawing
milton glaser is a partner in pentagram, one of the most influential design companies of the last century:
the act of drawing makes me conscious of what i'm looking at. if i wasn't drawing, i have the sense that i would not be seeing. ... i always think of every drawing as kind of a miraculous occurrence. it takes a while to do drawing that you find interesting. curiously, people think that the difficulty of drawing is making things look accurate. but accuracy is the least significant part of drawing. but you have to learn how to draw accurately before you can learn to do anything else. then you can begin to think about drawing expressively. that's another game entirely.
granolanauts
update: jim reveals the granolas.
jim leff put together a granola blind tasting today in the east village at dba on 1st ave (which has a fine selection of draught beers and ciders). in these photos, you see the granolanauts surveying an expanse of assorted granolas in an intrepid fashion, then, midway through, in a less intrepid fashion. granola is not a low-calorie food.
Nov 18, 2009
Nov 17, 2009
steak filter
via vimeo.com
video signal of the steak cooking, passed through the steak as it cooks. signal degrades as the steak loses moisture. i wonder if you would get the same result if the steak were cooked sous vide.
Nov 13, 2009
lifebox
a few weeks back, paul stamets wrote to the scifoo mailing list to ask if anyone wanted one of the first run of his lifeboxes. these are cardboard panels seeded with tree seeds and symbiotic fungal spores that improve the growth and development of the seedlings. i wrote to say i wanted one but never heard back. i forgot about it. then, today, a small box appears on the front step.
which is nice.
Nov 9, 2009
experiments in food
i went down to new york last week for the french culinary institute's harold mcgee series, which consists of mcgee talking about the science of cooking and nils noren and dave arnold from fci showing off a select portion of the fancy stuff they've been doing in their copious spare time to illustrate (and push beyond) the known science of cooking.here's nastassia lopez's official account of day 1 of the series on cooking issues, the FCI's R&D blog. i'm still processing the three day show and tell of the output from one of the cutting edges of food, but these are some early thoughts about the uses of experimentation in cooking.
we got to try some of almost everything that was talked about so that we could compare, for example, the flavour and texture of mashed potatoes cooked with a pretreatment to set the starch granules (cooked to 160F, cooled to 40F, then boiled and passed through a tamis) and mashed potatoes cooked in the traditional method (ie, just boiled and passed through a tamis). [i liked the conventional cooking method better]. there were lots of experiments and it was sweet to be able to try several different ways of preparing the same item side by side. so that was great.
throughout, nils, dave, and harold repeatedly noted that the techniques were not being presented as the one best way to do any given thing (cook a steak, burger, or whatever), but rather as ways to break down the process of cooking as much as possible so that the cook can, given a clear idea of the final outcome desired, achieve that outcome with the greatest possible precision and reliability. compared to the whizbang demonstrations, this relatively theoretical consideration didn't seem top of mind for most of the participants. (in fairness, it's difficult to focus on things like that when being constantly plied with really tasty stuff--see below).
tasty stuff: i think this was a case full of winesap apples, juiced with a pectinase, clarified with a centrifuge, and then evaporated under a vacuum. the bottle is about the size of a roll of quarters and contains an apple syrup that tastes like getting hit in the head by a case of apples.
more tasty stuff: egg on egg on egg (ikura on egg whites, served on a round of all-egg bread cooked in a pressure cooker).
the uses of experimentation
this was the last thing on my mind when i showed up on the first day, but it turns out you can't understand how experimentation is valuable to cooks without thinking through the assumptions made when experimenting in food.
the series is one of the most basic instances of the experimental method in cooking: all variables but one are held constant to illustrate the effect of that one variable on the outcome. the example from thursday morning's discussion of heat in cooking was a series of pieces of salmon cooked at different temperatures, to illustrate how temperature has a nonlinear effect on the texture of cooked salmon. based on the series, cooking salmon to between 48C and 52C produces a safe and tasty piece of salmon. but this is not the most useful conclusion to draw from the experiment. the real takeaway is understanding that cooked salmon has five major discrete textures, and that these textures change over relatively small temperature intervals.
the salmon temperature series.
the salmon temperature series described above takes a complex real system (cooking potentially different types, cuts, sizes of salmon pieces at varying temperatures, pressures, for varying amounts of time, to say nothing of flavourings and cooking media) and reduces it to a simple model that can be experimentally manipulated (the same piece of salmon [sort of] + different temperatures = a range of cooked salmon). the implicit assumption is that temperature is the variable with the biggest influence on the texture of cooked salmon in the real world, and that the relationship between these variables in the experimental model closely approximates the real world.
all experiments that take the form of simplified models rely on at least these two assumptions: 1) that the experimental model has the important variables in it, 2) that the relationship between the variables in the model is relatively close to the relationship between variables in the real world. if those conditions hold, experiments based on simplified models are useful in practice not just because they provide precise and specific guidelines for cooking (even though that may sometimes be true), but also because they sensitise cooks to the materials and tools they work with. part of this is using the experiment's results to understand when it makes sense to pay attention and what it makes sense to pay attention to.
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