B12 Solipsism

A few interesting links collected February 3rd through February 6th:

• Flash Crash! – If you are reading this from a browser using Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in (i.e., if you see a blue rectangle below), it will probably crash within the next few seconds.

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• If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It Cold – editorial cartoonists are not scientists, in other words
• Spirits: Long-lost Gin Buck gets most bang from ginger beer – The gin buck? Three ingredients, no matter the variation. You can try the “modern” version: gin, lemon juice and ginger ale, which gives the drink a mellow lemon-lime flavor. Or, substitute the lemon with a half-lime squeeze, rimming the glass with the pulp to make it extra tart. Either way, it’s fizzier than a gin gimlet, and sweeter that a straight gin and tonic.

  But to really do it right, you’ll want to go retro and spice it up with ginger beer, which, unlike today’s ginger ale, actually tastes of ginger. That’s how they made it in the old days: gin, authentic ginger ale (that actually tasted like ginger, so to get that flavor today, we’d use ginger beer) and lime juice, over ice cubes. The ginger and juniper flavors interact intensely.

  Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08220/902258-389.stm#ixzz0eXG3Ki1I

If I’m going to drink bourbon¹, a deftly-created Old Fashioned is probably my favorite way to drink it.

That’s when I come back to the Old Fashioned. As prone to becoming the subject of polemic, revisionism and endlessly repetitive arguments as any other cocktail — barring perhaps the cult-like madness that often accompanies the martini — when the computer is turned off and I place the whiskey and bitters on the kitchen counter, ultimately it’s just a drink. Not that I don’t recall the nagging questions as I mix, nor the ways I’m sure the drink would annoy partisans at polar ends of the mixological range: first a dab of sugar syrup in the bottom of a glass followed by a couple of dashes of bitters (hardcore Old Fashionedistas mandate the physical crushing of a sugar cube, possibly with a swath of orange or lemon peel); then a measured dose of bourbon or rye whiskey, depending on the mood; a quick stir for everyone to get acquainted in the glass, followed by large chunks of ice and, for that inner five-year-old with maturing tastes, a single bottled Italian wild cherry for color, rinsed of any cloying syrup

[Click to continue reading Are You Friends, After an Old Fashioned? - Proof Blog - NYTimes.com]

Personally, I skip the cherry, and usually skip most of the sugar syrup too.

Jonathan Miles adds, in a requiem for the decade just over:

No, the real story was in rediscovered in drinks like the aviation cocktail, a sublimely floral combination of gin and maraschino liqueur (and later, as cocktail historians dug deeper into its origins, the violet-flavored crème de violette) that was a Web sensation before bars like Milk & Honey started featuring it on cocktail lists.

Or the old-fashioned, once dowdy but reinvigorated by bartenders like Don Lee, who recast it as the celery and nori old-fashioned at Momofuku Ssam Bar, and Phil Ward of Death & Company, whose Oaxaca old-fashioned — with tequila standing in for whiskey — proved how versatile a spare, 200-year-old formula could be.

These were artisanal drinks with history and gravitas and a contrapuntal range of flavors — sweet, sour, savory, bitter — that hadn’t been balanced in generations. They’re representative of a lost American art — the art of the cocktail, as practiced by pre-Prohibition bartenders — that, after the ’00s, can no longer be called lost.

[Click to continue reading Shaken and Stirred - The Last Decade Was Good for Cocktails, Anyway - NYTimes.com]

“Mad Men: Season 3 [Blu-ray]” (Matthew Weiner)

You’d have to add Mad Men chic to the equation too: the Old Fashioned was Don Draper’s signature drink, the drink that won him Connie Hilton’s ad business, as described amusingly at A Dash of Bitters.

It happens to all of us, eventually. You’ll be at the country club, at a party hosted by your boss, who’s in the midst of a humiliating midlife crisis. He’ll be the fool in blackface, serenading his new bride, who’s 30 years his junior. Disgusted, you’ll walk away and seek out another old-fashioned. Alas, no bartender will be on duty, and the famous hotelier who’s rooting around behind the bar will declare that he’s on the same mission as you, but to his dismay, there’s no bourbon.

With a James Bondian flourish, you’ll leap over the bar, rummage a bit, and find some good Old Overholt. You’ll take a couple of glasses, drop a sugar cube in each, and dash in some bitters. While the bitters soften the sugar cubes, you’ll find any old tall glass behind the bar and fill it about halfway with ice. Free-pour the rye over that, open a bottle of soda water, and splash some in. Muddle the sugar cubes. Roughly thrust a barspoon up and down in the tall glass three times, and then pour the drink, ice included, half into one glass and half into the other.

You’ll drop a wedge of lemon into each glass, then, but you won’t bother stirring the sugar into the drink, probably because you’ll be making out with someone else’s spouse by the time you’d reach the sugary sludge. And you’ll have yourself an old-fashioned rye cocktail. Hand one off to the hotelier and drink up.

[Click to continue reading Don Draper’s no-nonsense old-fashioned for two — A Dash of Bitters]

Indeed. No precision required, just American can-do-ism.

1. not in my top ten of alcoholic drinks, well, maybe number 10 or 11. [↩]

A few interesting links collected December 18th through December 23rd:

• Climate Change Deniers vs The Consensus | Information Is Beautiful – point by point refutation of climate change deniers
• Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon Recipe « Knopf Doubleday – Cooking – "one of Julia Child’s signature dishes: boeuf bourguignon. In case you’d like to follow in her footsteps, we are a sharing a PDF of the recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking."
• Make: Online : Flashback: The Sweet Sound of Particleboard – The Sweet Sound of Particleboard
  Beef up the tone of open-back amps with a little thrift shop help.
• Featured Article – Bourbon versus vodka: Bourbon hurts more the next day, performance is the same – While the toxic chemicals called congeners could be poisonous in large amounts, they occur in very small amounts in alcoholic beverages," explained Damaris J. Rohsenow, professor of community health at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. "There are far more of them in the darker distilled beverages and wines than in the lighter colored ones. While the alcohol alone is enough to make many people feel sick the next day, these toxic natural substances can add to the ill effects as our body reacts to them."

Some additional reading October 4th from 10:05 to 12:48:

• Wife of Japanese PM Brings UFOs, Aliens into Global Affairs | Underwire | Wired.com – Hatoyama… has told reporters she knew Tom Cruise in a former life (with or without Thetans). She also claims to “eat the sun” to gain energy — making this reporter wonder if another of her former incarnations might’ve attacked Tokyo.

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• Food Safety Documents – The New York Times – Tracing the hamburger that left Stephanie Smith paralyzed, through government and corporate records obtained by The New York Times, shows why eating ground beef is still such a gamble

• From Snapshots from a Flounder

• WTF? Wisconsin Tourism Federation changes name after internet jokes – Telegraph – The Wisconsin Tourism Federation has changed its name, after being made aware that its acronym WTF had become crude internet slang. They are now aware of all internet traditions…
• Recipe: The Basic Burger :: Mark Bittman :: Culinate – Given concerns about the safety of store-ground meat (E. coli, salmonella, and the like), you might want to try grinding your own meat for burgers. Buy a chuck roast, cut it into small cubes about an inch square, and pulse a small batch (about 1/2 pound) at a time in a food processor. Make sure you don’t pulverize the meat and it’ll be wonderful. Freeze what you don’t use immediately.

Red red red, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

CameraBag treatment of last week’s great stuffed and simmered red pepper experiment.

came out delicious, despite this photo looking (intentionally) sinister

I used what turned out to be a variation of this Epicurious recipe, with able assistance and advice from my mom¹ via email. If you click the link below you’ll see the original ingredients and technique, these are the ingredients I used:

2 large (8-ounce) red bell peppers
other peppers, pimento, whatever
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups chopped onions
6 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2/3 cup cooked brown basmati rice, cooled
1 tablespoon sweet Hungarian paprika
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
2 1/2 cups tomato sauce, partially handmade from some roma tomatoes, and partially from a a jar of strained tomatoes
1 1/4 pounds lean ground lamb
oregano
a dash of cayenne
three diced carrots
a diced fennel bulb
seems like some other vegetable, celery, maybe?
1 large egg

Cut off top 1/2 inch of peppers and reserve. Scoop seeds from cavities. Discard stems and chop pepper tops. Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add ground lamb², onions, garlic, carrot, fennel, and chopped pepper pieces. Sauté until onions soften, about 8 minutes. Transfer to large bowl. Mix in rice, parsley, cayenne, paprika, salt, pepper, and allspice. Cool 10 minutes. Mix in 1/2 cup tomato sauce, and egg.

Fill pepper cavities with mixture. Stand filled peppers in single layer in heavy large pot. Pour remaining 2 cups tomato sauce around peppers. Bring sauce to boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover pot and simmer 20 minutes. Spoon some sauce over each pepper. Cover; cook until peppers are tender and filling is cooked through and firm, about 20 minutes

[Click to continue reading Stuffed Red Bell Peppers Recipe at Epicurious.com]

My mom suggested two other variations which I would follow in a future preparation: slightly char the peppers before stuffing, and add a handful of pine nuts to the stuffing.

1. she has a freaking Facebook account!! [↩]
2. or ground beef, whatever, actually I’ve made it both ways [↩]

A few interesting links collected July 2nd through July 3rd:

• Dovecote Records Limewire is a bunch of hypocrites Gets mad at Us for stealing -

  Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

  Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

  Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

  Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

  Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

  Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

  Woman: We work for Limewire.

  <Long pause> Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

  Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

• That’s Right! I Said It’s Caipirinha Time! on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Every time I look at Friendly Joe’s awesome caipirinha making instructional Flickr page, I get a mighty, mighty thirst.

  “Caipirinhas are the Brazilian national drink. That said, we won’t conject on the overall condition of the Brazilian populace at large. No worries- They’re refreshing and the weather’s warmin’ up -
  Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll be ready to samba in your neighbor’s flower beds in no time… “

• Tour № 2 – Ogden Avenue Extension | Forgotten Chicago -

  “Left: A brief aside, in case you forgot who built this damn city!

  Right: Remnants of Ogden’s bridge supports are still visible south of Division Street.”

• Saddam And Goldman Sachs: Who Is The Student, And Who Is The Master? -

  The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam.

I’ve only had caipirinhas twice, but I loved them (though, my head didn’t love me the next day). Unfortunately, I have yet to make a trek to Brazil, though it is on my short list.

“A pair of them will make you leap like [a] Playtex Girdle-gal,” wrote Charles H. Baker Jr. in his eccentric 1951 work, “The South American Gentleman’s Companion.”

His racy description captures the effect of cachaca (ka-SHA-sa), the Brazilian national drink with a sweet, fiery flavor that can pack a macho punch. Though often compared to a young white rum (both spring from sugar cane, though rum is made from molasses, a byproduct of refining cane into sugar, and cachaca is distilled from fermented cane), this spirit has a more devilish reputation all its own.

Indeed, though exported brands are roughly 80 proof, more potent bottles are the norm in Brazil. The spirit is popping up more and more here, with a movement toward higher-quality, more refined versions.

“The cheap stuff was all that was available for a long time in the United States,” says Joshua Pearson, beverage director of Sepia restaurant. “We’re definitely seeing more artisan products. … It becomes a nice spirit you can drink without adding tons of fruit juice or sugar.”

The most famous cachaca cocktail is the caipirinha (kai-pee-REEN-ya), a refreshing combo of cachaca, sugar and lime juice served on the rocks. Aged gold cachaca is often served neat.

[Click to read more Cachaca, Brazil's national drink, is fire in a glass -- Bill Daley, chicagotribune.com]

Wonder where to get the best cachaca in Chicago? Sams, perhaps?

Some additional reading July 2nd from 13:49 to 19:05:

• Travel With Your Mind: Sky Saxon Remembered – Sky Saxon, lead singer with 60s garage punk legends the Seeds, died on the morning of June 25, 2009 (or as his official web site put it, he “passed over to be with YaHoWha”); as it happened, he died the same day as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, ensuring that the entertainment press, who might have been expected to treat his passing like a one-line filler item, didn’t even give it that much attention. But Saxon hadn’t been a celebrity in the traditional sense for a very long time. Sky may have been a rock star for about two years on the strength of the singles “Pushin’ Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,” but after those twenty-four months as a bargain-basement Mick Jagger, he evolved into Flower Power’s Last Man Standing, a guy who let his freak flag fly with a wild-eyed sincerity that made most of his peers from the Sunset Strip scene look like weekenders, and transformed his story into something far more interesting than the typical two-hit wonder and cult hero.
• The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts – NYTimes.com – While some chefs have groused quietly about the insatiable demand for burgers, most are philosophical. “All chefs can be frustrated by the buying public sometimes,” said Clark Frasier, a chef with restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine. “In this economy I’m happy to sell anything they want to eat.”

  All this high-powered attention has produced some new ways of thinking about and cooking burgers. Interviews with 30 chefs provided dozens of lessons for the home cook that aren’t terribly difficult and don’t cost much money. And it all yielded the ideal burger.

• Daily Kos: How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin infighting – Schmidt put the matter to rest with an breathtaking reply to Palin:

  "Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

A few interesting links collected April 17th through April 24th:

• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Messing with Texas – “What Texas could choose to do, however, is to divide itself up into as many as five states, a privilege given to it as a condition of its annexation to the Union in 1845. What would Texas look like if it chose to do this? Would dividing a large, red state into five smaller, reddish states benefit Republicans in the Senate? In the Electoral College?The answers are not so clear. But first things first, we need to come up with a logical way to divde Texas into five parts.”

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• Fritinancy: Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone – MoDo “sat down with Mr. Bell, 39, and his assistant Thomas Watson, 22, and asked them to explain why they shouldn’t be condemned to a slow, painful death.

  ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can’t wait for a passenger pigeon?

  BELL: Possibly the message I’d like to deliver to you right now.”

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• Gapers Block : Drive-Thru : Chicago Food – Wait, No Need to Soak Those Beans – “One revelation, to me, was the idea that beans need not be soaked before cooking–provided that they are cooked slowly for a long time. In a recipe called Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Red Beans, the red beans are rinsed, and are thrown right into the pot. The beans slowly rehydrate as they cook with the other ingredients, for about 2 hours.”

  This recipe looks quite tasty: I’m making a variant as soon as I can get into my kitchen.

A few interesting links collected March 31st through April 1st:

• ESPN – OTL: Gotham’s Savior – E-ticket – Then I ask whether he’s driven to build a new thing here that will prove Phoenix was no fluke, that will show everyone that his system really works, that will silence the naysayers once and for all, and he says that until he has won it all, they can say anything they want about him and he can’t say boo back.

  I say Yeah, but aren’t you burning to shut ‘em up?

  He says it doesn’t consume him.

  I say I get that, but wouldn’t you relish it?

  And he leans forward in his chair and reaches across the desk to wipe up a little mess of popcorn kernels with his left hand.

  He cups the bits of shell in his right hand, then pours them casually into the nearby wastebasket, and looks up with a sly grin and says, “You’re asking if I’m human?”

  Wish Mike D’Antoni would have accepted the Bulls job, oh well.

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• AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We’re Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet – DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

  I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

  AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years…averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

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• One Killer Smoked Brisket Recipe | Meaten – Anyway, that is how I do it, I hope that it made sense, and let me know how yours turns out.

  Viva Meat!

  Image courtesy of swanksalot¹

1. is it so fracking hard to give proper credit?? Still disappointed that TreeHugger is such a corrupt website. Meaten.com, which I imagine has a lot less traffic than TreeHugger figured out how to properly give credit to my photo. [↩]

Some additional reading March 17th from 15:24 to 15:41:

• eG Forums -> Making Limoncello – Take the peels of one dozen lemons + 1 lime microplaned off. … Place the peels into an airtight container (I use a large screwtopped jar) and cover with 1 bottle of 100 proof vodka (I use 100 proof Smirnoff). …Place the jar in a safe place (on top of my refrigerator works for me!) for at least two weeks, giving it an occasional shake and sniff to check on it. You’ll be able to see the vodka turning bright yellow as it pulls the flavorful oils from the peels. When the peels no longer look colorful and the vodka doesn’t seem to be gaining any more visible color or scent, it’s done. Filter through a coffee filter or cheesecloth into a large bottle or jar and press down to remove all the vodka and oils that you can from the peels. Add a 1:1 simple syrup (I usually start with 2 cups water to two cups sugar, boiled lightly until completely dissolved and syrupy and cooled off) and then thin further with approximately another 750 ml bottle of your favorite regular vodka.

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• The Webtender Forums: Re Limoncello like mama used to make <by Dom Costa> – The traditional way of making limoncello is to slice off the topmost layer of lemon peel, avoiding the bitter white pith as much as possible. If there is any pith on a slice, scrape it off with a knife or spoon. An extremely sharp vegetable peeler works best. (If you use a fine grater , avoid the temptation to shave off every last bit of colored peel, because you’re likely to end up taking some pith along with it. In other words, it’s best to give up on the colored parts of the peel that are in any “valleys” in the surface of the lemon.) Once you have your lemon peel, steep it for a couple of weeks in 95% grain alchool. You can tell that the flavoring elements have been thoroughly leached out when the peels have lost their color. Filter well the infusion , and add ( cold) sugar syrup you prapared in advance ( 500gr sugar in one litre hot watwer), let stand for a a week, put it in the freezer, ready to drink.

Some additional reading March 17th from 13:38 to 14:12:

• Taste of a thousand lemons – Los Angeles Times – On a wiltingly hot late summer evening, when all the plants are fainting and there’s not a breath of wind, you pour a tiny glass of limoncello straight from the freezer. It’s colder than ice, and it explodes in your mouth with all the freshness and optimism of lemon. Each sip seems to say, “Poor kid! Poor kid! What a scorcher that was! But everything’s all right now — your old friend night is on the way.”They know a lot about hot summer evenings in Sicily, where limoncello was invented about 100 years ago. It might just be the most sympathetic after-dinner drink there is, as bracing as a gin and tonic but more cheerful and fragrant. Limoncello’s fans have found a lot of other uses for it too: spiking lemonade, flavoring cocktails and splashing onto ice cream, poundcake or fresh fruit

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• Seattle Food – After Homemade Limoncello, You’ll Accept No Other – page 1 – Limoncello, the southern Italian after-dinner treat, is an invigorating refresher with an aroma and flavor unmatched by any citrus-flavored vodka or dessert wine. It’s the sensory equivalent of eating lemon meringue pie on a lazy Sunday picnic in the middle of Paolo’s lemon grove. It’s a potion that gets you to stop and live in the sun-drenched moment, even when it’s cloudy outside.

  The Luxardo brand that your state liquor store may carry is all fine and well, but once you’ve had homemade limoncello, you’ll accept no other. This recipe is a monthlong project that yields huge rewards for just a little patience and hardly any work.

• Swanksalot’s Solipsism: Fifth Ward – Milwaukee, with biker – “As a billionaire, there would be a lot of buildings I would purchase in Milwaukee. This was one, for some reason. I’d turn most into art collectives – cheap studio space for artsy-fartsy types”