In December, the world feels like a broken palace.  We wander the ruins at dusk, yanking out clumps of rye and talking about how there was once a garden here.  We trundle around in dirty voile dresses, talking about Miss Havisham and glass horses and headless cupids.  Down in the valley, the windows are glowing.  We can smell mushrooms, simmered in beef stock and butter, but we also smell crushed anise–something has passed by here, and broken the stalks.

To prepare escargot, you must first find a nest.  I don’t know how you will find it.  Perhaps you will find an outgrown garden, swollen with unplucked, wormbitten turnips, monstrous grey zucchini, soft carrots shrouded in curled shame by dry, crisp tops.  You will sit on a crumbling cinderblock, and you will watch, burying your cigarette butts beneath graveled hunks of soil.  If snails are capable of lurking, they’ll be lurking here.  What do snails do when they lurk?  They do what they always do, which is: snail around, and bite soft things, and make love to themselves.  Snails are incredibly creepy.  Their purpose in life is to increase snail-ness, by whatever means necessary.  Which means if you sit long enough, in a rotting forgotten garden, you will see a snail (after having lovingly snailed itself, perhaps over a period of hours) make a nest.

The nest will be filled with snails–perhaps fifty to a hundred.  The snail will dig the nest with its foot (which is also its whole body.)  The nest will be only a few centimeters deep.  Once the eggs are laid, the snail will cover them with soil, and then hie off, probably to go snail itself again.  Mark the spot with a stick, and visit it every week.  After a few weeks, the snails will emerge.  They will have spent their time in a typically snail-like fashion–eating their own egg shells, and then eating each other, in order to gain the strength to pull themselves from their graves into the wide world.  The great, wide world of snail food and snail friends and snail foes and general snailing opportunities.  The night was made for lovers, but also for snails, who are their own lovers.

The infant snails will be loathsome things–pale and clear and slimy, like discarded retainers.  Nonetheless, you must gather them up.  Force cold rough gloves onto your red stiff hands, and gather up these wriggling, transparent young snails.  You will wonder what is becoming of your life, and then you will put the snails in a box.  Preferably it is a wooden box, with holes drilled in it.  Add some soil to the box, and make sure there are worms in the soil (snails like to eat dirt, and worms like to eat dirt after snails have eaten it.)  Make sure the box is warm and wormy, damp and squirming, blind and questing.

What snails love best is a mixture of decayed matter and carrion, because they are the Devil’s own snails, but you must give them green things instead.  This is because snails will taste of whatever you feed them, and since you probably do not want to eat a mixture of decayed matter and carrion (I am assuming here that you are not a snail yourself), you must feed them beautiful and clean things.  The French like to feed them dill, or apples, or artichokes, or celeriac, or parsley, or cress, nettles, sorrel, roses, henbane, and yarrow.

You must keep your box of snails in the kitchen, that you might keep an eye on it.  Your warm, dark kitchen, from which the light fades by four in the afternoon, these days.  You must try not to sit in your warm, dark kitchen, sipping Carménère and staring at your box of snails.  This way lies madness.

The time will come for the snails to be purged.  If you do not purge the snails, you will have to eat whatever lies in their snaily stomachs, and so you must purge them.  The old method is simply to feed them nothing for a few weeks–for you to starve the snails, as they lurk in their little box, and drink wine to forget you are trapped in a dark kitchen with a bunch of creepy dying snails.  But nowadays we are more compassionate–we feed the snails cornmeal for a week, and then we make them fast for another.  They do not lose as much weight, this way.

After they are purged, you can boil your snails live.  Boil them for three minutes, or until they are dead.  Place them in a cool fresh brine, and then rinse them.

Your snails are ready for anything now, but I don’t care what you do with them.

Tomorrow, we’re doing Thanksgiving for eleven.  Two of the eleven can’t digest milk products, so we’re going dairy-free.  The below catalogues my tips and tricks for making turkey, stuffing, gravy, and mashed potatoes that cut the lactose without sacrificing flavor.  Most of these recipes can be easily adapted for vegan needs (except the turkey, obviously.)  Speaking of which . . .

DAIRY-PROOFING THE TURKEY:

Most recipes for roasted turkey have you rub it down with tons of herbed butter.  This is because herbed butter is awesome.  However, we can’t use it!  What to do?

Buying it:  Our first step was to purchase an Heritage turkey.  (Yes, I know I’ve advocated against serving turkey at all, but this year my hand was forced.)  Heritage turkeys are cool because they are not industrially bred, meaning they actually get to run around eating normal food and reproducing naturally and not being full of antibiotics.)  They’re turkeys like the Pilgrims ate.  Their other major advantage of getting one, beyond the fact it supports small farmers, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, blah blah, is that Heritage turkeys are fattier than their industrial counterparts, which helps to mitigate the butter issue.  I’m not saying you’re screwed if you don’t get a Heritage turkey, but it can give you a small assist.  If you can’t get a Heritage bird, free-range turkeys are also unusually flavorful.

Royal Palm Heritage turkeys

Brining it: Another way to ensure that your turkey is moist is to brine it.  Cook’s Illustrated has a great guide to brining, and there are a million different turkey brining recipes out there, so I won’t belabor this point.  Suffice it to say that brining your turkey results in moister, more flavorful meat.  Brines are generally composed of this ratio: 1 cup kosher salt (don’t use table salt or it will be too salty!) to 1 gallon liquid.  The liquid could be water, stock, cider–basically any liquid (or combination of liquids) that you feel will impart awesome flavor.  Some cooks also add fresh or dried spices and “aromatics” to this mix.  Popular brining spices include whole peppercorns, whole allspice, rosemary, whole juniper berries, sage, thyme, chiles, sugar, oregano–anything that fits the flavor profile for the rest of the meal.  For aromatics–which are, by the way, just vegetables that happen to be high in flavor and aroma–you can’t go very far astray using staples such as onions, carrots, garlic, apples, celery, or ancho chiles.

You will probably need a couple gallons of brine, as well as a container to brine in.  A 5 gallon bucket works well.  Heat your brining liquids to a boil and add your salt (and sugar, if using.)  Stir until the salt and sugar is totally dissolved, and then cool to a cold temperature.  Put your fully thawed, innard-free turkey in a bucket, and pour the brine over it until it’s totally submerged, and refrigerate it.  You should brine it for a minimum of 4 hours and a maximum of 18.  Drain it by placing it uncovered in the refrigerator on a rack above a bunch of paper towels, and let it dry for at least 8 hours.

This sounds like a lot of fuss but it’s worth it–the resulting turkey is insanely juicy, even the breast.  When’s the last time your dad was carving the breast and rivulets of golden jus began leakily cascading across its crispy, bronzed skin and everybody got lusty and quiet and embarrassed?  You won’t miss the butter because you’ll be too mortified (and satisfied.)

Fig. 1: An Embarrassed Dad

Prepping it:  As referenced above, normally you would prep a turkey by rubbing it (inside, out, and under the skin) with an herbed butter mixture.  When using butter is not possible, there are a number of substitutes.    Don’t use margarine because it is filled with water and weird fillers and god knows what else.  This means that it won’t give you the buttery effect you’re after.  (One exception–Shedd’s Willow Run is the only vegan margarine I’ve ever had that’s worth a damn.  That’s because it’s really bad for you–it’s made of soybean oil and food coloring.  It’s just a bunch of saturated fat, which makes it work well in sauces and other applications.  No, I am not a shill for Shedd’s, although sometimes I wish I were, since Willow Run is no longer distributed at any of the grocery stores in my county anymore.  When Ross found out it would soon be unavailable, he went out and bought a million cases.  We’ve been using them for a year now, but I fear for the day on which we reach Peak Soybean Oil, as it were.)

Anyway, there are a number of butter substitutes.  Good quality lard, for instance.  Don’t be afraid of lard!  It’s rad, and you can use it with all the traditional Thanksgiving spices–sage, thyme, pepper, etc.  If you don’t want to use lard, try an oil.  Olive oil can be good if it goes with the rest of your turkey flavorings.  Italian-style turkey is not a bad thing.  To make your rub, try mixing it with marjoram, oregano, and rosemary.  Canola oil is inoffensive and adaptable and can be used as well.  You might try steeping it with fresh herbs in order to give it extra flavor.

Julia Child also recommends dropping your turkey on TV and laughing about it because you are so hardcore cool you can pull that crap off.

Once you’ve rubbed your turkey down, fill it with aromatics or stuffing as desired.  Here’s where things get wacky.  Julia Child recommends covering the turkey breast with strips of pancetta before trussing.  (Don’t use bacon unless you are okay with your turkey having a smoky flavor.)  The pancetta imparts vital pig fats!  It will make your turkey taste dark and exotic.  Ross tested the pancetta theory with a number of chickens, and the results were tasty.  We haven’t tried it on turkey yet, but this year we are venturing into the abyss!  If we ever come up, we’ll let you know if it worked.

Truss your turkey and roast.  America’s Test Kitchen recommends roasting at 400 for one hour, roasting at 250 for two hours, and then finishing it at 400.   The purpose behind the initial high roasting heat is to sear the meat–this sears the juices in.  (If stuffing your turkey, heat your stuffing until it reaches 130 degrees before putting it in the bird.  This keeps the stuffing from being in the “danger zone” during the low-roasting period.)  If you don’t know how to roast a turkey, find out more here.

NO-BUTTER STUFFING:

You probably think no-butter stuffing sounds obscene.  It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.  Everybody has a different stuffing recipe.  We’re making cornbread and sausage stuffing.

Making the stuffing:

I like this recipe from Bon Appetit.  Here is a dairy-free adaptation.  Instead of buttermilk, I used a mixture of coconut yogurt and coconut milk.  Coconut milk provides the necessary body and fattiness, while the coconut yogurt provides the tang and lactic acid of the buttermilk (at least as much as is possible.)  Don’t be scared to use coconut milk–the coconut-y tang is barely detectable in the finished cornbread, and it can even enhance spicier stuffing preparations.

Coconut milk substitute

If you’d like to make this recipe vegan, you can try substituting 3 tablespoons coconut milk and 1 tablespoon oil for each egg.  Some cooks use 2 tablespoons applesauce to substitute for each egg, but you may not want the resulting sweet notes in your stuffing, so CONSIDER CAREFULLY Y’ALL BEFORE COMMITTING Y’ALL.  Also, this is kind of good with cut up scallions in it.

No-Buttermilk Cornbread (serves 10)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted Willow Run margarine OR 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup coconut yogurt (made from coconut milk and available at most health food stores) mixed with 1 cup coconut milk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups yellow cornmeal
• 1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 400°F.  Oil a 13×9x2-inch metal baking pan.  Whisk together margarine or oil, coconut yogurt, coconut milk, then eggs.  Mix the remaining dry ingredients in large bowl, then stir in the milky mixture.  Transfer to prepared pan.

Bake corn bread until edges are lightly browned and tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Cool completely in pan. If using in stuffing, cover tightly and store at room temperature at least 1 day and up to 2 days.  (Note: you have to wait that long.  You can even make your stuffing the day-of.  Just tear it into bite-size pieces, spread in a single layer on some baking sheets, and bake at 250 for an hour.  That will dry it right out.)

You can use this in any cornbread stuffing recipe.  I like Emeril’s Southern take on it, as well as this Bon Appetit fruit-based dressing and this very Yankee oyster cornbread stuffing from Charlie Palmer.  Just remember the following tips:

• Substitute tasty oils or lard for butter
• Remember the egg substitution rules
• Don’t be afraid to pour in lots of turkey drippings for added flavor
• Sausage, bacon, or any pig derivative can cover a multitude of sins
• If you want to make these recipes vegan, substitute mushrooms or nuts in place of meat.  They’re still savory morsels, after all.  Vegetable stock can always be substituted for chicken/turkey stock, but homemade stock will taste much better than packaged.  Another interesting option is to make a seaweed-based stock, or one based around shiitake mushrooms.  There are some good ideas for this here.

Tomorrow, we’ll take on gravy and mashed potatoes.  If you have any other tips or tricks, please share them below.

First of all, quit trying to hack things, weirdo.  You can’t hack a holiday or a life or your mom or nothing, I don’t care what Slate told you.  But I do have some Thanksgiving tips!

Thanksgiving is not that hard of a holiday.  All it is about is eating food and watching football.  There are no weird religious connotations or political issues to navigate, unless you are going to get weird about organic vs. free range crap, in which case you are Jonathan Safran Foer and you need to get off my lawn.

But holidays can still be awkward, because people can be weird about their families.  This is because of the nuclear family system, which will be torn down in two years if all goes according to my plan.  In its place will be a bunch of cults, by which I mean groups of relatives and friends who live in Melrose Place-esque complexes but with a garden instead of a pool and cool, inter-dependent relationships instead weird Tolstoy relationships.  I will accomplish this by destroying the economy and the environment, which will force the dissolution of the suburbs and thus of suburban nuclear family angst.  Don’t worry, my plan is already working!

Meet Your New Apocalypse Mom

In the meantime, however, I have some sweet tips.  They are divided according to whether you are going to be a host  or a guest or alone.  (Ha, ha, just kidding.  The joke here is that we are always essentially alone, a fact of which we become most aware when we are striving the hardest towards togetherness.  This is called situational irony.  If you would like to know whether your life sucks or not, you should try to measure how much situational irony it contains.  The more hilarious your life is, the more depressing it is.  Now that you know that, be careful not to think about it too much!)

Anyway, here are my Top 5 Hosting Hacks:*

1.  Go Potluck

Unless you are a really, really good cook, most of your food will not be that good.  It helps if you have some professional training, but even then, a few of your dishes are going to fall flat.  This chart breaks it down:

In any given dinner, one dish will be okay, another really good, another lousy, and the last good.  The reasons why might vary, but the formula never does.  Maybe it’s because you’ve never cooked something before, or you had too many things going at once, or you skimped on ingredient quality.  Who’s to say (besides your guests, to each other, in the car on the way home)?   This is not a big deal normally, but Thanksgiving is a meal freighted with expectation.  If the turkey is “just okay,” everybody will get sad, because they will decide it is a symbol of how their family is “just okay.”   The way to get around this is to potluck the flip out of your meal.  Have your guests each make their specialty, whether it’s candied yams or tomato jam or pot brownies.  This will make them really invested and competitive, resulting in lots of delicious food (and tasty savings for you!)  At the very least, you are sharing the blame, which is a good life technique in general.

2.  Don’t Make a Turkey

I know that everybody says they want to eat a turkey, but what they really want is to feel that the Barthian sign of the turkey is present.  To put it another way, people are way more excited by the idea of the turkey than by the turkey itself.  Turkeys are difficult to cook because their breeding has gotten all perverted.  Their meat is dry and flavorless and it’s almost impossible to cook it all to the same degree of doneness–either the breast meat is perfect and the dark meat is underdone or the dark meat is cooked well and the breast is dry as hell.  The turkey is really just an excuse to eat lots of stuffing and gravy, which people crave because they don’t eat them very often, because for some reason most people are embarrassed to make stuffing and graving a part of their regular diets even though they LOVE IT MORE THAN ANYTHING.  Perhaps they feel like they must “suffer” through the turkey in order to get to the sweet, sweet stuffing and gravy, and that if they just went around cooking stuffing and gravy all the time all willy-nilly-like, they would lose their Protestant Work Ethics and immediately turn into hobos, in which case they would never get their sweet, sweet stuffing and gravy anyway.  Or perhaps it’s the ritual of smelling the turkey all day and worrying about it that they like–anointing the fatted calf with oils and ungents and whatnot.  Or just the sweet visuals.  BEHOLD:

Here is my true solution to this problem: Make lamb or salmon or ham or chicken, something that actually tastes good.  But to appease weirdos, roast a neck or some giblets or whatever that you gank from somebody who’s actually purchased a turkey.  That way, the magical turkey smell will still be present while your guests sit around watching football.  Enhance this illusion by blowing up the above picture, framing it, and hanging it over the dinner table.  The important elements of the turkey illusion will still be maintained, without the pesky presence of the turkey itself to contend with.  If anybody questions you, lecture them about semiotics until they cry.  Then pass the stuffing.

3.  Bake, Bake, Bake

The other main things that people like about Thanksgiving are biscuits and dessert.  When the conversation stalls, stuff the silence with warm, buttery crumbs.  Example:

Some dad:  “I can’t wait to read ‘Going Rogue.’”

Some offspring:  “That’s dumb.  I hate you.  I hate life.  Do you understand life?”

You:  “I made pecan pie!”

Other guests:  “Eff yeah!”

Some offspring:  “This doesn’t change the fact that I hate you all.”

Some dad:  “Why I oughta–”

You:  “There’s real whipped cream!”

Some offspring:  “Oh, OK.”

Your cat, your dad, and your sibs all have one weakness . . .

4.  Watch ” The Beastmaster”

In this section, I was going to talk about the importance of background media–how it provides a handy  conversation piece, which is convenient, but also how sad it is that the art of conversation has declined to the point that we need external sources of entertainment in order to interact.  I was going to discuss how weird it is that Americans have collectively lost their social skills over the course of only two generations (just think–our grandparents used to get together for neighborhood cocktail parties and have weird Lions or Eagles clubs and just, you know, interact for fun, whereas us and our parents can’t get through a conversation without texting or fact-checking some dumb point via imdb.com, assuming we’re even having conversations, instead of just sitting around absorbing warm TV rays, which is crazy–we’re a nation of hikikomori.)  I was going to ask if anybody you know has actually gone on a real date in their life (”date night” doesn’t count),  and then I was going to contrast all this “The Internet and Media in General Are the End of Culture” sturm und drang with this awesome Clay Shirkey essay about how technology makes everybody crazy at first but then we adjust: just look at the Industrial Revolution, which made everybody just get drunk for a really long time before they figured out how to be awesome again, which is going to happen to us someday at some point.  But screw it–”The Beastmaster” is really good, whether it’s a crutch for interaction or not.  He’s a master of beasts, you know?  Look at him:

Get it together, animal friends. NOW.

He’s objectively cool, and it’s objectively okay to love him.  END TRANSMISSION.

5.  Act Right

Okay, here’s the deal: sometimes things don’t work out.  Sometimes, despite all your little “life hacks” and “time management tools” and “I-statements” and whatever, the course of true love does not run smooth.  That is to say, sometimes things are sad or awkward.  The turkey burns, or your uncle gets drunk, or your sister says the wrong thing at the wrong time and makes everybody else feel like shit.  These things happen.  And when they do, you have a choice: you can get all crushed and flail about and store up the bad feeling so that you can make some of your precocious art about it, like some poem about how nobody is real but you or whatever, or you could Act Right.  You can pretend that you don’t know what Acting Right entails, but that’s a flipping lie and you know it.  Acting Right means committing to the situation.  You accept that the situation is a bad situation, and you don’t lie to yourself about it.  You let it be sad.  Then you look at whether there is anything you can do to improve it, if there are any elements of the situation that are under your direct control.  Some might be, some might not.  Focus on those elements which you have power over, and exert that power.  It will mean doing things that you don’t want to do–it will mean making conversation with people you don’t want to talk to, or spending money you don’t really have to spare, or sucking up some crap you don’t want to take.  It will not feel good, and you will not receive points.  But you will have satisfaction, of a sort.  You will know that you did what needed to be done.  You will know that you are not a douchebag (see Fig. A.)

Fig. A

And you will give thanks.

*Seriously, I’m not doing tips for guests or loners.  If you are a guest to a Thanksgiving you don’t want to go to, simply arrive late and leave early.  If you are alone, get some takeout and eat it in the bathtub with lots of candles.  IT IS BOTH GOOD AND DISGUSTING AND COOL, WHICH IS A GOOD LIFE PLAN.

]]> http://youareweare.com/essays/how-to-hack-thanksgiving/feed 1 http://youareweare.com/food-craft/how-to-trick-people-into-thinking-you-are-good-at-wine http://youareweare.com/food-craft/how-to-trick-people-into-thinking-you-are-good-at-wine#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:46:45 +0000 Mar http://youareweare.com/?p=1234

Look at these effing hipsters.

There are a small number of situations in which it might behoove you to pretend to be good at wine.  These are the situations:

1.  You are on a date with a man or lady and you want them to think you are “discerning” even though you are not discerning and you want them to think you are “sensual” even though you are not sensual.  People like to think that they are attracted to “discerning sensuals” even though that is code for “promiscuous snobs.”  When pursuing a long term relationship, it is to your advantage to present yourself as being more attractive than you actually are because then it is easier to trap someone into entering into a co-dependent spiral with you, after which you can present your true, repulsive self and enjoy the “intimacy” that ensues.  People would rather foster destructive psycho-sexual bonds with “that cultured man” than with “that man over there.”

Look at that cultured man!

2.  You are at some kind of company event with alcohol and you want your co-workers and superiors to think that you are “educated” and “have good taste” instead of that you are a “wino” and “have an alcohol problem.”  There is a fine line between these personality traits; I contend that it doesn’t really exist.  Middle-class people like to think that they are “scholars of viticulture” instead of “total alcoholics,” and the way that they propagate this myth is to make comments like “Woah, I can really taste the malolactic fermentation in this Chard” and “Straw wines are totally overrated, y’all.  Recioto della Valpolicella is the rich man’s Mad Dog 20/20.”  This strategy is actually amazingly effective, and allows your petit-bourgeois colleagues to act exactly like homeless people with no social repercussions.  So if you’re the kind of person who finds getting tanked in front of their boss “enjoyable” rather than “nerve-wracking,” and you’d like to be able to do this “fairly frequently” without implicating yourself as a “loser,” oenology may be for you!

Company event with drinking

3.  Same as above, except substitute “increasingly brittle wife” for “co-workers/boss.”

4.  You’re one of those people who like to be “on-trend” and “up on the latest craze” and “part of the zeitgeist.”  You like to talk about “seizing the cultural moment” and “the big buzz in the hive mind.”  If you’re not sure if you’re one of those people, here is a simple test.  Don’t lie.

a.  Have you ever, for any reason, worn a fedora on a day other than Oct. 31?  (NO EXCEPTIONS FOR ANYBODY OTHER THAN DON DRAPER.)

b.   (Ladies only) Have you ever worn a bandanna on your head in a non-housecleaning/painting context?

c.  How many times have you gone swing dancing?  Is it “a bunch”?

d.  Do you own a Jetta?  Have you in the past?

e.   Have you ever owned a “crazy” pet, such as a pig or ferret?

f.  Do you want to work in PR?  Do you already?

Congratulations!  If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, you don’t have a personality: you have a conglomeration of current and outdated marketing campaigns.  In the part of your leg where a personality would normally live, you have a Tazmanian devil tattoo.  If you think wine is “cool” and that it might be a good “hobby/personality trait” to develop, this article can help you.

Black hole of marketing trends

Now that we’ve established all the reasons that one might need to pretend to be an aficionado*, on with the “life hacks” and trickses!

Trick#1: Ask Dumb Questions

Here are some dumb questions:

1.  “Was this wine estate-bottled?”  Estate bottling means that the wine in question was grown, made, and bottled all by the same company.  The vintner has controlled the wine-making process from top to bottom.  This is not as significant a factor as people like to think it is.  Small wineries like to use “estate bottled” as a kind of folksy marketing ploy, much in the same way that potato chip or soap companies like to have little stories on the backs of their products about how it all started in Old Man McManus’s penny kitchen or whatever.  The fact that their wine is estate bottled is supposed to mean that it is higher quality and more authentic.  This is not necessarily true–there are some great wines produced by committee–but, as with all snob hobbies, it’s important to pretend that you’re some kind of flipping historian from down home on the Grand Cru, i.e. that you are disgusted by the faintest whiff of fabrication and you just want things to be pure, man, like way back when it was just you and Iggy Pop hanging out in a basement, shooting heroin and rubbing noble rot all over each other’s faces while Emperor Lothair I sat in the corner and made rag rugs.

LOTHAIR I (as opposed to Lothair II)

2.  “Can I smell the cork?”  Smelling the cork proves nothing, but it looks fancy.  Ostensibly, the purpose of smelling the cork is to see if the wine is spoiled in some way, but the way you determine this is by smelling and tasting the wine, not the flipping cork.  If you wanted to know if a Twinkie was bad, would you ask to smell the wrapper?

3.  “Is this wine [adjective]?”  The fastest way to trick people into thinking you know something about a topic is to use some buzzwords.  So throw some adjectives around–it doesn’t really matter which ones, because–at heart–wine is always “wine-flavored.”  When faced with a bottle of wine, go ahead and ask if it’s “big” or “fruit-forward” or “possessive of slate-tinted undertones.”  You will always be safe if you remember that Merlots are “tannic,” Cabs  “complex,” Chards  either “oaky” or “crisp,” Pinots  “light and delicate,” Rieslings “apple-y,” Shirazes “berry-inflected,” Cote du Rhones “full-bodied” or “gamy,” and Zinfandels “fucking grape soda.”

I gave Zin to a baby once and the baby spat it out and said it was "too under-developed."

Trick #2:  Act like Martha Graham

I am so intense. I am so intense that my ghost has a ghost. This Malbec is fricking sweet.

Tasting wine is ultimately all about theatre–it’s the way you swirl the glass, peer at the label, swish the wine about in your mouth.  The way you lean back and hold your glass up to the light, twirling its delicate stem in order to watch the way the wine clings to the side of the glass, contemplating the colors hidden in its depths.  You roll your shoulders about, sighing and exhaling, rolling and closing your eyes in ecstasy.

In other words, it’s a big bullshit performance.  You have to act EXTREME and INTENSE and PASSIONATE and LIKE YOU INVENTED A NEW LANGUAGE OF MOVEMENT.  What you have to do is become Martha Graham.

Martha Graham was the Chuck Norris of dance.  Everything she did was unbelievably hardcore.  She started dancing when she was totally over the hill for a dancer (late twenties) and went on dancing on stage until she was 76.  At the point, she tried to kill herself with alcohol, because she was pissed that she was too old to dance.  She got wasted all the time until she was 79, after which she got her crap together and went on writing new ballets and choreographing until her death at 96!!!  She basically invented modern dance.  When she wasn’t freaking people out constantly she was freaking her young male co-stars.  She was totally awesome.

Watch this video below (start at 1:15.)

Her dancing is tense and visceral and very Expressionistic.  This is who you must become when you drink wine.  Manhandle that glass like it is some ripped avant garde dude.  Toss your head around like you are trying to rediscover your primal drives.  Flail around like this wine is reconfiguring your very relation to time and space.  People will think you are serious, rather than just a serious tippler.

Trick#3:  Engage in Some Hard-Core Negging

Negging is such an effective technique that it even works for THIS “man,” who is some fucked up shit my cat dreamed up.

This isn’t a very complicated trick, but it always works–not just in the case of wine, but in the case of LIFE ALL THE TIME.  All you have to do to impress/manipulate people is neg them a little bit.  People hate being negged because it makes them feel insecure.  Their solution for this is to try to impress you forever until you yield and validate them.  Just not being that into them makes them totally into you.  This is how to apply that to wine:

1.  “You’re having [name of wine]?  What an amusing choice!”

2. “I think it’s so admirable that you’re not really up on all the latest trends.  You always make such classic selections.  Some might call them boring, but I think they’re real homey.”

3.  “Oh you don’t know about [wine term]?  Hmm.”  Here is a nifty list of terms to use!  Make sure that you remember the meaning yourself before dropping them.  Try such bon mots as “I suspect the hand of carbonic maceration in this Lambrusco–it’s just a touch too sparkling,” or “What a charming monocepage!  I had no idea that a Grenache  could be so delicious on its own.”

Trick#4: Just Throw Money Around

So many tips!  Here they are:

1.  Build a wine cellar (or have one built.)  Spend tons of money making it all temperature controlled.  Make guests look at it every time they come over.  You’re not a souse, you’re an Edgar Allen Poe guy!

2.  Or you could install a wine rack.  This isn’t as impressive as a whole friggin’ cellar, but it still proves something important about you, namely that you have enough self-discipline to not drink a bottle of wine on the same day you buy it.  There’s an old, annoying wine saying that “Americans age wine in the backseat of their cars on the way back from the store.”  It is annoying because it is true.  If you have an actual wine shelf, and fill it with actual bottles of wine, and let them stay there for actual amounts of time, like a whole week or whatever, it will signal to people that you are a high-falutin’ collector.  Awestruck, they will start whispering questions to you about your collection, to which you will simply nod and smile, and say something about young wines being “too tightly knit,” which is why you need to allow them time to “bloom.”  You get extra points if you manage to talk about aging your wines in the exact way a pedophile might talk about a particularly hot 11-year-old girl.  In wine circles, this is not considered “creepy”; rather, it comes across as endearingly “European,” which is important because the whole goal of all wine people is to go back in time and get born in Europe, thereby becoming “actually European,” instead of just “aspirationally European.”

Aspirationally European

3.  Buy expensive wine.  Buy it in a restaurant, buy it for your parties, buy it at the store while a sexy individual looks on.  There are two great reasons to buy expensive wine: one, it makes you look committed to wine, because Americans equate money with love.  Two, wines over $30 always, always taste good.  If you spend the money, people will think you have good taste, because the product will be high-quality.  There’s an important exception to this rule, which is: never buy wine by the glass.  I don’t care if it costs $20; it will be bad unless it comes from a previously unopened bottle.  This is because wine by the glass usually comes from open bottles, which means the wine has been exposed to air.  A little air can be good for wines, but over time, it causes them to degrade.  It’s also a crappy value.

4.  Go to wine tastings.  That way you can casually mention that you go to wine tastings.  You will get to know the wait staff at the restaurants that host the tastings, which will increase your cred when you strategically take your date there.  He or she will feel like they’re really getting “a taste of the wine world’s underbelly,” although we all know that all they’ll be getting is “a taste of how customer service people are super willing to pretend to like people who are fiscally indiscreet.”

5.  Buy a Moleskine notebook and put your “tasting notes” in it.  Again, this speaks to the need to elevate wine-drinking from “carousing” to “total science, man.”  It’s a great prop for when you are out at bars alone: people will think you are a food critic, rather than just a guy or gal who can’t get a date and thus is drowning their sorrows.  A guy with a notebook isn’t a drunk; he’s a professional!

6.  Staying with the theme of props, you should also buy some handsomely photographed wine books.  Display in your home or upon your person.  Be all blase about them like an Antonioni character.  You’ll have to use a sander to scrape the babes off you.

Scraping babes off you

7.  If you are really poor and have no other option, you can always resort to . . . .

. . . buying wine with a cool label.  This is a very entry-level trick, and won’t work with advanced bourgeois people, but in a pinch it suffices.

Thus ends my guide to pretending to be good at wine.  I hope this was a helpful guide.  I hope it helps you hide your alcoholism from yourself, your family, and your friends.  Cheers!

*For a full discussion of why trying to be an aficionado turns you into a hell person, see The Sun Also Rises.

A: Super Mario’s Salvadorian food is a taco truck in downtown Bellingham.  I can see it from my front porch.  The food is good, and they’re nice people.

Q: How do I get there?

A: Its street address is 1422 N. Forest St. in Bellingham, WA.  It faces the old Wilson Motors auto lot on E. Champion street. Click here for a Google Map. Their phone number is (360) 920-4330.

Q: What can I order at Super Mario’s?

A:

Menu for Super Mario's Salvadorian Foods

Q: How much do these items cost?

A: Please note that the following prices are subject to change – they have before.  What follows is my transcription of this lousy photograph I took of their pricing list on October 15, 2009:

Pupusas          $2.00

(Corn Tortillas with your choice of filling)

Bean and Cheese or Bean Cheese and Pork

.

.

Wonder Burritos          $6.50

(A layer of cheese, beans, rice, cilantro, onions, cabbage, sour cream, guacamole,  and your choice of meat in a flour tortilla)

Asada (steak), Chicken, Pork, Tongue, and Veggie

.

.

Super Tacos          $2.25

(A layer of bean and cheese, your choice of meat, with cilantro, onion, radish, and lime)

Asada (steak), Chicken, Pork, and Tongue

.

.

Quesadillas          $9.00
(A layer of cheese, your choice of meat, cilantro, onions, sour cream, and guacamole in a flour tortilla)

Asada (steak), Chicken, Pork, Tongue, and Veggie

.

.

Tortas           $6.00
(A sub roll with mayo, lettuce, cilantro, onions, radish, and your choice of meat)

Asada (steak), Chicken, Pork, and Tongue

(with sour cream and guacamole added)              $7.00

.

.

Tacos $1.50
(Your Choice of meat with cilantro, onion, radish, and lime)

Asada (steak), Chicken, Pork, and Tongue

.

.

Regular Burritos         $5.00
(Your choice of meat, beans, rice, cilantro, onions, cabbage, in a flour tortilla)

Asada (steak), Chicken, Pork, Tongue, Bean and Veggie, Bean and Cheese

(With sour cream and guacamole added)           $5.50

.

.

Tamales          $1.75
Chicken Tamales

.

.

.

Q: What about the combination plates?  How much are they?

A: $6.00 for a two taco plate, $8.00 for the three taco plate.  The rest I never order, so you’ll have to call if you’re interested.

Q: What should I get?

A:  The crowd pleasers seem to be the papusas and the Wonder Burrito.  The papusas are small little handmade self-contained pockets of cheesy, meaty amalgamation.  The Wonder Burrito has a layer of cheese seared between layers of tortilla so it wins the “so good, brah” award. I personally like the regular pork burrito, no sour cream, only guacamole; the 2 taco combo; and the pork torta with guacamole. The tacos are actually really good here. Well balanced flavors.

Q: Which meat is best?

A:  The pork.  Or, at least, I think so.   The pork torta is, in my opinion, one of the best pulled pork sandwiches in town.  The pork is dry and crunchy and well-seasoned.  I like the other meats, too, but the pork is my favorite.

Q: Aaron asks, “What should a vegetarian get? I have a vegetarian friend who goes there all the time.”

A: So long as you’re doing cheese, probably the Bean and Cheese papusa or a bean and cheese burrito.  You could, in theory, get a regular Veggie burrito/only guacamole, which is probably the only thing which approaches vegan. Meaning that there wouldn’t be any big chunks of meat or dairy, but you never know.  Update – Marie chimes in: “The veggie mix is pretty good – lots of cabbage and carrots. I think the textures are nice. There’s also a mushroom and cheese papusa that’s meatless.”

Q: What should I get to drink? What hot sauce is best?

A: Jarritos soda.  Tamirand is the best flavor. But be sure to get a cold one from the left side cooler, not the one directly below the ordering window.  Update – Katie adds: “…their non-a sangria is to die for, it is something i frequently dream about. also, the apple soda is lovely.”

Also, note that if you’re eating at the truck, the sauces are all in squirt bottles in a separate cooler all the way to the left. Put them back when you’re done.  There are two sauces, hot and green.  Both bring out different flavors.  There is maybe a third flavor, “red”.  The hot is pretty darn good, I have to say.

Q: Best practices?

A: Call in your order 15 minutes ahead of time.  Otherwise you’ll be spending a lot of time waiting around for the food to be prepared.  When you walk up to the window, if there’s nobody there, it’s OK to call out a friendly “hello!” as in “hi, friends” to let them know you’re there, because sometimes they can’t see you. But don’t call out “hello?” as in “anybody home?” because that’s rude.  Tip generously.   Say thank you.   Don’t smoke cigarettes on the premises.  Don’t bring beer.  If you want extra to-go sauce, (hint: you might) ask for it nicely.  Bus your own table.  Don’t feed spare morsels to stray cats passing by.

Q: Why is the business called “Super Mario’s”? Is there any relation whatsoever to the Nintendo franchise?
A: The owner’s name is Mario Nolasco. Is he a die-hard SNES Mario Cart gamer? Certainly in my imagination.

Q: Do you have any random pictures of Super Mario’s-related things?

A:

The Truck

When you go, check out the sweet mural on the back side of the truck.

Regular pork burrito, plus guacamole. Hot sauce applied by your author.

BLUE RIBBON RECIPE WEEK: MUG O’ SPAM

The Kansas State Fair is one of many that has just concluded, and we were able to get copies of several blue ribbon-winning recipes. We’ll share them this week.
This was the winner of the Great American SPAM Championship. It was submitted by Heather Britain of South Hutchinson.

INGREDIENTS

1 can (12 oz.) SPAM Classic, shredded

1 cup Rice Krispies cereal

1 egg

1 tablespoon onion, minced

3 tablespoons brown sugar

1 teaspoon dry mustard

1/4cup ketchup

3 tablespoons vinegar

DIRECTIONS

In large bowl, mix SPAM, rice krispies, egg and onion.

In a small bowl, combine brown sugar, mustard, ketchup and vinegar. Reserve 2 tablespoons for later. Pour remaining sauce into SPAM mixture. Mix well.

Press mixture into 2 microwave safe mugs. Don’t fill all the way to the top. Leave about 1-inch space. Spoon 1 tablespoon of reserved sauce into each mug. Microwave on 70 percent power for 5 minutes. Let stand 2 minutes before serving. Eat straight from the mug.

OH MAN.  So I subscribe to the Bellingham Herald’s Recipe of the Day service.  It’s basically a thing where the Herald will send a free recipe to your email inbox on the daily.  Part of the reason that I subscribe is that I believe in supporting local journalism, so I wanted to give them an online assist.  The other reason is that I’m always looking for easy recipes, and Recipes of the Day tend to be simple and quick.  However, to my mind, “simple and quick” shouldn’t mean “utterly effing disgusting.”  I prefer to cook using local, seasonal ingredients; I had hoped that, by subscribing to a local newspaper’s Recipe of the Day Service, that I’d be receiving tips on how to use up, say, the summer squash and tomatoes that have been flooding the local produce sections.  The Recipe of the Day feature should be tuned into local agriculture; it would be a million times more useful that way.  We’ve all got bags of slowly aging produce fragrancing our refrigerators at this time of year, but the provenance of said vegetables varies from region to region.  We in the Northwest have access to pretty great produce year-round, but that doesn’t mean that we always know how to use it.  A great ratatouille recipe isn’t news, but it can be timely.  So that’s one aspect of why I’m so disappointed today.

Another is my general disappointment with “fast, family-friendly” recipes relying so often upon prepackaged ingredients (I’m looking at you, Rachel Ray.)  Prepackaged ingredients tend to be sodium and corn syrup heavy; they also tend to taste crappy.  And they’re unnecessary!  Chow.com has a great feature called Take Your Lunch to Work.  It explains how to make a week’s worth of quick lunches from a cheap ingredient like beans or tofu.  You do a bunch of prep on Sunday, but then you convert the leftovers into easy, tasty meals.  Some of these meals require as little prep as packaged Mac ‘n’ Cheese, but they use fresh components and are much better for you.  Unfortunately, this type of food journalism is the exception, rather than the norm.  Most people don’t have the time to make Coq au Vin on a weeknight (although it is a one-pot meal), but that doesn’t mean you can’t eat well.  Heck, just make putanesca–Italian for “whore’s sauce,” so-called because it can be prepared in only twenty minutes, or between clients.  The idea that prepackaged food is more efficient or cheaper than fresh food is a myth.

Which brings me to today’s Recipe of the Day, Mug ‘O’ Spam.  I feel like somebody is making fun of me here.  Is the Kansas State Fair trying to bait me?  Is the Bellingham Herald being ironical?  The Great American SPAM Championship? Aslan wept.

Ha ha, Kansas accidentally made their children's God cry

l can only conclude that Heather Britain is some sort of crazy Amy Sedaris performance art hipster.  Otherwise, everything about this phenomenon is obscene.  There is a certain cheekiness apparent in the title of this opus, but is it biting satirical cheekiness, a la Ricky Gervais, or is it a Rosanne/Pluggers/Home Improvement-style cheekiness?  You know the sort I mean, it’s all “Isn’t it pathetic that we all wear sweatpants constantly?  P.S. I totally validate the choice to wear sweatpants constantly as a blow against self-righteous pinko liberal Left Coast culture.”

Now, I’m definitely working-class, and I hate trustafarians as much as the next person, but there’s something unsavory about this kind of attitude, something proudly ignorant, something  . . . uniquely American.  I suppose that’s why they call it the GREAT AMERICAN SPAM CHAMPIONSHIP, rather than the International SPAM Cook-off.   Apparently, there is something GREAT and AMERICAN and CHAMPION-y about cooking with SPAM (p.s. why SPAM instead of Spam or spam?)  It’s really funny and ironical to seriously serve your family food WWII K-rations.  (But what about Spam culture in Hawaii, you might be asking.  Are you intentionally ignoring this important aspect of Spam history?  The answer to that is yes.  I’m only concerned, within this article, with Spam as a symbol in the lower 48.)

Call me, Brad Dourif!

I am pissed at the Herald for joking me with this article.  It symbolizes everything that’s wrong with the Recipe of the Day feature.  And I am angry at the great state of Kansas, where as far as I can tell the apocalypse has already happened and the land is ruled solely by Stuckey’s managers and Grima Wormtongue-in-Wise Blood preachers and other Flannery O’Connor characters.  But mostly I am mad at Heather Britain, I am just pretty sure that she is making fun of me.  Or else she is a fantastic Shavian satirist and I want to be her when I grow up, I’m not sure.  Because let’s think about this recipe for a moment, shall we?

You get a can of Spam “Classic” (!) and you shred it.  You stand over the kitchen sink in your three-bedroom-ranch-style, and you scrape congealed aspic off a log of room-temperature “meat,” and then you put it in a bowl, and then you shred it.  (Using what?  The razor-sharp edges of your clinical depression?)  Then you pour some Rice Crispies into the Spam bowl.  I mean to say that you lurch into the living room, a little hazy from the Carlo Rossi strawberry wine you’ve been hitting since eleven, and fish the Rice Krispies box out from beneath the couch where little Madison stashed it, and you dump the last of it into your bowl of Spam.  Your back hurts, so you put your arms on the counter and lean on them, pushing your butt out, trying to find the ache.  You look out the kitchen window at the parking lot, and then you crack an egg onto your crispy Spam pile.  You watch the white bubble around the pink Spam fragments for a while, and then you start looking for a small bowl.  None of them are clean–the house is a graveyard of dirty bowls, stashed on every surface, from the TV to the counter to the top of the toilet.  And the dishwasher is broken again.  You pick out the cleanest of the dirty bowls–Madison’s cereal bowl from yesterday, with only a little milk caked in the bottom–and then you empty every condiment you’ve got into it.  Mustard, brown sugar, vinegar, ketchup, dry mustard, some leftover onion–it doesn’t matter.  You just need something that will wake y0ur mouth up, something to coat the strands of Spam as they slip down your throat.  You want something salty and sweet and meaty and hot, something to keep you going.  But you don’t have anything like that.  You don’t even have any bowls.  The thought of scrubbing Bob’s egg pan from this morning is too much, you’re not ready yet, you need to watch Ellen first.  So you dump the spices into the Spam bowl, and you stir them half-heartedly, and you pack it into some Disney World mugs and you nuke it.  70 percent power is how high you nuke it, and you try to remember the last time you felt 50 percent, much less 70.  You decide, right then, that the kitchen floor would be a good place to sit for a while.  You slide down to the kitchen floor, and you do a little sitting.  The microwave stops, the microwave bleats.  You keep sitting.  It keeps beeping, at 30 second intervals.  You count them off.  You don’t move.  After the fourth one, you drag yourself up.  You eat the Spam, straight from the mug.  You try not to look at the veins in your hands, the cracks in the plaster.  You eat the Spam, straight from the mug.

WRONG.

What baristas coffee apologists will neglect to tell you is that the perfect cup of Joe is actually impossible to attain.

After years of niggling dissatisfaction with home-brewed coffee and reading tons of coffeegeek.com I have come to the conclusion that there are six primary factors at play in the pursuit of a great cup of coffee:

• Bean selection
• Roast (and period of time elapsed between roast and brewing)
• Grind (for optimal results, you need to use a $100+ conical burr grinder so as to avoid the dreaded “dust and boulders” problem that is inherent to blade grinders, plus you want to brew as soon after you grind as possible)
• Temperature of brew (anywhere from 190F – 205F yields acceptable coffee but different coffees brew better at different temperatures and you definitely don’t want to brew it too hot or too cold or your coffee will be broken)
• Length of brew (3-4 minutes)
• Strainer density (to filter out any remaining sludge for a “clean” cup without removing any of the tasty oils eliminated by a paper filter)

What I’m getting at here is that to make decent coffee, you need to construct what coffee dorks refer to as a “rig” of tools which take into consideration all of the above factors to produce a good cup of coffee.  And the costs of this rig add up quickly.  But why spend that dough if it won’t yield the perfect cup?  I’m talking perfectly extracted. Perfectly clean.  Oils intact.  There is but one who can bring this fantasy to life.  The bejeweled queen of rig componentry.

She is called Clover.

It’s the best coffee maker that money can could buy.  It takes into consideration all of the factors involved in brewing great coffee and then does the inarguably right thing with each one. It brews coffee at the precise temperature and length of time you specify, and then sucks the resulting brew through a 70 micron screen; using modern technology to make corporeal a cup which until recently only existed in theory.

It also costs $11,000.  Or rather, it did before Starbucks bought the rights to all of them so you can’t even get one anymore.   So, big whoop, you think, I’ll still be able to walk into any Starbucks and get the perfect cup of coffee, right?  OK, now watch this Starbucks ad:

Read: “We bet you can’t tell the difference between instant coffee and our fresh-brewed drip, you mocha-slurping, mouth-breathing philistines.   My 12-year-old basset hound with a putrefying gum disorder has a more refined palate than you.”

Any company with this much contempt for coffee drinkers and coffee itself cannot be entrusted with this doomsday machine of coffee machines.  Put another way, Starbucks killed the electric car.

Look, even if you don’t care that much about a “perfect” cup, “good” coffee still means building a rig.  It’s $100 for a decent automatic grinder, $20 for an instant-read thermometer, $40 for a decent French press, plus coffee…  You’re looking at a $150 investment, min.  This is not a beverage of the people.

At the moment these realizations coalesced in my mind, I was decimated.  I just wanted a perfect cup of coffee, man.  Instead, now, you’ll find me tossing and turning about a sweat-drenched bed, an aforementioned “slug” from “that wonderful mug” dancing a jig in my head.  “You’ll never have me, Ross Brackett,” it ridicules in perfect four-part harmony, “plus I make your pee smell weird.”  Damn you, Manhattan Transfer, and your vivid coffee-related imagery. And damn you coffee, for keeping me up at night.  Damn you both to hell.

Sometimes you have to know when to put an obsession like this on hold…

…and replace it with an

even more profound obsession.

Enter black tea.

Organic “Assam” variety from the bulk section of the Co-op. Other good places to buy it in Bellingham include Wonderland Teas and Spice Hut

Tea rundown:

• Delicious
• No grinding
• No need for a thermometer -  it’s ideally brewed with just-boiled water
• No need to obsess about endless varieties – just buy the best loose Assam you can find, and it’s still cheap as hell
• Particles are large enough that there’s no need for an ultra-fine strainer
• Tasty at any temperature
• You can water it down and it still tastes good
• You can drink it all day, and it doesn’t make your sweat/urine/poop/saliva reek of stale coffee

But most importantly, the perfect

cup of tea can actually be

accomplished. For cheap. In your own home.
How, you ask? How can I brew the perfect cup of tea in my own home, you ask?

OK, you probably didn’t ask and you may not even care.  But you’ve made it this far, dammit, and, uh, hey, I *promise* there’s a present for you at the end if you make it all the way through.  A shiny present!  Keep reading.

The procedure:

1. Mise en place (?)

You will need (pictured left to right, back to front):

• Measuring cup
• Kettle
• Decanting vessel.  Any  glass or porcelain container or jar will do the job
• Black tea
• Ramekin or a little cup to hold tea
• Brewing vessel – a teapot is easiest, but a mason jar or any other vessel made of glass or porcelain works great. Don’t use plastic.
• Tea cozy (a towel or a knit hat does the same thing)
• One teaspoon measuring spoon
• Tea strainer
• Timer, stop watch, or clock

2. Measure the brewing vessel,

measure the tea

Fill your brewing vessel with water and then pour it one cup at a time into a measuring cup to determine how much it holds.  Write this number down.  Now to figure out how much tea to use.  Fortunately, the ratio is actually codified in the English language.

1 teaspoon

to

1 cup of water

I know, right?  By volume, that’s roughly a 50:1 water to tea ratio, and this seems to work great.  Be sure to measure the tea before you boil the water so there’s no futzing around when the kettle is hot.

3. We are making tea now

First, pour out any water already in the kettle.  The Internet has repeatedly informed me that previously-boiled water is less oxygenated and is thus less tasty.  Sounds like BS to me, but what do I know… (if you are reading this and know better please debunk this myth for me)

Fill the kettle…

And light it.  Soon you will hear the sweet sound of…

WATER BOILING!!!  EMERGENCY ALERT, lol.   I had a picture of our kettle boiling, but this is better. Strangely, the creators of this popular internet video have the same formica as us.

4. Go Time

OK WE HAVE ESTABLISHED THE SOUND OF THE WHISTLE IS DEAFENING I WILL TALK LOUD.  TURN BURNER TO LOW!!!

Phew.  OK, the water is still boiling but the whistle isn’t blowing as loud and it’s time to to proceed to the next step.  Tea purists speak of “bringing the pot to the kettle” instead of the other way around and that’s what we’re going to do here.  The idea is to get the teapot hot and keep it there until the brewing is done.  You want the water to go directly from the flame to the teapot.  Keep the kettle on the flame when you’re not using it.  Before you even touch the tea, we need to get the teapot hot.  Pour a bit of the boiling water in there.

Swirl it around a little so as to coat the insides of the pot, and then pour it out into the sink (yes, it’s not pictured, Sherlock, use your imagination). Now the pot is primed for actual brewing.

Go quick, now!  Pour the pre-measured tea in the pot.  Please note that the tea goes straight in the pot.  Use of tea bags or tea balls restricts saturation and makes the tea less good.  We’ll strain it later.

Pour water quickly over tea leaves.  Remember, water over the tea, not the other way around.

Keep hurrying.  Put the teapot lid on, and then wrap the teapot in the tea cozy (or towel, or whatever).  The point of the tea cozy is not to keep dust out of the pot, but rather to keep the water as hot as possible without actually crossing over to boiling.

Now, grasp the the teapot through the cozy and shimmy it a little, just a slight jiggly swiveling,  to make sure the leaves get a little swirled around inside of the pot. This also increases the extraction.

Now set the timer.  I use the built-in timer in our microwave, but you can buy a fancy tea timer or use a stopwatch or whatever.

Set the timer for 3 minutes.  Now, we want to brew the tea for a little longer, about 3 minutes and 30 seconds, but we’ll set it to 3 minutes as you probably already blew 10 seconds pouring the water and getting the lid on and shimmying the teapot, and it buys you a little time to run back to the kitchen once the buzzer goes off, plus the tea strainer always wanders away at the crucial moment.  You just want to buy yourself a little time, OK?

“BEEP!” says the microwave.

Don’t panic. You’re cool. Get the tea strainer and ready it over the decanting vessel.

Take the lid off the teapot if it has one.  Otherwise it will fall off and almost break scaring the hell out of you.

Pour through the strainer into your decanter.

And… now the decanter is full of black tea as good as it can be made.

Let it cool down a little before you pour it.

Maybe clean up after yourself while you’re waiting.

That way when you call out to your friends:

TEA’S READY, FRIENDS.

And they come into the kitchen

And they try it

They’ll be all

You did it

YOU DID IT.

Oh, and I almost forgot:

More on tea:
http://www.rsc.org/pdf/pressoffice/2003/tea.pdf
http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm

FOODS

Everybody at the roast was fond of the chicken, and this infused their subsequent ribbing of him with an inclusive sort of glee – all the jokes were inside jokes, culled from a lifetime of  “good times had by all.”  They would say, “He isn’t very good at golf, is he?” and everyone would laugh because he was, of course, good at golf.  “That dumb cluck never met a gold futures proposal he didn’t like, eh?,” and everyone would laugh because he had, of course, made his fortune in gold.   But one man did not like the chicken, because the chicken once fired him from a project.  No one knew how he had gotten into the roast, but in all the hubbub and fooferaw and general chaos, he had somehow snuck in.  He leaned back in his chair, leering, holding hands with a bedraggled Eastern European model and gulping a series of dirty martinis.  His mouth, when not drinking, was constantly pursed, one eyebrow askew, and he seemed constantly on the verge of saying something.  A few of the guests noticed him, but quickly looked away, with the exception of a small, dark, and recalcitrant child.

The child’s name was Edmund and he admired the man, for he too thought that the roast was a big load of crap.  Edmund was skeptical because he had just read “Catcher in the Rye,” and he recognized in this gathering the very sort of phoniness bemoaned within those sacrosanct pages.  He did not realize that an obsession with phoniness is the hallmark of adolescent precocity, for he was only nine and thus yearned to attain his full flower as a precocious adolescent.  He thought the disgruntled man the very height of masculine angst, and he resolved that, should he live to be thirty-eight-ish, that he would only consort with Eastern Europeans femmes, and drink his gin with a fine cold scorn.  He would wear his suits rumpled, the tie yanked down, top button unbuttoned, and he would lean quite far back in his chair, and rest one thumb inside his trouser waist, and the other on the inside of a thin girl’s thigh.

Edmund’s father was a lowly clerk in the chicken’s organization, and Edmund did not admire him overmuch, as he felt that a harried air was unbecoming to the true man in his prime.  His father, and little slip of a mother, were meanwhile ensconced at a distant table, and were promptly, jovially, getting rather drunk.  They were happy and ineffectual, thought Edmund, because they did not realize that there are finer things than to be the phony employees of a phony chicken at a phony roast filled with phony jokes and phony, yet endless, bonhomie.

In fact, the phony bonhomie had become in the way of reaching an almost unbearable fever pitch.  The flattering subtext of the jokes, never too subtle, had floated almost entirely to the surface of each slab o’ wit, rewriting the very nature of the event from roast to High Mass.  “I suppose,” thought Edmund, “that the power and affection wielded by this chicken is such that he has transmuted this occasion from party to palimpsest.  Only I, and that dashing man over there, can glimpse the original text.  I do wish that he would speak up already!”

“If you had told me ten years ago,” said a red-faced presenter, “that a chicken could be as good-lookin’ as he is modest, I would have laughed you out of the room.  But now – why, it seems impossible, but in my eyes this fowl has “flown” to the top of the pile of my estimation.  Fo’ shizzle!”

“You know what they say, ‘Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, whips gotta be ghost-ridden,’” said another.  “But I would add – chickens gotta rule and be rich and also generally awesome!”

“I’ve fucked a lot of hos,” said yet a third.  “But I’ve never really loved anyone – except for this animal right here!  Give it up!”

- And on and on and on it went, the crowd whipped into a drunken, synchophantic frenzy, the lone angry man getting angrier, a scowl settling ever deeper into Edmund’s small full face, the Eastern European escort obviously terribly bored, but a little tense.

“I never realized that I would love having a sexy employer,” said a tousled receptionist.  “How wrong I was!”

Finally the angry man could take no more, and he stood up, listing a little.  The crowd waited with bated breath, most hoping that no unpleasantness would mar the felicity of the celebration.  Edmund’s face lit up like the sun, it bloomed like a dahlia, as he hoped against hope that the man would say something delicious, something cutting.

The man drained his drink quickly, and smashed it down upon the table.  And into the silence he said, “hey chicken your wife had chicken legs chicken so there.”

The chicken cocked a brow, and replied, “At least I’m not poor!”

And everyone laughed and laughed and laughed, and the angry man sat down deflated, and the Eastern European model/escort rolled her eyes and inched a little away, and the buzz of pleased drinkers drinking once again filled the room.  The band started back up, playing a sprightly version of “Going Up to the Country, Baby Don’t You Wanna Go,” and a few couples even started dancing.  Edmund calmly plucked a lit candle from a nearby candelabra.  He yelled, in a piercing voice that cut threw the din, “Fuck all y’all!” and then threw the candle, quite accurately, straight into the chicken’s face.

The End

He eats to become more.  He eats the heads of those he admires; he eats the heads of the state whom he feels to be most corrupt.

Brutus, eating, becomes more every day.  He transcends his former shape – becoming fatter!  Fatter is a kind of more, as well.He has shaped his spirit with trembling hands, flagging it till it becomes harder, tougher, more erect.

Brutus does not know the difference between his mind and his body, but he can guess.  Still, he upends his cock, pushes his belly to evolve forward, shits out the crap of his day.

Fig. 2

He is a materialist, the purest kind: a cannibal.  Fucking and eating are the same to him; losing and shitting are the same to him.  He wins, sometimes – he manages to suck the marrow out of bones.

He will take every loss and he will repair it – he will put something in place of something else.  When somebody gives him a mean glance, he eats a beautiful crossaint.  He casts his feces in bronze, throws it in the faces of his enemies.

He does not know the difference between fucking and eating – he eats the pussy he will fuck, he eats his babies if they overcrowd his cage.  He bites – his penis has a bone spur in it, like a bird.

In Russia, where he lives, the people eat their leaders, and the leaders eat the people.  It’s how they keep track of things.  Then they burn the bones in a barrel.

Fig. 2

Many birds come to see him; they love him for how much he shits, because the shit feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the worms (somehow), and the birds love a fat worm of an evening.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who liked to cook.  The other children at school liked to eat: crumbled raw Top Ramen, Lunchables, candy, and Capri Suns.  But this little boy, whose name was Bobby, would spend hours pounding galangal and ginger in his mortar and pestle in order to create the perfect Pad Thai.  He made fish sauce from scratch, baked pizzas on a marble oven block, and was generally quite the gourmand.The problem was, he was extremely clumsy.  Whilst chopping scallions, he often slipped and gored into his own finger.  His arms and hands were a tapestry of scars and burns in various stages of healing.  His mother feared for his eventual disfigurement.  It was decided that the boy ought not to cook at all, and so he was consigned to the gulag of the microwavable and the frozen.

He found this unacceptable.  Night after night, he rose at four, and cooked until six, in order to satisfy his starved palate.  This resulted in further mishaps – broken crockery, scored flesh.  But he could not stop.

His parents, alerted by the Bactine stains haunting his laundry, caught on.  And so they took to tying him up at night, for his own good.  Thus restrained, he became an insomniac – his nights were filled with fantasy menus, his days a haze of recipe projections.  He fell asleep frequently at school; was often rebuked for his absent-mindedness; and acquired a reputation as an incorrigible dreamer.  This, of course, made him quite unpopular, but Bobby did not mind, as the vacuum left by his friends might now be filled with dreams of potables and prandials.

His fantasies became so strong, so fully realized, that he increasingly found that he had no need for actual food.  This too, was not a hardship, as the Dinty Moore stews and Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese forced upon him by his mother seemed sins against his soul, and choked his throat like ashes.He became gaunt, then bony, then absolutely skeletal.  No amount of scoldings could move him.

Eventually, he found himself in a hospital, forced to ingest sucrose through an intravenous.  Psychiatrists reasoned with him; they medicated him; they attempted to make him forget the vision that fueled his days.  But he was imperturbable.

After he died, his room was filled with the scent of baking bread for three days, and no amount of air freshener could erase it.