we have a map of the piano
Like good phrenology, but geographic. Mirth and tranquility are too small.
Also, we have a map of the piano - live in japan.
Also, we have a map of the piano - live in japan.
> enter the window
You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west, and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. To the east is a small window which is open. On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers. A clear glass bottle is here. The glass bottle contains:
A quantity of water.
>
New Pickle
Interesing seeds at Seed Savers, including Red Malabar spinach, fat Oxheart heirloom carrots, Amish Deer Tongue lettuce, and Sutton's Harbinger peas (won an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1901, apparently).
I am anxious to try pickling a batch of West Indian Gherkin cucumbers (above). I think they would be a nice addition to a bloody mary with some kind of hybrid wasabi/horseradish.
stop yodeling until oktoberfest
maybe the funniest thing the New York Times has printed, ever:
A Rough Script of Life, if Ever There Was One
... "Caller from the 100 block of North Morehead Street requested to speak to animal control because caller felt that someone was coming into his yard and cutting the hair on his dogs. Dispatch advised caller to set up video surveillance on his house. Caller said he planned on it." ...
decorative
A great Soho design store, Moss...mossonline. Their Aphrodite pitcher reminds me of a plant I saw at Wave Hill in the Bronx,
the nipple fruit:
Not sure know why.
local eats
I had a great oyster from Duxbury, MA a little while back at B & G Oysters. I found these Duxburys at my local whole foods last night and brought a few home (something I rarely do because I can't open them without gouging my hand open usually). They were fantastic with a shallot-ponzu-rice wine vinegar mignonette.
The view from the back garden at B & G.
calf stretch
It really is not easy being green. Everyday I wake up and feel less flexible. I don't understand what niche this fills, but I am going to study it.
potato and onion tart, No. 1
My first attempt at the kind of tart you cook.
1. thinly slice some onions, and saute them down with some garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. Add a lot of sea salt and pepper. Set this aside to cool to room temperature after it's all softened and smells great.
2. thinly slice some russet potatoes
3. Play stringbean jean by Belle and Sebastian.
4. make a single layer of potatos, cover with a layer of the onions, then another layer of thinly sliced potatos, and repeat this until you are satisfied.
5. Add some chicken stock until it comes up about 1/3 of the way in whatever pan you've started making your tart.
6. Cover with aluminum foil, and back it at 350F for about 45 minutes.
7. Uncover it, and sprinkle a handful of goat cheese on top; place it back in the oven at 350 or 400F for another 30 minutes, until most of the stock has evaporated and the goat cheese is nice.
8. Let it cool for 20 minutes before cutting squares out of it.
sunday rustic short ribs
I woke up this morning thinking about cayenne and pomegranate. Here is my experiment with cayenne and pomegranate braised short ribs.
1. take a couple bone-in short ribs 
2. rub them with coarse salt, back pepper and cayenne
3. brown them on all sides in a tablespoon of olive oil 
4. remove them, and then soften some rough-chopped celery, carrot, and shallot in the same pan. 
The umami gets released as the miripoix cooks. 
5. deglaze with a cup of pinot noir or syrah
6. add a cup or so of good stock and pomegranate juice (I knew there had to be some use for POM), let these meld together 
7. add back the short ribs and some thyme, cover and simmer for a couple hours. 
8. remove the short ribs and strain the braising liquid; add a little more cayenne, then reduce this until there are just a couple tablespoons left
9. reheat the short ribs in the reduced braising liquid 
10. plate with some carbohydrate such as good bread or egg pasta
.
11. Hot and sweet. Yummo.
proposed poems from The New Yorker
We will watch every John Waters film
We will read the Sunday Times every time
(I in this order:
week in review
Magazine
Sunday styles
Metro
Real estate
Arts and leisure)
I will try not to crash our volvo,
On our days off we'll laze on the chaise
Flopping gasto journal from my fingers
Two story wall of windows letting something in
Soapstone reverberating like the Getty,
Something needs to shore me up
Something needs to fight for me against all the
Metastatic cancer in the world
I will still be telling
That story of throwing up in the bathroom
Of honmura an
When I'm sixty four
After getting an ileus at yale.
In a dream I have
We will sit back somenight again
Like two figurines next to each other
At the formosa café
With all our friends about us
We will never let the atmosphere
Atomize us again like this,
We will walk our dog in the indifferent night
Petting some cats along the way
I will throw a cigarette into the street
And no pain or consfusion can fastforward our lives
In those kind of lonely nights
We will watch every john waters film.
D.N. ad infinitum
Dorothy Norman
1931 gelatin silver print 11.6 x 9.0 cm.
ex-collection Georgia O'Keeffe
GEH NEG: 37390 74:0052:0094
paperback favorites
All my books for the past year come from the table in the front of a Barnes & Noble.
pickles à la minute
Grub Street at NY Mag has a great section called The Annotated Dish. This week's feature on Le Bernardin’s surf and turf (Kobe steak and grilled escolar), includes a Kimchee à la minute which is a single leaf of Napa cabbage marinated in korean barbeque sauce. I love to quick pickle things, and my latest experiments involve both baby cucumbers and Napa cabbage. Here's the process, which is the same for whatever you'd like to pickle, as long as it has a relatively high water content (so it can equilibrate with the salinity of the pickling liquid . . . or something like that):
1. wash your vegetables in cold water, and put them in a Mason jar
2. cover them with cold water
3. add some white vinegar (or for a more subtle flavor, use rice wine vinegar); it's hard to know how much to add, and it's up to your taste, but if ~5% of the total volume of the liquid is vinegar, that's probably a good start.
4. Add a couple large tablespoons of salt.
5. Cut a few very thin slices of garlic, ginger, and red onion, and add these.
6. Add a teaspoon of fresh lemon juice.
7. Tast the liquid at this point; dilute it if it's too salty or vinegary, or add more of whatever you think is missing.
8. Invert it a few times to mix everything, and place in the refrigerator.
You can eat these a soon as after a few hours, and it only gets better with time. After about a week or more there will be a special tanginess which will remind your palate how fresh and "à la minute" these pickles are.
['pit.tsa]
My search for good pizza outside NYC begins. Here is the "Oliver's" pizza I got at Todd English's Fig's in Beacon Hill tonight. It was nice and thin, with a good chewy texture to the dough, nicely charred in spots from the wood burning oven.
Red Hook | June 9 2007
Is this where all my classmates from Dartmouth went when they said they were going into consulting? Were would the world be without them?
objet trouvé
Sometimes art can be found in unexpected places. Here is a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi in an otherwise featureless corner of Mount Sinai Hospital.
You can visit the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City near P.S. 1.
something good comes from Kid A?
Could this be one of Radiohead's best and most overlooked songs ever? or is this just the endgame of my (still) trying to find something transcendental and worthwhile about the album?
super simple pasta
pasta with sage and brown butter
1. rough cut a handful of sage and some garlic
2. boil some spaghetti (or some bucatini if you can find it) until al dente
3. heat a couple tablespoons of good butter in a shallow pan until it starts to brown; wilt the sage and garlic in the butter for a minute or two
4. transfer the pasta (with some of the pasta water still clinging to it) into the pan with the butter and sage; toss this around for a minute; loosen it if it's too dry with a couple spoonfuls of the pasta water
5. add some fresh black pepper
6. top with parmesan just before removing to a plate
security blanket cuisine
The best gauge of what someone's concept of "comfort food" is might be the first dinner they cook for themselves in a new home. It is sort of the inverse of a last meal, but the two might be similarly revealing. Grilled cheddar with maple bacon, spicy pickled green beans (I found the ones that Stand includes in their pot of pickles - they're Rick's Picks 'Mean Beans') and garlicky dill slices, sunflower greens with a simple vinaigrette, and a Harpoon summer beer.
the preternatural sky
I always wonder about the 4 giant blocks on the Met's facade...presumably unfinished scupltures.
hard-won fruits de mer
The Haenyo divers are a group of women freedivers who collect abalone, seaweed, lobsters, octopus, oysters etc in the very cold waters off the southern coast of Jeju Island in Korea.
sakagura | last night
Thinly sliced duck breast, wrapped around some Julienned scallions, with a drop of (maybe) wasabe/edamame puree. The duck was rare, but the fat had a nice prosciutto-like quality. In the background is some grilled Japanese squid with miso and raw ginger I laid waste to. This non-presupposing restaurant in midtown is like a less rarified Momofuku Ssam. Sakagura, 211 E. 43rd Street,
pot of pickles
This is the excellent pot of pickles I had at Stand on East 12th yesterday. There were some nice new pickles, very sour dills, spicy pickled beans, some small green cherry tomatoes, and few other interesting things with some notes of nutmeg.
Visit the Pickle Wing of the New York Food Museum (Pickle Day on Orchard Street is set for Sept 17th).
Maybe more interesting, the Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul.
Visit the Pickle Wing of the New York Food Museum (Pickle Day on Orchard Street is set for Sept 17th).
Maybe more interesting, the Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul.
kayakers in the east river | June 16 2007
An incidental finding; taken from the Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City.
simple roast chicken
Sometimes considered the measure of a cook's mastery of the basics, a good roast chicken. This is a simple method adapted from Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. He serves it with French green lentils, pearl onions, button mushrooms, bacon lardons, and sauce Chasseur (hunter-style sauce of mushrooms, shallots, and wine) . . . probably none of which are necessary.
1. Start with a chicken that weighs between 2 and 3 pounds. Rinse it really well under cold water, and dry it thoroughly (inside and out) or it'll end up steaming instead of roasting. Salt the inside and outside with a good amount of coarse sea salt and black pepper. 
2. Heat the oven to 450F; meanwhile, truss the bird: 
3. Place the chicken into a shallow roasting pan, then into the oven: 
4. Close the oven door, and don't open it for 50 minutes.
5. 10 minutes before the chicken is done, chop a bunch of fresh thyme:
6. Remove the roasting pan from the oven, tilt it so the juice collects in one corner, and let the thyme wilt in the juice. Spoon it over the bird continuously for about 10 minutes:
7. Let it rest for 15 minutes. Pull it apart with your fingers. Eat the wings first. Look for the two "oysters" on either side of the backbone as you pull the thighs away. Plate it. 
more scanpaths
A classic paper by Yarbus in 1967 tracking saccadic eye movements when subjects looked at Ilya Repin’s The Unexpected Visitor (1884), and asked: 1) free examination of the picture, 2) estimate the material circumstances of the family, 3) give the ages of the people, 4) surmise what the family had been doing before the arrival of the "unexpected visitor," 5) remember the clothes worn by the people, 6) remember the position of the people and objects in the room, and 7) estimate how long the "unexpected visitor" had been away from the family.
strike zone = crotchal region?
An interesting article about using eye tracking to measure how long people are looking where...and using this to design better menus and news articles and web pages. Buried in the piece, however, is the interesting finding that men spend more time than women staring at the crotchal region when watching baseball.
dorothy norman redux
Portrait of Dorothy Norman
STIEGLITZ, ALFRED, b.1864-1946
Alfred Stiegliz: A Personal Vision, 1932
7.5 x 9.1 cm
STIEGLITZ, ALFRED, b.1864-1946
Alfred Stiegliz: A Personal Vision, 1932
7.5 x 9.1 cm
brisket yarmulke
From hats of meat:
"THE COW-BOY HAT - This American classic, made of the best marbleized cuts of beef available, assures that you won’t just herd cattle, you’ll wear them. With this beauty, the cows are alwavs on your mind."
Also see meatpaper, the magazine about meat.
does the super-id exist?
Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means more money in his pocket. He is like God, in a sense — the God of your own creation. Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, implore, cajole, pray or curse — he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you think it pays to fool him then fool him. Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot. He has nothing to lose. But if you realize that he is not a god but a human being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions, frailties, that he is not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom but a wanderer along the path, perhaps you will cease pouring it out like a sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise up on your own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice.
-Henry Miller, Sexus
venus | 2007
My favorite nude, by Modigliani. Visit the face transformer, upload a picture of yourself, and see yourself as a Modigliani.
sous-vide @ home
It's already a bit passe, but sous-vide ("under vacuum") is a method of cooking which involves sealing food in air-tight plastic and cooking it in a tightly temperature-regulated water bath, usually at a low temperature for a long time. The main advantage is that this method is basically the only way to cook something while keeping the integrety of the food completely intact. You essentially (in theory) end up with every molecule you started with in the final result.
Here is an experiment I did with sous-vide duck breast:
1. Start with a nice duck breast, with some garlic, orange peel, thyme, salt and pepper.
2. Seal it all together in an air-tight plastic bag that can withstand near boiling (I used a cheap Seal-a-Meal...but these machines can be ridiculously expensive).
3. Immerse in a water bath that is maintained at around 130F (a laboratory thermoimmersion water bath would be best, but I just balance a thermometer on the edge of the pot and adjust the heat). The larger the volume of water you can use, the more constant the temperature will be. Let this sit in the water for 2 hours..up to 12 hours (at maybe a slightly lower temperature).
4. Remove the breast and open the bag carefully. 
5. Essentially, it's done.
The next steps are optional:
6. Fire it in a pan to crisp up the skin.
7. Remove it to a plate.
8. Deglaze the pan with a little Gran Marnier. Set it afire.
9. Serve it with some watercress. Yumm-o!
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