I'm talking to you, Jabbo.

A Day in the Life

2014-04-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

Crankles
I've been sad since Mom left.

And I'm skeptical about Dad's ability to keep the house in order without her.

Sometimes it's hard getting up in the morning.

But there's work to do.

Like making sure the connections are connected.

And chewing my bone.

And putting up Dad's shoes. He leaves them all over the floor.

Sometimes I let my little sister sit in Dad's lap.

But not for very long. Dad needs me.

I think we'll all pull through this.

Fatty
I don't know what the hell his problem is.

While the dog mopes around, I have my hands full. Rolling the bath towels.

Sorting the dish rags.

Or gathering the hangers.

To hang the shirts.

When I'm not doing housework, I occupy myself with my myriad of hobbies. Like exercising.

Lying in wait to ambush the dog.

Rubbing my face on everything.

Or saving the boys by fighting off invisible enemies.

So, yeah, I mean, everything's going pretty well.

I Did It!

2014-04-06T10:36:00.001-05:00

I finished Book 4 of the Oxford US History Series, McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom.

I know what you're thinking. Another Book Post. Super Duper. I'm including some random dinner pics just because I don't know why.

I've read well over 3 thousand pages covering the first hundred years of our nation's history. Or third hundred years, if you count the nearly two centuries between the Jamestown and Paul Revere's Ride.

The most interesting of the volumes was What God Hath Wrought (number 3) about the antebellum period between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. This was a period of transition between the bizarre, alien world of the Founders, one we wouldn't recognize today, and the America that we know. During the antebellum period, they invented balloon-frame houses, working for hourly pay, travelling in winter, childhood, and democracy.

The most exciting was number 4, the Civil War one. I haven't read extensively on the Civil War since high school when my parents bought me the Time Life series. I read all of those lying on my bedroom floor. I'm not as limber as I used to be. Now I read on furniture. I also noticed my interests have shifted since then.

In high school, I was more interested in the Eastern Theater battles between the Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac. Now, I'm more interested in the effects of battles in the Western Theater, where the war was actually won.

Pickled Asparagus

And I'm more interested in the politics and society than in the battles themselves. Reading about terrified men and boys torn to pieces by low velocity rifle fire and canister shot, by the thousands, isn't quite as thrilling as it used to be. American military deaths in the Civil War add up to 12 Vietnams. In fact, if we lost the same proportion of soldiers to population over time in Vietnam as in the Civil War, the Vietnam War would have cost 4 million American lives. Two months ago the official POW/MIA numbers from Vietnam were updated to 1,643. The Union POWs who died at Andersonville Prison alone numbered ten times that.

And they say, well casualties in the Civil War were so high because you have Americans fighting Americans. Sure. If you allow for that, and account that the total casualties were roughly equal for both sides, the North and South each lost around 6 Vietnams worth of men in 4 years.

The sheer volume of slaughter is mind-blowing. So I prefer to read about Lincoln's political maneuvering to pass the 13th Amendment and the diplomatic loopholes of commissioning a blockade runner in a neutral, foreign country.

OK, on to less morbid subjects.

What's Next
These books:

Reconstruction
One does not slog through that much US History just to drop the subject and walk away. No. But here's the rub. There's a two volume sixty year gap between Battle Cry of Freedom and Freedom from Fear, the installment covering the Wall Street Crash of 1929 through the end of World War II. True story: almost half of that thirty years was the FDR administration.

Oxford University Press has tentatively promised that the volume covering the Progressive Era or Gilded Age, basically everything from the end of Reconstruction through the Wall Street Crash, is coming out this year. (Note: Gilded Age was the name that rich white men came up with because it sort of sucked for everyone else.) That still leaves me with a thirty year gap.

Pumpkin Pancakes

So I will fill that gap, in part, with Eric Foner's Reconstruction. Not an Oxford History book. But it's supposed to be the definitive work on the Reconstruction era.

Before I begin my next 800 page history book, I need to partake of a little literary junk food. A little light reading. Most days, I eat healthy, homemade from scratch, mostly vegan dinners. But once a week I need something gross and dirty like a bacon cheeseburger (actually, yesterday I made beef tacos). The same goes with books. I read literary masterpieces and masterworks of academic historians. But I need to get in some greasy pulp fiction from time to time.

The Dresden Files
Storm Front, book one of the Dresden Files series, comes highly recommended by a hermit I know in Central Texas.

Lucy, let me 'splain.

There are a myriad of subgenres within Fantasy. You're probably most familiar with High Fantasy, which encompasses Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson, George R. R. Martin (actually, Martin is Medievalist, but who am I to split hairs), and many more. It's epic, it has magic and swords and battles and all of that. Woot.

But it's only one of many. There's Steampunk and and Low Fantasy and Dark Fantasy and Historic Fantasy a bunch of others I would get too bored to list because they're basically all Fantasy with a different adjective.

One I find wildly compelling is Contemporary Fantasy (which overlaps heavily with Urban Fantasy). Contemporary Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in our world and our time. The most notable examples are pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman or the TV shows Supernatural, Buffy, Once Upon a Time, etc.

Only, when you get to Contemporary Fantasy novels, most of them are either Young Adult or Paranormal Romance or both. Harry Potter is a good example. Twilight is a bad one.

Black Bean Sweet Potato Tacos

Then you have the Dresden Files. Which is one of the few (if only) adult Contemporary Fantasy series that doesn't deal extensivly with moping teenage girls dating vampires. In many ways it's like Supernatural. It combines the noir private detective genre with monsters and zombies.

The Problem of Fantasy
I could go on at length about my issues with High Fantasy. Don't get me wrong. I started there. I cut my teeth on Tolkien. We all did. But grave sins are committed in the name of Fantasy, and it's time to give the genre an overhaul.

OK, the quickest of explanations.

Fantasy traces its roots to the old myths and legends, Beowulf, The Odyssey, Le Morte D'Arthur, etc. Those stories, however, weren't set in ancient times or made up lands. They unfolded in settings contemporary to their original listeners/readers. Beowulf has characters that wield swords and hang out in mead halls because at the time it was composed, people wielded swords and hung out in mead halls.

Carrot Soup with Lemon Tahini Dollop and Roasted Chickpeas

The other issue is society. Tolkien and CS Lewis wrote for an audience that took nobility and royalty and privileged birth for granted. We had those once in America, but then we fought two wars to make them go away.

Today, the Fantasy Industrial Complex still churns out fiction set in ancient times with an aristocratic society. Because that's how Fantasy started. Sort of like how the Catholic Clergy still wear clothing (and those hats!) contemporary to the Byzantine Empire because that's when they got started.

Beef Picadillo Tacos with Homemade Salsa

Everyone is still playing in Tolkien's sandbox. But it's time for a Contemporary American Fantasy. That's my soapbox. And it's just my opinion. There are obviously plenty of people out there still buying books about swords and high kings and prophecies and elves and orcs.

And true, there's been this new wave of dystopian fiction. Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. But they're still, really, playing in Orwell's sandbox. 1984 was a Cold War novel and last time I checked, the Cold War was over. The danger to freedom no longer comes in the form of a despotic government regime.

In this respect, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is probably the best vision of the dystopian future now available to us.

Star Wars EU
So, after Return of the Jedi, people started writing a corpus of Star Wars books. The Extended Universe novels are all officially sanctioned and licensed by the chinless George Lucas himself.

You may say, that's not very nice. Well, I hold Lucas solely responsbile for the fourth Indiana Jones. And that movie is unforgivable. Also Jar Jar Binks.

Says Lucas: "But let me say here once and for all: He was the best damn character in any of the six movies. He was by far my favorite."

Thanks, Chinstrap. Now, please stop making movies.

Back to the EU. The most revered trilogy, by serious Star Wars fans, and by serious Star Wars fans, I mean the people who dress up like Boba Fett and go to conventions, is Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. It takes place five years after the Battle for Endor. This Trilogy is very nearly canon. The people who have Rebellion bumper stickers and X-Wing tattoos and the original 1977 C-3PO action figure still in the package consider Thrawn as important to the mythos as the movies.

Since there's a new movie coming out in the wake of the Chinless Master selling the franchise to Disney and since there's considerable controversy in the fanbase because the movie is projected to diverge from the Zahn narrative, I thought I'd give it a look see.

The Fault in Our Stars
I don't have to tell you the title is a reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We all know that. Yawn.

I've been a super fan of John Green and his brother Hank Green for quite some time. John does the Crash Course series for history and literature and Mental Floss on Youtube. Hank does Crash Course for science and he does Sci Show. Together they do Vlog Brothers. Both very smart, very entertaining, very funny guys. I could go on but it would get weird.

Unless it already did.

I found out recently that John Green wrote a handful of books, one of which, The Fault in Our Stars, is soon to be a Major Motion Picture at a theater near you. One of my favorite things to do is read the book before the movie comes out and then forget to watch the movie. I plan to do that with this one.

Parting Shot
You weren't going to eat... all of that beef... were you?

What should we blog about next?

Spring Happened

2014-03-08T14:47:00.000-06:00

After one last burp from the Polar Vortex, it's once again T-shirt weather in Illinois. That is, it's in the low 40s. You can hear birds for the first time in months. You can see the grass. I can walk the dog in my slippers without having to lace up winter boots. It's not that I hate winter boots in specific, I just hate laces in general. I find them churlish and offensive.

Pickle Fails
So, the most recent pickles didn't work out quite like I hoped. One, I executed flawlessly. The other I screwed up horribly.

The Full Sours came out as advertised. Fully Sour. Too sour to enjoy and I didn't like the flavor of the mixed pickling spices. I did everything correctly, I just didn't like the final pickle. Neither did Aine. Neither did anyone at Poker Night. Except for Kwstas. He's Greek. I sent the jar home with him.

So, the habañeros that almost killed me. I had them fermenting in the pantry, which turned the pantry into a box full of pepper spray. Aine refused to go in there. The animals would run and hide when I opened the door. I went in to check them the other day and apparently I didn't chop them fine enough. The pepper pieces separated from the water.

I would have liked to have saved the jar, but I didn't have the Hazmat suit necessary to wash them out. So I tossed them. I'll try again with a less aggressive pepper.

Popcorn Again
We're trying to wean ourselves from the microwave as much as possible. So we've started doing popcorn old school. On the stove top.

Popcorn and Illinois have a special relationship. It's the state snackfood and one of the state's major crops.

It's also one of the oldest staple crops in the Americas. Archaeologists have found popcorn dating back to 3600 BCE in a domestic caves in South America. That means they're almost twice as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us. When the pyramids were being built, these kernels were already a thousand years old. The archaeologists were able to pop and eat them.

Popcorn may have been the main food source for the Aztecs before flour corn was domesticated. They even had a word, totopoca, which means the sound of many kernels popping. You know the popcorn garlands we make at Christmas? The Aztecs invented that. They made popcorn garlands to adorn statues of the rain god Tlaloc. You can see a statue of Tlaloc just over the Texas border in Ciudad Acuña. Be sure to take some popcorn with you if you go.

The first popcorn machine was invented in Chicago in the 1880s. In the 1890s in Chicago, the Rueckheim Brothers developed a process for coating popcorn in caramel, then applying oil to keep the kernels separated. They started selling them in waxy boxes and named them Cracker Jacks. Almost a decade later, Vaudeville songwriter Jack Norworth wrote "Take Me out to the Ball Game" after reading an advertisement on the subway. He wrote the popular snack into chorus, giving them free advertising until the end of time.

Cheaper than dirt, popcorn was a common meal during the Great Depression and a popular snack during the sugar rationing days of World War II. Today, in the US, one billion pounds of unpopped kernels are sold every year. 70% of these are consumed at home.

Here in Jabboland, we're happy to carry on the tradition.

On the Stove Top
When a kernel reaches an internal temperature of 356 degrees, the starch and water turn into a foam that expands outward with a pressure of 135 PSI. The liquid foam congeals into a solid within milliseconds, producing what popcorn afficionados call the flake. The flake can develop into one of two configurations: the obvious Butterfly or the rounded Mushroom.

Here's how it's done:

Put a little bit of oil in a pan and add a single kernel. Turn on the stove.

For a single serving you only need about two tablespoons.

Add a pinch of salt.

Wait for the first kernel to pop.

Once it does, add the rest and let science take its course. You'll want to shake the pan a little, to make the flakes move up and the unpopped kernels move down.

Voila! A healthy, delicious, filling snack. With no additives or chemicals or mad scientist creations that taste like butter but aren't.

The image is misleading. That's a deep bowl. Two tablespoons equal half a bag of popped microwave popcorn. A quarter cup equals one bag popped. Another difference is, when you pop it on the stove, you have one or two leftover kernels. Total. Instead of several dozen. I've popped the leftover kernels from a microwave bag on the stove and gotten almost as much popcorn as I got out of the microwave. So when you pop it in the microwave, you're eating half of what you pay for and throwing the rest away.

Parting Shot
It's dangerous to go alone.

Take this.

Well, excuse me, Princess.

"That's Marvelous."

2014-02-27T14:06:00.004-06:00

Cuban Sizzle Crisis

2014-02-22T16:24:00.001-06:00

Salt Pickles
Last week, I started a batch of Full Sour Pickles. I didn't even slice these. I just shoved them in the jar whole and, hopefully, I'll end up with some proper movie theater style pickles.

In addition to dill and garlic, I added mixed pickling spice. I got it at a local hippie store. I don't know what all it has in it, but it's given the cukes an amazing aroma.

One week in, here's how they look:

The dill looks a little bleached out and the brine is cloudy, but these smell great and they still have a week to go.

In addition to the pickle experiments, I've started doing a weekly batch of quick pickles. Just to have some on hand. I added some pickling spice to this week's batch, just to see what it does.

Hot Sauce
Following the traditions of the McIlhenny family and some lady named Cholula, I started my own batch of fermented hot sauce. The McIlhennies use only Tabasco peppers. Cholula and Tapatío use Arboles and Piquins. And for you buffalo wing fanatics, Frank's uses Cayennes. For my masterpiece, I used Aji Dulces and Habañeros.

I stemmed, seeded, and half the peppers.

Then mixed them with salt and pureed them.

Now, they need to ferment for a month. In the dark. Apparently, they'll lose all their color if they ferment in the light.

Habañero
Means "from Havana" in Spanish. These peppers came to the US from the Caribbean, but come from South America originally. They've found habañeros in domestic cave sites dating back to 6500 BCE. Which means people were eating these peppers before the cow was domesticated.

Habañeros are hot. Really hot. They average over 200 thousand units on Wilbur Scoville's famous scale. This makes them over three times as hot as piquins, twice as hot as tabascos, ten times as hot as a cayenne, and thirty times as hot as a jalapeño.

In 2000, Guinness Book rated the habañero as the hottest pepper in the world. It's since been displaced by a series of contenders. The current hottest pepper is the Carolina Reaper. It can reach peaks of over 2 million Scoville units. Basically the low end of the legal range for pepper spray in the US.

Try one!

Parting Shot
The temps have shot up to the 40s, which, in Illinois, is flip flop and tank top weather. My neighbors have spent the weekend lounging by the pool, working on their tans.

Some habits are hard to break, though. Baloo and Bagheera still huddle next to the heater. Even when it isn't plugged in.

Also, on the subject of Tapatío:

Icicle of Doom Update

2014-02-18T11:04:00.001-06:00

After a full day of freezing rain and snow, the giant icicle next door grew. Both in length and girth. It's now a full story high.

What follows is uncensored photographic evidence of this grisly occurrence.

The images are graphic, so if you have a weak constitution, close your browser window now.

That's How It Tarragoes

2014-02-15T15:31:00.000-06:00

Pickle Update
On Poker Night last week, I rolled out the Indian Spiced Carrots and the Korean Style Turnips. Both were met with approbation. The turnips didn't have much flavor by themselves, but they soaked up the onions, garlic, and pepper. They were savory with a bite. The carrots had sweet curry flavor and a lot of crunch.

The Real Deal Half Sours did not make a public appearance. My grandfather liked to tell a story about meeting a friend at a butcher shop. His friend ordered a number of steaks cut thick and a number cut very thin. When asked why, he explained the thick steaks were for him, the thin for when he had company. The Real Deal Half Sours were my thick steaks. Best pickles ever.

Sochi 2014
The Olympics this year are held in Stalin's favorite vacation locale, Sochi, apparently chosen because it stays warm year round. In honor of the Russian games, I made the traditional Russian delicacy, brined apples.

The brine contained honey and salt and I packed the apples with tarragon.

In the bottom of the jar, you can see a grape leaf. Grape leaves are rich in tannin, a chemical found naturally in plants. Tannins make coffee, tea, beer, and red wine bitter. They also help intensify your hangover. They give kidney beans their red color and add to the flavor of chocolate. Tannins in grape leaves keep pickles crispy without affecting the flavor.

Long story short: gross pickles. Aine said they tasted like cough syrup.

I also made some quick pickles last weekend, but the grocery store didn't have any dill. I just used leftover tarragon from the apples. Tarragon has a flavor similar to anise or fennel. They all taste sort of like licorice. Not a flavor you want on your cukes.

So, bunk pickles this week.

I'm sure the fault was mine, not the Russians'. For more information about what they like to eat, read this article.

Next up on the pickle schedule: Full Sour Kosher Dills.

Winter Wonderland
It's still cold. There's still half a foot of snow on everything.

This conversation happened the other day...
James: I can't wait until it's finally up in the 30s again.
Aine: I'll consider it warm when I can go out and the boogers don't freeze in my nose.

I know what you're thinking. That's a lot of talk for a married couple. We only do it to keep warm.

I bundle up Crankles before we go out.

But he seems to enjoy himself.

Look at this.

I don't know if you can tell from the picture, it's a free-hanging icicle, six or seven feet long.

Playing Catch
Fatty's favorite toy is the plastic ring from the top of a milk jug. She wants to play catch all day long every day without ceasing.

She doesn't seem to understand that humans need sleep, though. I often wake up in the morning with it lying next to my face.

Some days, she crawls under the desk, sits on her haunches, and tugs on cords like marionette strings until the router and speakers are sucked over the back of the desk. When I've had enough, I kick her out and close the door. But she still doesn't take no for an answer.

Curried Millet Cakes
In red pepper sauce and topped with coriander chutney. Another new dish we tried out. I took a picture because it looked super fancy.

Parting Shot
When I first saw this truck, I got excited because I thought Radon was a type of dinosaur. Apparently, it's some sort of gas. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about, though.

Keep Picklin' On

2014-02-02T13:36:00.003-06:00

Garlic Check
After about 4 days, the fermenting in the garlic jars tapered off. So I drained the brine, added soy sauce, rice vinegar, water, and lots of brown sugar.

Now, the 6 month wait begins.

The carrots are also coming along nicely. They taste tart and crunchy. Yes, carrots are supposed to be crunchy, but now they have that pickled crunch instead of the raw crunch. It's a whole different kind of crunch. Along with fennel seeds, garlic, and bay leaves, the recipe called for pickling spices. Which I didn't have. And couldn't find at the grocery store. So I just used garam masala. The flavor so far is unusual, but very good. I've moved them to the fridge, but I'm going to give them another week before I unveil them at Poker Night.

One Good Turnip Deserves Another
Next on the fermenting agenda: Real Deal Half Sours and Korean Style Pickled Turnips.

I peeled and sliced the turnips and tossed them in sea salt to draw out the water. Here they are after only 30 minutes. Sweaty.

The salt pulled almost a cup of water in that amount of time.

This is basic osmosis. Osmosis is the movement of water and water always follows salt. So if you have cells or tissues and the salt concentration is greater on the outside, the water will move out. If the salt concentration is greater on the inside, the water will move in. Which is why you decrease your salt intake if you're retaining water or have high blood pressure. Water follows salt.

After three hours, I rinsed them and added green onions, garlic, and pepper flakes. These should be ready in about a week.

I also started a batch of Real Deal Half Sours, named thus, mostly because they're the real deal, but also because they are half sours. No vinegar here. Brine, dill, and garlic only. These will be 100% fermented and should be ready in a few days.

What's the Dill?
Why, you ask, do pickles get dill and garlic? Why not cilantro and shallots? What's the deal with dill?

Well, dill and garlic are tasty. The flavors combine well with the cucumbers. But most importantly, both dill and garlic are anti-microbial. Since fermenting is controlled decomposition, you are establishing the environment for a specific type of bacteria. You want to kill off all other bacteria and fungi. Along with the salt concentration, garlic and dill regulate how much bacteria and what kind will grow in the jar.

Garlic and dill have been used medicinally as far back as Ancient Egypt. There's evidence that garlic was cultivated during the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. By the way, while the Great Pyramid was under construction, woolly mammoths were still alive. So that was a long time ago.

Garlic and dill were probably added to pickles to preserve them, the flavor being a fortunate side effect. Now we fresh pack them in vinegar and can them, retaining the garlic and dill out of tradition. Also because they're tasty.

Parting Shot
It's not enough that she steals toys from the dog and then taunts him.

Fatty has also claimed all of my shirts.

Snowy Time Mystery: extra credit on the final exam for anyone who guesses the reason this line of snow remained after a rain.

I've Got Chills

2014-01-25T15:59:00.000-06:00

They're Multiplying
We had another snow last night and this morning the temperature jumped up to the 30s. This created a thick layer of snow fog, about six inches deep, that creeps along the ground, pours over curbs like liquid, and dances in the street like flame.

This is what the grocery store parking lot looks like:

Last week we moved our pickling operations in the direction of a different fruit. Green Beans.

I packed them in with a lot of garlic and dill. More than I used for the cukes. These were also quick pickles. By Friday, they were ready.

If you're used to fresh pack vinegar pickles, the cloudy brine might look a little alarming. It's cloudier than your store bought pickles for two reasons.

One, fresh pack pickles go through the canning process to kill all microbes. I'm creating petri dishes to culture as many lactobacilli as possible. Much of the cloudiness comes from masses of bacteria. Yum.

See the scale in the picture? That's right. 1 micron. Picture an inch. There's 25 thousand microns in an inch. If the lactobacilli were the size of fish oil pills, the green beans would be a two and a half miles long.

Two, I'm using table-grade sea salt for my brines. It has added magnesium chloride. You've seen athletes chalk their hands in magnesium chloride for a better grip in rock climbing, weight lifting, and gymnastics. But not for pool cues. That's silicon and aluminum. Morton started adding it to salt as an anti-caking agent and their famous slogan was born.

In addition to giving little girls something to pour all over the sidewalk, magnesium chloride clouds brine. So there.

The so-called Dilly Beans were super duper. Very garlicky and pickly. I took a jar to poker night where they must have been a hit. I came home with an empty jar.

I also started a second sauerkraut batch. You can see the color change of the first batch at one week in comparison to the new batch.

Also, look at the bubbles. That's the exciting thing about fermenting. It's not so much a jar of vegetables as it is a little wilderness, churning and frothing with living things fighting for survival. At night, when it's quiet, you can lean down, and listen to the gas escaping from the lid. It's like listening to it breathe.

By the second week, the fermenting had stopped in the first batch, so I've moved it to fridge. It came out sour and very, very crunchy. I haven't decided how to eat it yet, but I have it on good authority that sauerkraut soup is pretty much the bees knees.

This weekend, we moved from leaves and fruits to roots.

I'm doing spiced carrots and Korean-style pickled garlic. If you've ever peeled six bunches of garlic by hand, then you know how much fun this was. The carrots will be done in about two weeks. The garlic, however, will take at least six months. So we'll know how those did at the first of August.

Today, the whole house smells like garlic and vinegar.

Also, I've learned that people into fermenting are called fermentos. So, I guess I'm a fermento now. For some reason it sounds slightly less pretentious than birder.

Parting Shot
This weekend's forecast: snowy with a chance of squirrels.

We're in a Pickle

2014-01-18T13:57:00.001-06:00

The New Year has arrived and so has snow.

A lot of snow. When I lived in Texas, snow was this rare wondrous sort of thing. Here, it's pretty common, but being so, you develop a more intimate relationship with it. It can come down in small, hard pellets that squeaks when you step into it. It can come down in these massive tufts that looks like someone dumped a load of down pillows into a wood chipper. It can come down in this fine sort of dust that swirls and eddies, forming white dirt devils and leaving the parking lot covered in miniature wind swept dunes.

The Inuit are purported to have a hundred words for snow. This isn't entirely true. In Inuit, you tack nouns and adjectives together to make new, longer words. Like German. So, rather than having a hundred distinct words for frozen precipitation, like sleet, hail, snow in English, they have cobbled-together descriptive words. Like whitesnow, fluffysnow, snowontheground, snowthatfliesupyournostrilsandmakesyournosebleed.

Even living as far south as Illinois, you think about snow differently. You look out the window in the morning, not to see whether it's snowing, but to see what kind of snow it is.

Since we can't get out and run or take pictures of Lincoln statues, we've started doing inside activities. And this year, 2014, this will be the year of the pickles.

All Puckered Out
Pickling is what happens when acid goes to work on vegetables. It changes the molecular structure of the cell walls, making the vegetable crispy, preserving them.

When people who pickle say pickle, they mean any pickled vegetable. We associate pickle with pickled cucumber thanks to Jewish immigrants in New York. They opened up delicatessans and served a pickled cucumber spear with every sandwich and a great American passion was born. In the UK, pickled cukes are called gherkins and the word pickle refers to pickled onions served in pubs.

There are two types of pickles. Fermented and Fresh Pack.

Fresh Pack pickles are what you see lining the grocery store shelves. Look next time you go. Most of the jars will say Fresh Pack on the label. You dunk a cucumber in vinegar (acetic acid) and then send it through the canning process. It can then last for months if not years at room temperature.

When you ferment pickles, you let our old friend from the cheese-making days do the work. Lactobacillus. You pack the cukes in a salt water brine to kill the bad bacteria and let the good bacteria eat the cucumber sugars and poop out lactic acid. The lactic acid pickles the cukes. Since fermented pickles have live cultures, you have to store them in the fridge when they're ready, to slow down the ferment.

On the other hand, fermented pickles can be canned like fresh pack pickles once they've reached the level of fermentation you prefer.

Controlled Rot
That's what fermenting aficionados call it. Everything is covered in bacteria that are waiting for an opportunity to start munching. The benefit of fermenting vegetables (over fresh packing them) is that the bacteria preserve many of the vitamins and nutrients that the vinegar destroys.

We ferment meat and milk to get corned beef and cheese. We ferment grains to get beer. And we ferment vegetables to get pickles. Most cultures have their own pickled dish. Notably the Germans with their sauerkraut, the Koreans with kimchi, and the Japanese with miso.

I thought at first that the US was unique in the fact that we didn't eat many fermented things. Then I looked into to it. Coffee and cacao (chocolate) beans are fermented after picking and before processing. Soy sauce is fermented. Our favorite hot sauces, Louisiana, Tabasco, Cholula, Tapatio, are all made from fermented peppers.

From China, we get our most notably American ferment. Ketchup. The original Chinese sauce was made with mushrooms. Making ketchup with tomatoes became popular in America because we didn't know what else to do with tomatoes. Most people accepted the fact that unfermented tomatoes were poisonous. Scientific consensus didn't shake the paranoid myth until the mid-1800s and tomatoes didn't become a household staple until Campbell starting canning them in the 1890s.

The Smell Jar
Our pickling odyssey begins with cucumbers and cabbage.

My first cucumber pickles are quick pickles, or half sours. I added a little bit of vinegar to kick start the pickling, then let lactobacillus do the rest.

They were ready after three days, but needed a full week for the flavor to develop. These tasted better and had a better crunch than any store bought pickle I've had. Ever. Maybe with the one exception of those giant barrel pickles I used to get at movie theaters.

To make sauerkraut, I started with fresh cabbage. I basically chopped and bruised the cabbage and added salt. The salt pulled out the liquid and the cabbage formed its own brine.

I taste this every few days to monitor the flavor development. The flavor has slowly progressed from salty to pickled. It will take 4-6 weeks before it's ready, but after one week, you can already see the change in color. The little bubbles are bacteria poop.

Now, the whole house smells like rotting cabbage. Aine's not entirely thrilled. But Pig's curious.

Battling Entropy
Aine's accustomed to working 16 hours a day without downtime. Such is Grad Life. She can't handle all this free time. Have you seen the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen goes stir crazy and karate chops his hotel mirror? That's Aine.

So over the break, she set about organizing our lives. The clutter and slovenliness started to wear on her. Here's one example. The linen closet.

Before:

Obviously After:

Parting Shot
Not for the faint of heart. The grisly scene of the New Year's Day Snowman Massacre. May their souls find peace.

Autumn in Review

2013-11-16T16:55:00.000-06:00

It's cold and dreary outside. I've got the Michael Buble Christmas album playing. Jarling's put out their closing sign. Ohio State just trounced Illinois on their own turf, Memorial Stadium, less than a mile from here. The wind's out of east this afternoon. If you walk out into the parking lot, you can smell the humiliation.

The winner of this rivalry, dating back to 1902 (year of the first Rose Bowl, year Texaco was founded, year Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in a car), gets the Illibuck. Which is basically a wooden turtle. Go figure.

What can it mean, you ask? The seasonal shut down of Champaign's favorite frozen custard spot. The yearly defeat by the Buckeyes. The... did he say Michael Buble?

That's right. Autumn is coming to an end. Since we're slipping into the holiday season, let's take a look back at the 2013 Fall Season.

Corn Maze
We returned to the Hardy Reindeer Ranch to navigate the corn maze. That night was dark and freezing. I did my time in Scouting circles as a youngster and learned this very important maxim: Always Be Prepared. Pursuant to that notion, I brought flashlights, gloves, hat, scarf, and a small bottle of Canadian Whiskey.

The maze layout this year looked like one of the guys from Easy Rider. At least before driving through Mississippi. They had six stations spread through the maze with hole punches. You wandered around with a punch card and looked for every station. We got them all. After two hours.

Here's what it looked like:

We Had the Runs
We did the Rattlesnake Master 5k/10k. This was my 7th and final race of the year. I did one adventure run, two 10k runs, and four 5k runs. It's only the last run of the year because I can't find a December race. Next year, I'll try to find something more productive to do with my time. The run was gorgeous, open prairie-land bordered by trees turned orange, yellow, and red.

Sebastian, who ran the 4th of July Freedom run with us, signed up for this one as well. Then we all went for a post run breakfast at Le Peep, the local Champaign version of IHOP. I got a bacon and potato skillet topped with cheese and basted eggs. So disgustingly unhealthy. So delicious. Also, I doused it with Cholula. Because Cholula. I rest my case.

Aine had pancakes. Of course.

The results:
James 10k - 54:37, 37 out of 83 (pretty much dead center of the pack, where I always find myself)
Aine 5k - 30:38, 69 out of 170
Sebastian 10k - 42:26, 7th out of 83 (he's sort of fast)

This is how we looked:

Bayern Stube
Means "living room" in German. A kitschy little German food restaurant north of here in Gibson City. We make a yearly pilgrimage to gorge on pork and potatoes.

They sell their beers by the liters. I kid you not. There are few things as terrifying as a liter mug of beer. I'll be honest, I wasn't man enough to order a liter of beer. I had two half liters.

Seriously. I don't have the upper body strength to lift it since we stopped doing P90X and they refuse to bring you a straw.

As you can see from the pictures, the walls are covered in animal heads, shelves full of steins, German musical instruments, and bizarre weapons. Like a flint lock pistol that's also a hatchet. Try tucking that one into your waistband.

While you wait for your meal and sip your half liter of beer, they bring soda bread and "sausage butter" to munch on. It looks like butter, spreads like butter, but smells and tastes like summer sausage. Which is sort of how I imagine heaven.

For dinner, I had the Bismark Schnitzel, named after the Chancellor because this is how he preferred it. Pork Schnitzel topped with baked apples and Gruyere. I ordered potato pancakes and saurkraut.

Ainers got pork cutlets covered with brown gravy and potato pancakes and vegetables on the side.

I didn't get a picture of her plate. This is her trying to get a picture of the tapestry behind Jessie. The artist took the time to weave an ornate hunting scene. Including one of the hunting dogs taking a steaming crap in the cold Bavarian woods.

Germans.

Say Cheese
We cut into the second pound of cheese. The one we let age three months. Let me tell you. All the difference. It tasted sharper and had a drier, crumblier texture.

This was the most successful cheese of the year.

Parting Shot
We had our first snow of the year. Baron von Flopsburg found it delightful.

Fraulein Fattywurst prefers to stay in where it's warm.

For lack of anything better to do, I decided to make flash cards of all the flags and capitals of all the countries in the world. And then learn them. I'm at 75% on the capitals and 90% on the flags. When I get these down I'm going to add the US States and Territories and probably all the disputed territories. Like Transnistria and South Ossetia. Look 'em up. They're real places. At least, they're trying to be. But probably not Cascadia, because yawn.

Maples Turn First

2013-11-02T13:35:00.000-05:00

Autumn in Champaign
So, we took a couple side trips this weekend to view the foliage. So far, only the maples, horsechestnuts, and honey locusts have started to turn. The oaks, elms and sycamores still look green. So, here you go. The ridiculousness.

Arboretum

Japan House

Allerton

Parting Shot
At Allerton, we found a small leaf cupped like a boat, filled with water. It was kooky.

And these crazy looking roots.

And just in case you forgot how terrifyingly gigantic the trees are in Illinois, here's a picture for comparison.

Pizza and Prose

2013-10-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

So, we've done quite a few pizzas in the month or so since the last post about pizza. I intended to save the pictures and write a blog post devoted entirely to pizza. We loved all of them though. So no suspense. I realized that a blog post about pizza would be boring to read. I realized the thought of writing it bored me. So we're going to switch things up. I'm going to show you all the pizza pictures, but I'm going to talk about books.

I know. You're excited. Here we go.

Mango Black Bean Pizza

As you know, I've started to work my way through the Oxford US History Series. The idea for this series was born in the 1950s. A couple prominent historians wanted to produce a multi-volume history of the US explaining the development and change of politics, culture, and social movements. They wanted a series that appealed to the general reader and that had lasting value. A definitive work of US history that generations to come could read beside a fire on a cold winter night.

They got to work with the writing of the thing, but by the 60s they way we study history changed. It became more scientific, relied as much on chemistry and technology as on written texts, and as a result, what we know about history changed. By the 70s, the books written for the series were already out of date, so they went back to the drawing board. The first published book of the series (3rd chronologically) came out in 1982. The next one (number 6 in the series) came out in 1988.

So far, 8 of the 12 books have been published, with one (book 8) on the way next year and three more in planning. I started with book 3, The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff, about the American Revolution. The first book, about America before the Europeans, and the second, about Colonial America, are yet to be published. I plan to read at least through book 6 (Civil War). Book 7 about Reconstruction isn't finished.

Each book covers a roughly 30 year span. Three of the books won Pulitzers, two more were finalists, one won the Bancroft Prize, and one the National Book Critics Circle Award. Each weighs in at around 800 pages long. Large pages. With very small writing.

Indian Spice Pizza

Remember how your high school history book made you feel. Dry writing with lists of names and dates. Reading it made you want to gouge your eyes out with a freshly sharpened number 2 pencil. That's how Middlekauff made me feel. I've read a fair amount of very engaging historical writers: Tom Holland, Joseph Ellis, Alan Taylor, David McCullough. Middlekauff was not one of them.

I'm not saying it wasn't thorough, well-researched, and historically accurate. I'm saying I didn't care. I almost didn't make it through. I kept my eye on the prize, though. Eventually, I'll make it to the McPherson Civil War installment, Battle Cry of Freedom. It's supposed to be the best single volume history of the civil war and the best of this series.

Middlekauff wrapped things up after the Constitutional Convention and I needed a little break from history. I needed something completely different. I needed a slice of chocolate cake after finishing all my steamed Brussels Sprouts. You know what I'm talking about. Few things in the literary world are as chocolate cake as Fantasy. Last year, I read the first three Song of Ice and Fire books and loved them.

Side note: Everyone needs to read Game of Thrones (the first book of Song of Ice and Fire), at least. Forget that it's an HBO miniseries. Forget that it's technically fantasy. Think of it more as a Medieval Political Thriller. If you like interesting characters, decent dialogue, and a good story, then you'll like this book.

Those in the know say, if you liked Game of Thrones and want to take the next step, read the Malazan books. So I did. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. It committed all the sins of fantasy. Also, on top of flat characters and cartoon dialogue, the plot was ridiculous.

Spinach Feta Calzone

So, you have the Malazan Empire on the march to conquer the known world. The last free city resisting annexation is Darujhistan. The book starts well enough. You don't have to slog through backstory getting to know the characters or the political situation. Erikson drops you in the middle of the action. It's more than a simple story of an Empire trying to conquer a city. There are rival factions within the Imperial ruling class, within the Imperial Army, within the city under seige. There are neighboring peoples and gods and demons and religious crusaders. Everyone has a different agenda and it all comes to a head in this single city. Sounds good, right? Well, it doesn't so much come to a head as it comes to a weak plot resolution.

You see, Adjunct Lorn, on behalf of Empress Lazeen, travels to the hills outside Darujhistan to awaken the Jaghut Tyrant, and ancient monster, who will destroy the city. You're waiting for it the entire novel. She finally makes it there, awakens the monster, who starts rampaging across the plain toward the city. This seven foot immortal guy named Anomander Rake, of the Tiste Andii, unleashes his three pet dragons to battle the Jaghut Tyrant. Meanwhile in the city, as espionage/assassin subplots are unfolding at this huge yearly festival, they can hear the monster battles on the plain. The Jaghut is putting a serious smack down on the dragons and draws ever nearer to the city gates. This is it, you think. Some epic-ness is about to happen in a serious way.

Nope.

Another character, who was secretly the most powerful wizard of all time, appears on the plain. Poof. He kills the Jaghut. Zap. So much for that. Well, Adjunct Lorn apparently has a powerful demon in a bottle or something that also has the power to destroy the city and she unleashes it. Then there's a massive wizard battle and the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Boo.

Spinach Artichoke Pizza

Some of you may have already read my thoughts on the state of American Fantasy writing. Here it is in a nutshell. Most Fantasy is aristocratic literature. It reflects a British history, worldview, and culture. American Fantasy needs to be more democratic. It needs to be about rugged individualism. It needs to be more man versus nature. Basically, American Fantasy needs to be more like the Western.

Also, big pet peeve. Enough with the stupid names. Stop. Anomander Rake? T'lan Imass? Yes, Tolkien made up his own names. Tolkien was a linguist. He also made up several complete languages for his books. All the languages and place names and people names followed strict grammatical and phonemic rules. He didn't just throw together some letters because they sounded good. Oh, it's a good guy? More N's, M's and D's. Oh, it's a bad guy? More T's, K's, and S's. It should sound exotic? Put an apostrophe somewhere in it.

Stop. (Look at Game of Thrones: Ned Stark, Jaime Lannister, etc. They sound like real names. They don't sound like something from D&D.)

Sweet Potato Kale Pizza

After sidearming Gardens of the Moon across the room, I started my 2nd (their 4th) Oxford book. Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood (of Good Will Hunting fame). I like two things about Gordon Wood: he's a good writer and he looks like Carl from the movie Up. This book covered the Jeffersonian Republican Era. It starts during the first Washington administration and goes through the end of the War of 1812. Wood uses a lot of quotes from letters and articles and such from people during the period. It gives the book this documentary feel, where the interviewees are describing the events in their own words. With this book, you don't feel you're reading history so much as you're hearing it.

When you think of American exceptionalism (not always a bad word), egalitarianism, democracy (not always a good word), rugged individualism, these ideas about ourselves came from this period. Also started during this period: gouging out eyeballs during fistfights, county fairs, and wearing pants.

One annoying thing Wood does, though, and he does it often: writing long lists in the middle of paragraphs. He does this sometimes twice in the same page. Wood loves lists. Here's an example about the beginning of clubs and "voluntary associations":

There were mechanic societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphan asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance societies, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies, societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry, indeed, societies for just about anything and everything that was good and humanitarian.

Potato Leek Rosemary Pizza

Yeah. If it rhymed, it would have sounded like Dr. Seuss: They had societies for the poor, for the drunks and for some whores, they made societies and made some more, they loved societies down to their cores. As annoying as it sounds, in the very next paragraph, he talks about being buried alive. So Wood keeps you on the edge of your seat. Definitely a refreshing installment after Middlekauff. Sitting on my bedside table is the next in the series, What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe about the Jacksonian Period, which takes us from the War of 1812 through the Mexican War of the 1840s.

I needed a little break from history though, another slice of chocolate cake. I decided never to read anything else written by Erikson. Also, he's Canadian. So I turned to the epic fantasy series by one of the most prolific writers of all time, America's Horror Laureate, Stephen King. A few popular writers have written more titles than Stephen King, like Agatha Christie, Isaac Asimov, R.L. Stine. (Apparently, listing is infectious.) But I don't think any of them can match him in word count. So, you can love King or hate him (I do both), but you can't ignore him. A thousand years from now when some alien race is studying Ancient American Culture, they'll be reading Stephen King as much as Hemingway. Probably more.

Kale Mushroom Red Onion Pizza

When King started out to write the Dark Tower series, he wanted to do something as big and epic as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but with the look and feel of a Spaghetti Western. He cites the opening scene of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as his inspiration.

The first book, The Gunslinger, pulls it off. Here's the first line:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

He plops you into the action and you don't put the book down until it's finished. Everything you expect from Stephen King, the rambling backstories, pointless dialogue, description when you want action, incessant Dylan references, large excerpts you can skim out of boredom without missing much, none of that was in this book. This is the most un-stephen-king of any Stephen King book I've read. The writing is clean and crisp, the dialogue flows. He starts you at a jog and only gives you backstory when you need it. It has this Spaghetti Western, post-apocalyptic feel. Like Road Warrior. Like Book of Eli. Like Outlaw Josey Wales. There's a shootout in a small town, radioactive mutants, deserts, brawls, good versus evil. It does have some aristocratic elements, but it's the closest thing to what I'm talking about when I talk about American Fantasy. If you only read one Stephen King, read this one. The end is satisfying.

I need about a month between Oxford books. You know, to cleanse my palate. I can tear through the books in this series at a rate of one per week, so I'm on the third. The second book, Drawing of Three, lapsed into classic King, losing all of the feel and ambiance of the first book. On the other hand, it introduces the rest of the characters and the overarching plot is supposed to begin with this third one, The Waste Lands, so we'll see. The fourth is supposed to be the best of the series, so I'm going to give him through four before I decide whether I'll finish the series or not.

Moroccan Pizza

That's all. Here's your take away: Read Game of Thrones. Read The Gunslinger. Don't read Middlekauff.

Pizza Links
Mango Black Bean Pizza
Indian Spice Pizza
Spinach Feta Calzone
Spinach Artichoke Pizza
Sweet Potato Kale Pizza
Potato Leek and Rosemary Pizza
Kale Mushroom Red Onion Pizza
Moroccan Pizza

Parting Shot
On one end of my apartment complex, there are deep puppy prints in the parking lot where a dog ran through freshly poured concrete. In the fall, these fill with yellow leaves from the Honey Locusts that line the road and they look like festering sores.

Here's my favorite picture from the Wood book: 19th century Shakers doing an early rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Societies for founding zoos, baking cakes, and brewing brews, societies to play the barrumbazoo. Societies for petting dogs, shoveling bogs and wrestling hogs. Societies for chopping logs. They had groups for bathing suits, coat and tie, and fluting flutes. They had societies, it's true, for tooting toots and scooping poops. They had societies of every kind, you see, from North to South and Sea to Sea.

Cemetery Run

2013-10-20T12:44:00.001-05:00

Oops, We Did It Again
So last night we did the Kick'n Asphalt in Decatur. They held the run in Graceland Fairlawn Cemetery to benefit Easter Seals. This was our 6th race this year and probably my favorite.

There were a couple things I didn't like. No bibs. They didn't give out bibs to track your time. Which is fine, I guess, I don't really run for time. But when you have a bib, you can thumb tack it to your wall or tape it into your scrapbook or fold it up and stow it under your pillow. It's sort of keepsake. Memorabilia. Proof that you were there and you did it. They did hand out popsicle sticks with place numbers on them. Which sort of reminded me of PE freshman year in high school. Aine got 39th. I got 40th.

Also, weird was the fact that the staging area was at the funeral home attached to cemetery. So, when you went in to go to the restroom, every room was filled with runners in neon colors and blinking lights and glow sticks. It felt bizarre.

On the other hand, there was a great festive spirit. Energies were high. Everyone had wrapped themselves in blinking Christmas lights, glowing necklaces, glow in the dark shirts, crazy sparkling hats, and head lamps. Dad sent us a pair of headlamps for the run. We had some technical difficulties with one, but I wore the other.

I wasn't the only guy wearing a headlamp. I was the only guy under the age of 50 wearing a headlamp. It paid off though, the course had dark corners and potholes.

The run was amazing. We started at dusk, with the sun setting red and orange behind the massive, dark Scotch Pines and White Oaks in the cemetery. Because dense woods sheltered the area, you couldn't hear anything but the wind and a distant train wailing in the night. After darkness set in, the course felt so still and isolated, you could easily have been running through a tunnel underground.

Also, it was cold. Very, very cold.

Across the finish, they gave dude a medal.

In addition to the usual fare of water and Gatorade and bananas and power bars, the Salvation Army set up a trailer handing out cups of chili. It was pretty much canned Hormel chili with beans, but they gave me a handful of saltines, and after a cold run it tasted beautiful. I almost wept.

Even this morning, when I burp, I can taste the chili all over again and I get sort of emotional.

This run also had the best goody bags of any race I've done so far. It included a backscratcher, a koozie, two pens, a pencil, a package of tissues, a glow in the dark shirt, a Christmas ornament, a glow bracelet, a glow necklance, and a coloring book.

So, good race. I will definitely do this one again. If Aine says we can.

Only one downside to this whole experience: I ran my usual Friday afternoon 6-miler, so with no day off between my Friday run and the Saturday race, I sort of feel like a used piñata.

The Before-and-Afters:

In other news, Autumn has arrived. So, 30s-40s at night. 50s during the day. The beasts have chillies pretty much all the time.

And we have to sweater up before walks.

On the other hand, the leaves have started to turn.

And here's a picture of the same trees with gratuitous roses in the foreground.

Those are over on Fox. In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to get some pictures from Mattis Park, the Arboretum, and we're going to take a trip out to Allerton to see how it looks in the Fall.

Parting Shot
This afternoon's Squirrel Watch Report is brought to you by Fatty McTalons and Flops Furgeson.

Morton Pumpkin Classic 2013

2013-09-21T17:31:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I ran the Pumpkin Classic 10k. I've been training for it since June. All my hard work has come to fruition. I guess.

We woke up at 4:30, ate breakfast, drank coffee, and hit the road for the hour and a half trip to Morton on the outskirts of the great prairie metropolis of Peoria. We didn't see much in the wee dark hours, but on the trip back, with the sun in the sky, we saw that this part of central Illinois has hundreds and hundreds of windmills. I think there are two large windfarms around the Bloomington area. I had never seen so many in my life.

Morton was a quaint little town. Over 1,800 runners descended on it like carb-loading, hamstring-stretching locusts that morning to participate in the 10k. Around 7:15, we crowded into the street, awaiting the starting gun.

Look:

Extra points if you find me.

Then we were delayed for half an hour when two cars collided in the race path. During this time, I had the opportunity to inspect the attire of my fellow racers. I found multiple heinous violations.

Race Shirts - It's common knowledge, or so I thought, that you don't wear the shirt of the race you're running in. Some say it's bad luck. Some say you haven't earned it yet. Either way, it's in poor taste. You can wear a shirt from a previous race as long as it's equal to or lesser than the race you're currently running. Don't wear a marathon shirt to a 10k. These are rookie mistakes, guys. 5k mistakes. This is a 10k. Time to get serious.

Compression Pants - If you are an adult male, you have no business running in public wearing compression pants. Or performance shorts. Or tights. I don't care what you call them or how cold it is. If your top layer is bulge-producing, it is not appropriate.

Here's a list those who don't want to see that:

Women
Other Men
Children
Dogs and Cats

iPods - The jingle of my dog's tags, the honking geese flying low formations over Mattis Lake, the wind through the Swamp Oaks, rumbling cars and barking dogs and yelling children, the Indian women gossiping while their husbands play cricket in the park, loud rap music from passing cars, the buzz of dive-bombing wood bees, the chatter of squirrels. The sound of the world around me is my favorite part of running. When you jam little ear buds into your auditory canals and crank up Eye of the Tiger, you're basically encapsulating the inside and taking it to the outside which completely negates the purpose of going to the outside to begin with. But, James, you say, I get bored on long runs. If the outside bores you, you're probably the kind of person who takes portable DVD players and laptops camping. You should buy Sweating to the Oldies or Tae Bo or Insanity. You should not go outside because you are wasting it. You don't need an iPod to run. You don't need a smart phone with an app that tells you how far you've run and automatically posts it to Facebook. It's one of the few moments in your day when you can get away from electronic devices.

Also, if you're very lucky and listen carefully when you're running a race, you might hear someone toot. And that's totally worth it.

Long story short: we finally got started. The temperature stayed in the 40s for most of the run and the track was fairly flat. I came in at 53:09:04. This run was very well organized. They had electronic chips to record your time. They had each mile marked with a sign and a volunteer calling out the current time so you could monitor your pace.

Also, they took video of the finish line. Let me just say, I hustled the last 50 yards or so and then had to slow down rapidly so I didn't end up in a doggy pile just across the finish line. So this is what I look like slowing down. I'm not usually this floppy.

Finish Line (I come onto the screen at 24:08.)

Of course you want to see the before-and-afters:

Here's how Aine takes pictures. She says, stand here where the sun is directly in your eyes. Now look normal. Why are you squinting?

They gave Dude a finishing medal. I haven't taken it off since.

The Pumpkin Festival looked like it would be the biggest festival I've ever been to. It had a street full of carnival style games, a dozen different rides, food tents, arts and crafts. Pretty much everything I've ever wanted from a festival. Unfortunately it didn't start for another few hours and we had to leave. As we left town, we saw cars trying to get into Morton for the parade and festival were backed up for two miles down the highway.

There wasn't much to capture photographically, but they did have some large pumpkins. If you know what I mean.

That night we celebrated the fact that I sweated, wheezed, and grunted for six point two consecutive miles without stopping by eating some Watermelon Shrimp Curry. Sounds gross doesn't it? It also looked a little gross in the pan, but this was totes delish.

We got the recipe from Jessie, but it originally comes from a book (Full of Flavor by Maria Elia). I suggest you try it while watermelons are still available. The original recipe called for squid and crab claws. We used shrimps. You could easily substitute chicken. Jessie modified the recipe a little before she passed it on and then I modified it a little from that. Below is the dish as I cooked it. If you want the complete un-muddled original, you can find it here.

Watermelon and Seafood Curry
Makes 4 servings.

Ingredients

1 personal watermelon, rind and seeds removed
2 tbsp olive oil
1 yellow onion, finely chopped
2 inches fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 jalapeno
1 tbl dried lemongrass
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/4 tsp of cayenne pepper
1 lb shrimp
1 bunch cilantro, finely chopped
1/4 tsp fish sauce
1 tbl lime juice

Instructions

Liquefy 3/4 of the watermelon in a blender or food processor until smooth.
Cut the remaining watermelon into cubes and set aside.
Sautee the onion, ginger, and garlic until lightly browned.
Add the jalapeno, lemongrass, and spices and cook until fragrant.
Add everything else, bring to a boil, then simmer for 20-30 minutes.
Serve over rice with flatbread.

For reals. Try it.

My dreams of eating pumpkin pie at the finish line of the 10k proved to be bitterly false. Then we left before any of the serious pumpkin dishes were sold. Aine promised to make me some pumpkin pie when we got home. Turns out, standing the in cold for fifty three minutes and nine seconds exacerbated the cold she had been fighting all week. We'll pencil that one into the lessons learned column.

As soon as she felt better (a week later), she made me both pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread. A little late, but very tasty.

And the moment we've all been waiting for finally arrived. The cheese matured.

We ate it on water crackers with summer sausage from Rhode Island. We know a guy.

The final product had a mellow flavor, which would have sharpened had I allowed it age longer, and it was a little less dry than I desired. Next time I'm going to let it air dry for longer than two days. Aside from that, it was good. My first Cheddar. Woot.

Why Robin Thicke Should Be Boiled in his Tank

2013-09-14T15:45:00.000-05:00

Dear Son,

This may be confusing to you since you don't exist yet. One day you will. Once you've learned enough English to work at McDonald's or blog about politics, you'll probably understand a little bit of the music you hear. You might stumble across the song Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke. Hopefully, this travesty of a song will have been banned by then, but it looks like these namby pamby liberals with their freedom of speech aren't going anywhere.

This song has tarnished the good name of American Pop Music and, I'm afraid, has taken us to a place as a nation we can't come back from. You'll say, Dad, explicitly treating women like sexual objects in song is nothing new: Big Joe Turner released Rebecca in 1944. First, Son, I would say Jazz doesn't count. Second, I would say even if it does, there are some subtle distinctions and I'm going to outline them here. In this fake letter I'm posting on the internet.

Robin Thicke recently performed this song while being the direct object of twerking on a recent awards show. And while he had no control over Mylie Cyrus' impromptu shenanigans, he was a married man singing a sex song, which is probably wildly misleading to people considering marriage. Also, Mylie Cyrus looks underage, so that makes it even worse. Granted, when a 23 year old John Lennon wrote and sang, "she was just seventeen if you know what I mean," he had already married Cynthia Powell after knocking her up. Here's the difference. A 36 year old man who looks like a skinny Russell Crowe: inappropriate. A 23 year old high school teacher: inappropriate. A 23 year old musician: what father of a 17 year old girl wouldn't be pleased?

What does the father have to do with it? Well, if you're going to treat a woman as a sexual object, it's important to take her previous owner into account and that's where Robin Thicke falls short. You can only do what you feel if her daddy is poor. If her daddy is rich, however, you should probably take her out for a meal first.

And let's face it. It's not so much the implicit glorification of infidelity, which has always been OK: Elvis sang Long Tall Sally in 1956. The difference you should note is that Mylie Cyrus is neither "built sweet" nor does she "have everything Uncle John needs."

Robin Thicke sings "you're an animal, baby," which strips away her agency and her intelligence. It is never OK to imply that a woman isn't a person. When the Beach Boys sing that they "dig a French bikini on Hawaiian island dolls," they're not talking about girls as though they were mindless bodies only valuable for their aesthetic attributes. It's a well known fact the Beach Boys actually collected dolls. Some animals are wild, but you shouldn't confuse this with The Troggs' Wild Thing, which is neither about women nor sex. It's a pastoral poem affirming the grooviness of the natural world. James Brown's Sex Machine isn't implying that woman was created for only one purpose. If you go back and listen carefully to the lyrics, he's clearly talking about erectile dysfunction. And that's OK.

Also, when Tom Jones sings What's New, Pussycat... come to think of it, Son, I don't want you listening to Tom Jones either.

One of the most disturbing aspects of all this is the public nature of this explicit sexuality. Twerking on a stage to a song about flirting in a club. The Drifters were gentlemen enough to make love under the boardwalk, hidden from the eyes of the people walking above. Tommy James hid what he was doing. He waited until he thought they were alone now before tumbling to the ground wrapped in arms.

The worst part of this song is the use of the B-word to describe a woman. I'm not even going to type it in his fake letter on the internet. Son, if you're ever confused about whether the B-word is appropriate as a lyric, follow this chart.

Performers who can use the B-word

Mick Jagger
Johnny Cash
Miles Davis
Woody Guthrie
Elton John

Singers who can NOT use the B-word

Robin Thicke

But mostly, Son, it's about class. Roy Orbison may well ask a pretty woman he only just met to be his tonight solely on the basis of her looks, but Robin Thicke, Son, is no Roy Orbison.

Party Like It's 1799

2013-09-02T15:43:00.001-05:00

We spent our Labor Day morning in Arthur, deep in the heart of Illinois Amish Country, at the Arthur Cheese Festival.

Rat Race
We woke in the wee dark hours of the morning to drive south through the corn fields to Arthur. We arrived just before 7 am to check in, get our packets, and pin on our bibs. The packets, instead of coming in thin newspaper plastic, came in nifty, reusable canvas totes.

The goodies included our bibs, our shirts, advertisements for more 5k's (There's a night run through a cemetery in Decatur in October. Woot.), and the free cheese promised by the website. Only, here we found our first sign of trouble. The cheese wasn't local or even Amish. It came from Wisconsin.

We ran. Since Arthur has a sizable Amish population and the Amish only ride horse-drawn buggies and horses tend to poop all over the place, most of the roads in town (commercial and residential) were littered with horse poop. Most of the town had a faint livestock show smell to it. We're used to running the goose crap bespattered sidewalks of Mattis Park, so a neighborhoods crusted in former horse snacks didn't bother us.

We came in at 28:08. Look at us. Sweaty.

This was the best organized and executed of 5k's I've done. Painted arrows on the streets, high tech chips on our bibs (they had the results posted 30 minutes after the end of the race), it was a circuit instead of a turn around, huge inflatable arch over the finish line, water, oranges, and bananas for finishers. Top notch run.

Cheese Festival
We noticed in the main parking area for downtown, they had a buggy parking area.

Aine made friends with a sickly, underfed horse.

The vendor area took up most of downtown. Here's where we delved into the heart of Amish Culture.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed.

I'll grant that this was the final day of a three day festival. We left before noon so we missed out on the cheese eating contest and the curd spitting contest and the buggy rides. What disappointed me was The Merch. When you think Amish, you think home grown food and fresh milk and cheese and handmade pottery and woodworking and rocking chairs and things. So I came with a fat wad of poker winnings to blow on cool Amish stuff. Most of the booths, though, had cheap jewelry, inflatable toys, and Made in China Dollar Store grade crap you could pick up at any flea market. Also a lot of fried fair food.

There was one homemade cheese booth, one goat milk booth, a cool Amish crate/pallet booth (the only woodworking we found, but quality work), and some homemade licorice. The only pottery was imported from Poland (slip cast not wheel thrown). We saw a booth with stuffed pink zebras, another with hillbilly windchimes (a strip of wood with four empty beer cans tied to it), some knitting, and let me tell you, Arthur is still abuzz about the magnetic bracelets. You can find more quality, handmade wares at the Farmer's Market in Urbana.

We did see a local beekeeper selling honey.

A fair amount of quiltage.

Also, a camel. Go figure.

I wanted to get more pictures of the folks in their Mennonite hats and beards, but it somehow seemed a little disrespectful to snap pictures of them like zoo animals. We didn't hear anyone speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, which is actually German, because the word Deutsche confused 19th century Americans. They were all very friendly, though. I saw a couple women in Mennonite dresses, bonnets, bibs, and running shoes which means they ran three point one miles in that attire.

We did splurge and buy a homemade soy candle because it smelled good and we liked the little spongeware dish it came in. Except it was made by some guy from a town just north of Bloomington.

So, Cheese Fest. A little bit of a let down. Arthur was a quaint little town and I wouldn't mind going back to peruse the Amish stores on Main Street sometime when they aren't blocked by vendors from Cincinnati on the festival circuit. We did enjoy the run. And the Wisconsin Colby.

How Sweet It Is

2013-08-30T08:59:00.000-05:00

Urbana Sweet Corn Festival 2013
We did it again. It was so hot this year. I think we hit 85 degrees mid-day. Sweat was had by all.

Of course, the Motor Muster was there again.

Aine said, let's get a picture of the one with dead children in the back.

Instead of the old timey bus, this year they had a sweet Woody. Wait, what did I just say?

I scoured the streets for a 50s model Chevy Bel Air. I finally found one. Not the color I would have chosen, but it was the only one there.

Then we had to walk slowly around all the 1910s and 1920s model cars. Because of Downton.

And no Central Illinois festival is complete without overpriced beer in collector mugs.

Sure, it's the same price as a six pack, but can you drink a six pack in the middle of main street in front of your county courthouse? I didn't think so.

The One Community Stage had a lively performance by Bone, Jugs and Harmony (pun intended). They performed with whiskey jugs, kazoos, and all manner of ridiculous instruments. Aine said, I think this is kids' music. I said, no, these guys are for real. They're local and play venues all over town.

You're probably wondering, where are all the spectators? They're crowded in the shade of the building to the left. By this time in the day we hit the low 80s and people were passing out from heat exhaustion. All precautions had to be taken.

Kansas headlined the entertainment this year. Aine said we had to go since they play the theme song to Supernatural. I said, fine, but we leave as soon as they play Wayward Son. Wouldn't you know it. They played it last.

Here's videographic evidence that we were there. With the entire population of Champaign County. Forgive the sloppy camera work. The camera man had been drinking since three that afternoon.

The Blerch Shirts Have Arrived
We ordered Blerch shirts from the The Oatmeal website for the Pumpkin Classic 10K in Morton.

It's based on a six part comic you can read here:
The Oatmeal

You only need to read the first part to understand the shirt, but I would suggest reading all six.

Rocking the d20

So, a few of us decided we wanted to try out Dungeons and Dragons. It was decided that since I'm the only one not in grad school, therefore the only one with free time, I should be the one to learn the hundreds of rules and DM the first game.

In the picture above, you'll see the practice game from the other night where Aine, as a Level 1 Elf Wizard, defeated 4 Goblin Minions with her Magic Missile. That's right.

Coming Soon
Labor Day - Arthur Cheese Festival and the 5k Rat Race.
Hard Cheese - Three weeks to go!

Life's Been Cheddar

2013-08-21T12:20:00.000-05:00

The Results Are In
My time for the Run4Raley 5k: 25:57

Which means I ran a 8.4 minute mile. Which isn't very fast. But it was pretty fast for me. Now we're gearing up for the Pumpkin Classic 10k in Morton. Last week, I totalled 17 miles. This week, I'm hitting 21.

Thanks, Fanks
I gave up on Dr. Fankhauser. His instructions were rambling, inconsistent and lacking in vital information. The good doctor uses well water and cultivates his own rennet from calf guts to make cheese, so he doesn't spend much time on explaining the intricacies of using store bought milk for apartment dwellers.

After ruining 4 or 5 gallons of milk in pursuit of hard cheese, I bought a book.

On the right. Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll. She started the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, from whom I bought the rennet and the calcium chloride. From what the rave reviews say, she kickstarted the homemade cheese revolution. She writes instructions for those of us who don't milk goats.

(On the left, you'll see Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood about the period between the ratification of the Constitution through the end of the War of 1812. I finally finished the dry ramblings of Dr. Middlekauff.)

The first thing I read was NEVER USE TAP WATER to dilute your rennet and calcium. Chlorine in tap water cripples the rennet and gives you a weak break. Also, she says, NEVER USE IODIZED SALT. The iodine kills the bacteria that give your cheese flavor.

So we did it for real this time. I got to the curd cutting phase of the cheese process.

I cooked the curds.

And drained them.

Then I salted and spooned the cooked curds into the cheese press Dad made.

I had plenty of assistance.

I pressed the curds overnight.

The next morning I unwrapped the hunk of cheese and let it air dry for 2 days.

At which point I waxed it.

I now have a waxed hunk of cheese in my fridge. In four weeks, On September 18th, I'll cut into it and taste the deliciousness of my very first cheddar.

Easy As Pie
We're still doing a homemade pizza once a week. It's actually one of the easiest and fastest dinners to make if I remember to throw some flour in the breadmaker on time. The last two have been utter successes. The first I found randomly on the internet, the second I copied from a local restaurant.

Potato, Asparagus, and Feta Pizza

Pear, Feta, and Pine Nut Pizza

It's a Citrus, Khaleesi
Pitaya. Dragon Fruit. This fruit, from a night blooming cactus, comes from South America and Asia.

You just cut it in half and scoop out its guts. It had the texture of a pear and a very mellow flavor. Too mellow. It almost didn't taste at all.

Erin Go Bragh
Or at least until the first sip. We made Irish Coffees. Only, we didn't have cream, so I guess they were Black Irish Coffees.

Aine didn't finish hers.

(And, yes, under my wallet and phone, you see the Bernard Bailyn introduction lectures to his Peopling of British North America series. If Wood is the Obi Wan of early American history, Bailyn is the Quigon Jinn.)

Home Invasion
The other morning a small spider, the size of your pinky nail, crawled to the middle of my office ceiling. It was just hanging out. Minding its business.

Then Piglet saw it. She just wanted to rip it into small pieces. Frustrated at the spider's inaccessibility, she started mrowing at it. Alarmed by the commotion, Crankles rushed in to save the day.

Then he saw the spider. And he started whining.

They have a good time hunting roaches and flies together, but this distant spider completely stymied them. She mrowed. He whined. And that noise lasted for the first twenty minutes of my work day.

Parting Shot
Life in Illinois seems precarious at times.

But this does not alarm us.

August in Champaign

2013-08-03T12:05:00.001-05:00

Independence Day Again
Yesterday, August 2nd, was the anniversary of the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence. I'm currently reading The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff.

Chronologically, it's the first available book of the Oxford History of the United States series. Started in the 1950s, it was intended to be a comprehensive history of the United States for a general audience. Three of the books have won Pulitzers and two have been finalists. Each covers roughly a 30 year span. All of them are really long. We'll see how far I make it.

I realized reading this that the colonial era comprises one of the largest chunks of our nation's history. The time span from the founding of Jamestown to the battle of Lexington and Concord is about as long as Lexington and Concord to the end of World War II. About 170 years. Full of crazy stuff they just glossed over in school. For instance, did you know that New England alone saw 8 wars and 1 rebellion between the mid 1600s and the mid 1700s? Georgia was a penal colony: Britain colonized Australia because they lost Georgia in the American Revolution. The more I read about America before 1790, the more bizarre and exotic it seems.

Also, thanks to Benedict Arnold's actions at Saratoga, Horatio Gates' army defeated the British under Burgoyne. The victory at Saratoga convinced the French to declare war on the British, which more or less sealed America's fate. So, before defecting to the British, Benedict Arnold won the war for the Americans.

Run for Raley
I ran the 6th annual Run for Raley 5k in Philo. Proceeds are donated to researching Mitochondrial Disease, a disease in which your body is unable to convert food into energy. The charity run was started by the Kirbys in memory of their daughter.

My Before and After:

I ran the Freedom 5k in Champaign in 29:30. I finished the Raley 5k at 26:00.

Now I'm just tired and hungry.

Another Weird Pizza
Chicken Tikka Masala Pizza garnished with chopped cilantro. This combined two of our favorite things to eat. Indian food and Pizza.

You can find the recipe at Rasa Malaysia.

Coming Soon
Sweet Corn Festival 2013
Maybe Hard Cheese

Illinois Ghost Adventures (part 4)

2013-07-29T12:03:00.005-05:00

The Hannah House
Alexander Moore Hannah built his Italianate home in antebellum Indianapolis.

One of the few sympathetic Hoosiers, he used his house as a station on the Underground Railroad. After his death, his children sold the home and the property. The new owners, the Oehlers, moved into the house in 1899. Soon after, they began experiencing strange phenomena. Moving objects, phantom sounds, the smell of charred bodies.

After some investigation, they discovered the grisly truth. One night, Hannah sheltered a group of escaped slaves in his cellar. Someone knocked over the lantern, igniting the straw mattresses. Everyone in the cellar burned to death. Hannah later buried the bodies behind the cellar wall.

Today, people still experience ghostly figures moving through the house, cold spots, unexplained sounds, and the smell of burning.

Ghost Hunt
We spent Saturday night investigating the Hannah House with a group of other Ghost Hunters. The moment we arrived, we were filled with a strange sense of foreboding.

We explored the grounds before the events began. The woods around the house were filled with an eerie silence.

We found a hastily disassembled guillotine. Were the current owners French? Were they hiding the murder of the local aristocracy?

Inside the service branch of the house, we met with the other Ghost Hunters.

One couple were clearly professionals. The husband had a tactical vest and both were bristling with expensive ghost hunting technology. EVP recorders, EMF detectors, flashlights, digital cameras. I felt totally outclassed. I later learned that they had investigated hauntings all over the country. There was also a mother-son team who had been to a handful of other haunted houses. When those four learned of our inexperience, they did not seem amused. They moved away from us on the Group W bench. In addition, there was a group of four college kids, also on their maiden ghost hunting voyage.

While waiting for the tour to begin, I inspected the disturbing artwork. What could it mean? What secrets did these writhing, nipply figures hold?

The Guide gave us a tour of the house, explaining the history, pointing out the hotspots. Then they turned us loose to investigate. Aine and I staked out the attic while it was still light. What we found there unnerved us.

According to the Guide, the rugs mysteriously move around the attic floor. I took this picture during the tour.

When we returned, the chair had been moved and the rug missing. I found it behind a column on the other end of attic.

After sunset, we found, to our dismay, that the flash on our camera no longer worked. Did the spirits sabotage our equipment? What follows is the raw, uncut video footage we took as we explored the house.

The Attic
We didn't experience any paranormal activity in the attic, even though people before us had experienced being pushed and hit by an unseen entity. You'll notice the rug has moved from the earlier picture.

On the way up to the attic, I thought I saw one of the other investigators step out of a room, look at me, then return to the room. When I got to the room, no one was there.

Grandma Oehler's Bed
The Guide told us Grandma didn't like people messing with her bed. We taunted the old lady for over an hour, but couldn't rouse her. At one point, Aine was laying on the bed and I was sitting on the other side of the room. I thought I heard Aine whisper something. She sat up. Did you say my name, she asked. I said no. She said it sounded like someone whispered her name in her ear. We both heard it, but have no idea who said it. Also, while in the room, Aine heard a child say the word "mama" twice from the hallway. I didn't hear it and there were no children in the house.

Also, Aine downloaded a Ghost Communicator App on her iPhone. It displays words that, allegedly, are being communicated by nearby spirits. It kept showing us the words airplane and airport which didn't make much sense. But it also kept displaying my name. Then it displayed the word run. Which was a little disturbing. It didn't display my name in any other room or since we left the house. Only in Grandma Oehler's room.

Did Grandma Oehler know who we were? What was she trying to tell us?

The Cellar
We went down to the cellar where people burned to death and were hastily buried.

We took an EMF detector the Guide let us borrow. It didn't react anywhere in the house. While in the basement, the air grew suddenly chilly and the EMF started lighting up. The Ghost Communicator started repeating the words army, murder, and burning.

Extras
A couple other oddities in the house.

Parting Shot
The mysterious rocking chair.

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

2013-07-23T09:25:00.001-05:00

Here on the Jabbo Homestead, we enjoy strange fruit. And I don't mean the kind hanging from southern poplar trees.

We've already delved into the world of blood oranges and apple cider, which I think, regardless of what your doctor tells you, should count as a daily serving of fruit. We tried mangoes, which are devilish to cut, and papaya. We couldn't decide if the papaya tasted sweet and delicious or like vomit and bubblegum. It was a toss up.

Here's the good stuff.

Star Fruit
Carambola. A native of south and southeast Asia. We started growing them domestically in Florida as recently as the 1970s.

I've heard the texture described as similar to either an apple or a grape. People say it tastes like an apple, a pear, or a nondescript citrus. To me it has the taste and texture of a star fruit. You'll just have to try one.

To prepare it, you lop off either end and stand it upright, like you would a honeydew, then slice the edges off the lobes. Then slice it up and serve it. This is an expensive fruit, at least in Illinois, but so tasty.

Red Bananas
Red Daccas. Quite a bit different from the standard yellow Cavendish you're used to seeing in stores.

Funny story about that. Up until the 1950s, the predominant banana eaten by Americans was the Big Mike (Gros Michel). Big Mikes are fat and round (sorry, Kirk Cameron, so much for the ridges... also, in other countries, they eat the banana from what we consider the bottom, which is actually the top). If you remember pictures of the fruit salad on Carmen Miranda's head, those are Big Mikes. In the 1950s, most of the Big Mike trees in South America were wiped out by a fungus called Panama Disease. Which is the problem with growing a monoculture, that is, relying entirely on a single genetic strain of a food crop. See also Potato Blight. The Cavendish bananas were seemingly resistant to the Panama Disease fungus and they filled the vaccuum.

Today, bananas are still one of our favorite fruits. In fact, Walmart stores sell more bananas than any other item.

Red Daccas are a cultivar of Cavendish, only they're red and the flesh, when ripe, is pink. These took forever to ripen. They aren't as obvious as their yellow cousins. You have to squeeze them. They can turn black and still be green inside. These sat on my counter for a week and then I put them in a paper bag for almost another week before they turned soft.

But then they were delicious. Like the blood oranges, they had a faint hint of raspberry in the aftertaste. Aine thought they just tasted like bananas, though. She was not impressed.

Strawberry Pizza
Since we are now the proud owners of a pizza stone and a pizza peel, we decided to make pizza pretty much all the time. The dough takes an hour and a half to make in the bread maker, but after that it's a matter of rolling it out, slapping the ingredients on it, and heating it up. So, like twenty minutes total. It's one of the easiest meals to make if you plan ahead.

I found a recipe for Strawberry Basil and Balsamic Pizza on Cookie and Kate.

Instead of the balsamic reduction, we used balsamic vinaigrette, and instead of goat cheese we used feta. But you just sprinkle mozzarella and feta over the top, slice up fresh strawberries and spread them on like pepperoni. Then when it comes out, you add the fresh basil and sprinkle on the balsamic liquid of your choice.

It sounds weird, but it gets five stars. Delicious.

Jabbo Cider Review

2013-07-17T14:53:00.001-05:00

As American as Apple Cider
Apples come from the hills of Kazakhstan. They traveled to America on British ships in the 1600s. As seeds. Funny thing about apples. If grown from seed, the tree will produce bitter apples. You can't eat bitter apples, but you can turn them into hard cider. The American colonists loved two things: representation and getting their drink on. Grapes and hops and sugarcane didn't grow well on the Atlantic seaboard, so wine and the ingredients for beer and rum had to be imported. Apple trees could be grown almost anywhere and you can get 12 to 14 gallons of cider from a single tree in a year.

As a result, the cheapest, most accessible, and most popular adult beverage for the first two hundred years of our history was hard cider. Which they called cider. Non-alcholic cider wasn't invented until Prohibition. In 1700, the colonies were producing 300 thousand gallons of cider a year and the average man drank 35 gallons a year. By 1810, Vermont alone had 125 distilleries producing 170 thousand gallons a year.

George Washington preferred hard cider over beer. Benjamin Franklin said, "it is bad to eat apples, it is better to turn them all into cider." John Adams had a tankard of cider every morning for breakfast. Andrew Jackson, when he wasn't busy killing men in duels, drank cider.

Sarah Palin wasn't the first politician to appeal to Joe Six Pack. To appeal to the blue collar workingman, William Henry Harrison, in his 1840 bid for the presidency, called himself the "log cabin and hard cider candidate."

Cider's most important evangelist came in the form of the American Dionysus, John Chapman. You know him as Johnny Appleseed. Our popular conception of him is wandering missionary, spreading God's word and planting apple trees willy nilly. That's pretty much not how it happened. He did become a missionary later in life, but he got his start in the world as a businessman. Chapman traveled around the US establishing apple tree nurseries and hiring local farmers to manage them. Since the apples from all the trees he planted weren't edible, there was only one thing to be done. Thanks to Chapman, cider production soared.

The sad decline of cider is a complicated story. The 1840s saw a huge influx of German and Irish immigrants who brought with them a powerful love of beer and improved brewing methods (specifically, bottom fermentation which was superior to top fermentation practiced in the US... which produced beer of inconsistent quality before refrigeration and modern sterilization techniques, but that's a whole other story). During the mid-1800s, an apple blight swept across the US, severely depleting the apple tree population. Also, more Americans began to settle and farm the Midwest, which meant more land for growing hops and barley.

The biggest blow to the dominance of cider came with the Temperance Movement, beginning in the 1820s. The movement caught on with Anglo Protestants, that is, the cider drinkers. The Catholic beer-drinking Irish and Germans had none of it. At end of the 1800s, politics were heading toward national prohibition and the new soft drink Coca Cola snatched up the cider demographic. By the time the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, the American tradition of guzzling hard cider was gone with the wind.

That is, until the 1990s when American hard cider became popular again, thanks to Woodchuck.

The Survey
Since hard cider plays such an important role in our national and cultural heritage, I decided to try them all. I mean, anything worth doing, is worth doing to excess.

Angry Orchard - From the company that brought you Sam Adams. If the creepy man tree on the label doesn't scare you off, the taste will. I tried the Crisp Apple variety first. It tasted like sugar added juice box apple juice. If I wanted something this sweet, I would have made some Kool-Aid. I tried their Traditional Dry variety, but it was still too sweet.

Crispin - A California cider. This was probably my favorite of the ciders. Light-bodied, dry, crisp. It was both refreshing and intoxicating and had a really clean apple flavor. I had it again at Blue, Brews, and BBQ. It also tastes good out of a plastic collectible cup. This will be my go to cider.

Magner's - An Irish Cider. I ordered this at Dublin O'Neil's, Champaign's Irish Pub. It came on ice, which was a little disconcerting, but apparently that's a perfectly acceptable way to serve cider. This didn't have much flavor (maybe it was watered down) and I wasn't very impressed.

Woodchuck - The American cider that brought cider back. This wasn't as juice box sweet as Angry Orchard, but a little too sweet for my taste. By the way, a woodchuck is the same thing as a groundhog, only it has nothing to do with wood or chucking. The name is a corruption of the Algonquian wuchak.

Hornsby's - The one with the rhino. This was Aine's favorite. My second favorite. It was mostly dry, with a lot of apple flavor. This one tasted like actual apple juice from an apple. Not the from concentrate stuff with lots of sugar like they give to kids these days.

So, now you're armed with truth. If you love America, drink some cider.

We Are Hard Cheese Ready

2013-07-09T12:34:00.001-05:00

Dad built and mailed me a cheese press last week. When he told me, I rushed to Amazon to buy some cheese wax. Since that was the last piece of equipment I needed, I can now embark on the next stage of my Cheese Odyssey...

Hard Cheese.

I am moving from Cheese Adolescence to Cheese Adulthood. Granted, I'll have to successfully make a Brie or a Bleu Cheese before I am Epic Cheese Master, but this is an important step.

All my Cheese Dreams are coming true.

Potterpizzaversary!

2013-07-06T15:23:00.000-05:00

Background
Two years ago, on the July 4th weekend, we drove for two days in a Uhaul to move Aine and all her things up to Illinois. We arrived on Church street late the second day, unloaded the truck, and set up house. Exhausted, we didn't feel like cooking dinner and didn't know the local restaurants well enough to order carry out. We bought a frozen pizza and ate it while watching a comfort movie, one of the Harry Potters.

One year ago, on the July 4th weekend, I moved up to join Aine in Illinois. We drove a Uhaul for two days and late the second day, we unloaded the truck, this time doubling the amount of stuff in the 500 square foot Church street apartment. Exhausted from the weekend's activities, we decided to celebrate the successful completion of the move by cooking a frozen pizza and watching Harry Potter.

This year, we decided to mark the one year anniversary of my move and the two year anniversary of her move with a Potter and Pizza Night.

I asked Aine, do you want to get another frozen pizza or make our own, hoping she would opt for the frozen pizza. She said, let's make our own!

Homemade 'Za
We wanted to do this right, so we bought a pizza stone to have that authentic brick oven experience. I used the pizza dough recipe that came in the Oster Recipe Booklet and used whole wheat flour.

Taste of Home had a good pizza sauce recipe that I mostly followed. I omitted the fennel seed and cooked it for ten minutes instead of an hour and it produced a very tasty sauce.

Il Recipe:

2x 15 oz cans tomato sauce
12 oz can tomato paste
1 tbl Italian seasoning
1 tbl dried oregano
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
.5 tsp salt

We wanted different toppings on our respective halves. I wanted the traditional pepperoni and jalapenos. Aine preferred mushrooms, savoy spinach, and feta.

While I chopped the veggies, Aine, a pizza-making veteran from her Sewanee days, rolled the dough.

Crankles stood guard.

After we assembled the pizza,

we put it in the oven (400 degrees for 15 minutes). Here's how it came out:

Homemade pizza on a whole wheat crust. Our third annual Potter and Pizza Night was a success.

Grad to the Bone
Earlier that day, a courier arrived with paper proof of Aine's hard work and tireless scholarship. She now has her long awaited diploma for a Master of Arts in Classics.