In this conversation, I said that the last time I built a computer to play games with, the only games I was worried about playing were half life and quakeworld.

Then I realized those games came out in 1998.

So actually it’s not quite true — I upgraded in college but the fact is my pc gaming days basically ended at half-life 1, a game that is now about 14 years old.

I was introduced to nukazuke by a friend of mine who’d spent a lot of time in Japan. A bit of reading led me to believe that I could probably manage to pull off this kind of pickle, but then for years that’s where I was stuck.

I never actually got around to finding where to buy rice bran, or getting a container I could use to pickle in, or really doing any sort of actual prep or execution towards making these pickles.

Finally last weekend things came together and Cin and I managed to have time and supplies to get started.

I pieced together a plan from a variety of guides online.
Wandering Spoon‘s post about Nukazuke
Joi Ito‘s guide to Nukamiso
A post in the egullet forums by helenjp
The Black Moon‘s page on Tsukemono

Here’s what I came up with:

1kg of rice bran (米糠 mǐkāng)
670 ml of water
330 ml of tsingtao
150 g of salt （盐 yán）
a 2.5×5 piece of seaweed, soaked in cold water (海带 hǎidài)
1 slice of bread
a handful of cabbage, about 100g (白菜 báicài)

I also decided to try adding:
a few dried red peppers （干辣椒 gānlàjiāo）
a few dried mushrooms （干香菇 gānxiānggū）
a couple cloves of garlic, peeled （大蒜 dàsuàn）

These ended up buried in the mix.

I was going to do twice as much, but as I was weighing out the rice bran, I realized that it was a lot more voluminous than I’d expected.

The first step was to toast the bran. This proved not very easy to do in our limited kitchen, so we did it in a lot of batches. In our case, toasting meant mainly getting it hot, scorching the bottom, then making a mess trying to stir more. The end result is a very uneven toasting.

Next up, boil the water, salt, and beer. Then we broke up the bread and dropped it in and waited for it all to cool down.

Mixing up the bran and water to achieve a consistency something like wet sand.

After this, though we neglected to get pictures as our hands were covered in bran at this point, was burying the starter cabbage and then finally wiping down the sides and setting it down to wait for a day.

Some other (crappy) photos of this process are on my flickr set.

back to Ferments

Later still, while living at the corner of Dongzhimen Beixiaojie (东直门北小街) and Dongzhimen Nei (东直门内）I came across a reference on a friend-of-a-friend’s blog (via a tweet of Beijing Haochi) about where to find specialty flours for bread making, and yet somehow I never actually made it 100 meters down the street to check it out. I even got my bike repaired next door!

Finally, last weekend I managed to swing by and check the place out, having already struck out trying to find rice bran at another grain type shop up near the Lama temple.

The place is kind of a mess inside, though the couple running the shop were pretty great. They’re from Dong Bei and offered me some really tasty hazelnuts. They mentioned that all sorts of foreigners come looking for special flours and brown rice and such, as well.

[Map]
19 Dongzhimen Nanxiaojie, Dongcheng District (150m south of Gui Jie)
Tel: (010) 8401 7569
东城区东直门南小街19号

So I did what any reasonable food-interested nerd would do and started searching for how to get a sourdough culture started.

After reading a few different guides, most of which seemed intimidating and complicated, I decided “to hell with all that!” and got started loosely following the instructions on this very approachable guide.

I had an empty jar that previously contained bottled spaghetti sauce, a large bag of Chinese all-purpose flour sitting in a larger box that used to hold frosted mini wheats, and as much Beijing tap water as I needed.

I mixed together equal parts by weight of water and flour, and let it sit out for a couple days uncovered. After that, I started regularly “feeding” the culture, which involved stirring it up, pouring some out, and then replacing with new flour and water.

After a few days, you can imagine my surprise when I noticed that it was bubbling up and had a not unpleasant smell. I’d expected some kind of foul spoilage with colorful mold and putrid odor. (All of these I have been treated to since in other failed attempts to start a culture.)

It was only then, culture alive and bubbling, that I decided to give it a name: Melvin. I think my sister Cara and I were hanging around on the roof and possibly drunk when we came up with that one, but either way the name stuck.

I started trying to use Melvin to make bread, and the first few loaves turned out a little… flat, but with repeated effort I was eventually turning out tasty little loaves.

Eventually though I moved to a new apartment with no oven, and I gave Melvin to my mother, where he continues to thrive and provide delicious local Beijing sourdough flavor to those fortunate to be a guest to dinner when my mother entertains.

This of course prompted me to sift through all the old photos and music and homework from college and it’s been… entertaining. I need to finish going through these photos and put some of them on facebook or something.

Also lots of fun has been listening to some old playlists. It’s interesting to think back and consider how arrogant I was. Well, I still am I guess, but I mean the arrogance of being so young and convinced that I had some things figured out. I thought I knew, but I had no idea. At least now I am pretty convinced I don’t know a thing.

Also, was I just really sleep deprived all of the time in college? Look under my eyes, yikes!

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Me and Mia

That all said, there’s a winter storm raging outside, and it is cold. Seems like nearly a foot of snow dropped overnight and the wind is still blowing something fierce.

It wasn’t a surprise though, the forecast has been there for a while and on top of that, there was a nice automated message from the local Fire Department, yesterday, warning of the coming storm and that people should do all their driving and such then before it got really dangerous on the roads.

Part of the preparations for my family’s house was to restock the woodpile. There’s a few pallets stacked with wood a bit away from the house, and then there are the racks in the house. The racks in the house were low, while the stack far away was high. It was a fairly simple task for me — fill the inside stacks before the outside stacks got snowed under.

Going off on a bit of a tangent, one of my bosses is very fond of using “woodpile” as something of a metaphor when talking with our clients. It’s pretty good on our end, as it seems most people can pretty intuitively understand the idea (enough clients from places where one would have a woodpile, evidently) of having a large pile of discrete objects [logs / art production tasks] to process [burn / do].

Of course in that context we, the production company, never has to deal with the creation, so to speak, of the woodpile, which is a different thing altogether, and there the metaphor starts to lose some of its strength.

Returning to the actual, physical, woodpile though, moving the logs around reminded me of some of the small joys of having a clearly defined task to execute, and the satisfaction of going out and doing it.

The connection between effort and progress is one that I suspect is rarely stronger than in manual labor tasks. Having just written that I am sure there are plenty of examples where this is not true at all and I am romanticizing manual labor as somebody who doesn’t have to do very much of it, and to this I have no real retort. It’s probably true, there are no doubt many thankless tasks in which there is no satisfaction to be had by doing something to completion, perhaps because if one must do so every day for years, the joy is very hastily forced out.

But still, for me, this lazy sack who spends most of his days sitting in front of a computer (much as I do now writing this) hammering away at the keys to produce no physical product to show the result, it was… well not fun, that seems disingenuous if not wholly ridiculous, but satisfying.

I guess this is as much in praise of the satisfaction that comes with finishing things as it is an appreciation that I don’t do that kind of work so often as to have rendered it merely monotonous and unrewarding.

And with that, it’s time for me to throw another log on the fire.

The gist of it appears to me that gluten is (very) bad, and most carbohydrates fall on a scale from not-good to akin-to-poison. That this seems a little dramatic may be a consequence of the… colorful language some proponents use in describing their dietary choices. There are a few accounts that are more balanced out there (I encourage you to spend some time with Google as I did) but much of what I see is characterized by language and attitudes which strike me as more proselytizing than persuading. It seems interesting, though I have a lot of questions, but that is a topic for another post.

I did read a bunch though and something that struck me was how little consensus there seemed to be on many topics regarding human diet and nutrition. We’ve got a lot of experts saying a lot of different things, and moreover, what the experts have been (loosely) agreeing on seems to shift over time. The whole situation reminded me of an excellent blog post I’d read a while back on Idle Words.

The post, titled “Scott and Scurvy“, is about how scurvy was all but eliminated as a problem, and then it came back. The post goes into a lot of fascinating detail on the history of scurvy and its treatment and how our flawed models for understanding it led to that period where scurvy resurfaced as something to worry about.

I tried to find a high profile advocate of the Paleo Diet to title this post with but couldn’t think of any and so I went with Owsley Stanley instead who adheres to a slightly stricter doctrine of food, summarized thus: “Stanley believes that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic.”

All that said, it strikes me as interesting to think that at some point we’re going to get this whole nutrition thing down and at that point, in retrospect, all these diets and theories of nutrition and so forth are going to look kind of cook-y just as ptomaines look to me now. I hope that it happens soon enough that I personally can see how it all turns out.

from portrait of an LBX

Speaking of laowai, that’s the other word that gets our goat. Laowai — along with dialectical equivalents: lowei, waigolo, gueilo, etc. — means “foreigner,” but it is the slang way of saying it compared with the proper term waiguoren (compare the word “Paki” for “Pakistani” or the French slang “ricain”, semi-derogatory shortening of the formal demonym “américain”). Just about every Chinese in the country will shout this out from either pure stupefaction at seeing us or just to let everybody know what’s coming through town (imagine the scene from Blazing Saddles when the town drunk is screaming, “the new sheriff’s a ni**er!”). I’ve tried explaining to countless Chinese why we don’t like it when people shout laowai out in front of our faces. We know we’re different, that we come from somewhere else, that our eyes and noses and hair and whatever other parts don’t look like theirs — we know all of that very, very well, and when we’re trying to initiate contact with a new person, the last thing we want is for them to turn to their buddies laughing and say “laowai” as though a stray dog had just started talking. Every time I explain why this irks us, they just give me blank faces and say, “but that’s just the word we use for you… we don’t mean anything by it.” I suppose they, coming from one of the world’s most insular societies, have absolutely no idea what this must feel like, and rationally this shouldn’t be a problem for smart people like Andy and me. But hearing it thirty times a day, in addition to all the other stupid jeers, just really wears us thin, especially when we’re tired or in a bad mood (see above). I do suppose that if you went back a hundred years, before there was any idea of political correctness or courtesy for people who look *different*, and asked even an educated, open-minded man in the American South why he used the word, “ni**er” to refer to black people, he probably would have responded, “well, that’s just the word we use for ‘em… we don’t mean nothin’ by it.” Maybe when my grandkids come to China, things will be different. Until then, we grind our teeth and bear it.

from a thread on the something awful forums

uick question, how does everyone feel about this word? I personally got no issue with it in the slightest and use it to refer to myself or other foreigners all the time. However, in recent months I’ve met more and more people (usually Chinese-literate-just-outta-college kids) who feel all offended by it.

One girl I work with (Actually the same one I mentioned earlier about the IN AMERICA WE DO IT THIS WAY thing) was all pissed when she heard our place’s boss boasting(?) to some dude about how she had about 30 “laowais” working for her. She was all, “Why doesn’t she just use “外国人!” I personally see laowai as a more colloquial but more or less un-pejorative term for 外国人.

I’m not personally offended by it, my friends refer to me as a laowai. My boss, who lived in Beijing for a number of years seems to think it’s offensive though. He prefers wàiguó rén. I think maybe in bigger cities it has generated a negative connotation but here in a relatively remote southern boom town, where foreigners have rarely been seen before, laowai seems like the defacto term and I don’t take offense. Maybe it’s like a black/African American thing?

That’s pretty much my feeling on it. Laowai has pejorative connotations but when most people use it I don’t think they mean to include those.

Of course, China isn’t that far along with the whole “racism is bad” thing and you do probably run into more people using it in a nasty or superior way, and there’s a little bit of difference (probably superiority) built into the way Chinese people talk about race anyway (white people, black people, red people, yellow TYPE people…) so maybe it’s a little worse than “black / African American” but this is all pretty nebulous anyway and really if I had to choose I’d say go ahead and keep calling me a chalkie just stop doing the farmer blow on the sidewalk in front of my apartment and I’ll call it even.

as for the laowai thing… yea, i went through a phase where i didn’t like it, but meh, bitch all you want its never going to change… might as well embrace it.

From a chat where I asked about differences:

老外 is more 口语
外国人 is more formal
Also
老外 is probably used to refer to white people
外国人 is more neutural
neutral

Also, I just asked on quora.

It reminded me a bit of this time a friend of a friend came to visit Beijing and we were at dinner and I discovered that he had just finished law school at my alma mater in Chicago. We got to talking about the places to hang out in Hyde Park and it struck me how we had some very different experiences.

While I was in Hyde Park, there were a few restaurants that I went to a number of times and whie I don’t think I would have said they were amazing places, weren’t bad food. But since leaving Chicago, or hell, since getting out of Hyde Park more in later years, I’ve realized that a lot of the places I’d eat at repeatedly were actually kind of awful. Convenient and good enough, but otherwise wholly unremarkable if not actually remarkably gross.

So when I see people go back to their school and say how they’ve eaten at one of their old haunts and how great it is, it makes me wonder if they just had much better food around their school, or if they haven’t since expanded their definition of great food since finishing college. For me there’s not much I would go out of my way to have in Hyde Park. While the 55th street may have been where I have eaten the largest amount of Thai food in my life by volume, it is certainly overrepresented relative to how good it is.

Of course, it’s not just the food. It’s the place as much as the food for a nostalgic visitor. In fact, upon thinking back, I am probably guilty of having made these same kinds of status updates myself. Shortly after moving to China, I did go back to Hyde Park and I probably ate all the same crappy things and thought so highly of the experience because of all the good things I associate with the places I ate, all the things besides the food.