Sunday, November 09, 2008
Reposted Wapitis, Kitchen Genius, and the Original Yah: A Blog Post that’s Sort of Like Gorp
I continue to get a fair share of my paltry few visitors as the result of their search for “Elky Summers”. You youngsters may not know that that’s a crappy grandpa pun about a berlin-born actress of the late mid-twentieth-century, Elke Sommer, renowned from blockbusters such as “the Double McGuffin“ or the “Night in the Harem” episode of “Fantasy Island.“ Anyway, these friendly folk do a search for Elke and they find this site because of some elk photos I put up in 2004 but that disappeared in one of my various migrations from one host to another. Anyway, I re-posted them. Now if someone is looking for Elke Sommers and finds my site by mistake, at least I can show him some cool wapitis and ungulates. No, seriously. Enjoy, you craven ogler of germanic hotties. I refrain from the “rack” jokes but you are warmly invited to make up the deficit.
This morning’s pancakes were my best ever, I daresay. The batter had a light even consistency so I could easily ladle it out onto the griddle, which I allowed to get hot but kept unoiled till the last moment so the oil didn’t sear and spoil; I added the frozen blueberries later than I usually do, at the last moment even, and that kept the batter nice and light in color, not a thick muddy purple; the spices - cinnamon and cardamom - were well-chosen and properly apportioned; the cakes cooked up light and fluffy, with golden-brown sears on each side but rising with airy abandon between them; I even flipped them all accurately and on time so every pancake came out looking as good as it tasted. It put me on a kitchen rush, what can I say, so I’ll also talk up our new kyocera ceramic veggie peeler, which I used earlier today to peel a freaking GRAPE I love this tool, especially since our prior peeler was a crude twig with a blade from some manicure scissors taped to it.
Hell, I’m so overflowing with the spirit here, let me just add a kitchen tip: when you’re cooking ground meat, be it beef, turkey, pork, veal, or an extruded sausage, which tastes just as good as it sounds, make sure you stick around and make sure the meat breaks down into the smallest pieces and doesn’t just fry up in big chunks. The big chunk fry is not as tasty and it’s harder to incorporate evenly into other dishes in which this tasty ground meat can be used. Oh and measure things using measuring spoons over a little bowl. It’s way too easy to make a mess using those little suckers.
Which leads me to another brilliant genius move I invented today au cuisine: we wound up - AGAIN - with a little can of tomato paste, of which we’d used 2 tablespoons and the rest was going to be YET ANOTHER experiment in low-temperature mold colonization. We needed to freeze the tomato paste, dammit, and in a way that wouldn’t require us to thaw the whole thing just to use a little of it. My BGM: I lined an ice cube tray with clingwrap, put a few tablespoons of paste into four of them, covered them up with a little more wrap, and let them freeze. A few hours later I could pull them out of the tray without leaving any trace or stain of that very pungent, fast-staining stuff on my white cube trays. The four nuggets of paste now sit individually wrapped in a freezer bag, awaiting my pastely pleasure.
One additional kitchen tip that I don’t use is putting all the similar silverware in the same part of the cutlery caddy in the dishwasher - all the knives together, then the forks, then the tongs, then the skewers, then the jaws of life… that way you don’t have to separate the forks and knives when you put stuff away, it’s already separated for you. Someone in our house says that’s too much effort on the front end for an insignificant savings of effort on the back end, but I’m not sure. I am not constitutionally opposed to front-loading my back end, but then again, I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore.
There may be more to say about kitchens, but I think that this is enough for now. I have been reading “Wind in the Willows” to Zach and I just got through “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” That is some freaky juvenile literature. I’m going back to my blacklight strobe closet. Oh, but one final notion: Z has Flintstones chewable vitamins, as I did at his age, with the distinction that I knew something about the Flintstones at the time and he does not. SO I loaded him up an episode from the first season and we watched it this morning on You Tube. The overt sexism, the brutal slapstick, the smirking acceptance of spousal abuse and the omnipresent laughtrack that rode the animated program like a tick on an overweight picnicker, none of these really caught my attention. What I couldn’t help noticing was that Fred kept getting excited about doing something and would shout out “Ya-hoooo!” That’s right, Jerry Yang, he wasn’t shouting out Yabba Dabba Nuthin’. It was Ya-Hoooo straight down the line. I could have sworn he had a different catchphrase, but I guess that was an ad lib somewhere down the line. The Dabba Doo was a Johnny Come Lately. Only the Yah was truly with us from the outset. I think there’s something theological about this, but the blacklight strobe closet calls.
