Reading the news about Arlen Specter and his party switch has been kind of interesting. Republicans have called it “an act of political desperation” while Democratic bloggers and their readers are quick to point out that he’s generally a “flip flopper” and can’t be counted on as a reliable Democratic vote. I’m wondering, why is everyone freaking out that Specter is sensitive to his constituency? Isn’t that the point of a representative Democracy?
Well, I’ll admit it, I’m falling a bit behind on making up recipes. Last evening I combined two recipes and made up a third.
Slaw #1: Better Crocker Slaw
1/2 cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
1/4 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/2 medium head cabbage, finely shredded or chopped (4 cups)
1 small carrot, shredded (1/2 cup)
1 small onion, chopped (1/4 cup)
Mix the dressing together and pour over the carrots, onions and shredded cabbage. Let it sit in the fridge for an hour before serving.
Robert’s mods: homemade mayo (see the spring garlic recipe, sans garlic)! No onion, no celery seed, more carrot.
Slaw #2
1 bunch of chard
2 tablespoons of soy sauce
1 tablespoon of sweet rice wine (Ajimirin)
1 tea spoon of roasted seasame seeds
Red pepper to taste
In a large pot, boil water and cook the chard until it’s just soft. Strain and cool with cold water. Press excess water out of the chard. In a mixing bowl, throw in the rest of the ingredients and toss thoroughly.
Red Snapper:
- 1 lbs Red Snapper Fillets, cut into portion sized amounts
- Your own homemmade blackening seasoning or a store bought kind (I used Chef Paul Prrudhomme’s Blackened Redfish Magic
- 3/4 stick of butter
Open your windows and get a big cast iron skillet (or something that holds a lot of heat) and heat it on high. The higher the better (I let mine heat up for like 10 minutes. In a separate pan, melt the butter and slather the fish in it and transfer to a plate. Coat both sides of the fillet with seasoning. Transfer to the skillet and let it blacken (but not burn). You’ll get a nice dark crust on one side. Flip the fillet and repeat on the 2nd side.
Plate the fish over both kinds of slaw and serve!
So on the hottest day ever in San Francisco (91 degrees) I decided it was a fine day to not only slow roast a pork shoulder, but also make a steaming hot pot of soup while the roast cooked. To start, open all your windows, place the cat in the other room and open your back door for maximum air circulation. First up, the pork… if you’ve got an oven safe pot with a tight lid, you should definitely try this:
Apple and Brown Sugar Slow Roasted Pulled Pork
1 pork butt [shoulder] roast (about 4 pounds)
1/4 cup of worcestershire sauce
3/4 cup of light brown sugar
1 cup apple juice
1/2 teaspoon of salt
Robert’s mods:
Less worcestershire sauce (enough to cover)
Garlic salt instead of plain salt
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Sprinkle garlic salt on the roast, and slash the worcestershire sauce on there. Then pack in the brown sugar on each side taking care to rub it in so it sticks. Pour the Apple juice into an oven safe pot. Place the roast in the pot, fat side up. Cover tightly and put in the oven. Immediately turn down the heat to 200 degrees. Let it sit in the oven for at least 5 hours (I did about six).
When finished, the pork should easily pull apart with a fork. Shred the entire roast and place in a bowl, pour the remaining juice over the pork (you might want to skim it first). This stuff be fantastic.
Beef and Daikon Radish Soup
Now that the kitchen is heated up and starting to smell good (and the cat is going nuts in the other room), start on your second project which will make a good meal for the next day.
2 pounds of boneless chuckroast
2 large daikon radishes (sliced into rounds and split in half)
4 Medium sized carrots (chopped)
1 and 1/2 large yellow onion (chopped)
1 cup of chopped celery (more if you like celery)
1 small can of tomato paste
Lots of fresh thyme
1 teaspoon of oregano
4 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon of worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 teaspoon of garlic salt (ok maybe more)
1 quart of beef stock
1 quart of water
Cracked pepper to taste
Instructions:
Dice the chuckroast into small cubes (like 1/2 inch diameter) and trim as much fat as you can. Add olive oil to a large, heavy soup pot and over high heat, brown the cubes of chuck roast sprinkling worcestershire and garlic salt over it. You can add a turn or two of black pepper at this point. Make sure you completely brown the chuck until the water has cooked out and all you have left is beef and sizzling fat. Add the chopped onion and celery and cook until they begin to soften, 4-5 mins. Add radishes, carrot and garlic, sautee for an additional 1-2 minutes. Add tomato paste, beef stock and water. While you’re bringing the whole mixture to a boil, add the oregano and put in about a tablespoon of fresh thyme (well to taste). I don’t remember how much I put in, but it was a lot.
Once the soup comes to a boil, cover and reduce the heat to simmer it for a good hour, or until the daikon has softened. You can serve it at this point or allow it to cool on the stove and place in the fridge overnight to let everything steep together. Your patience will be rewarded.
After yelling that at the TeeVee commentators on the sunday shows who called it everything but, I read Sullivan’s skewering of the pro-torture “enhanced interrogation” crowd’s defense of the indefensible.
Moreover, it is worth pointing out that even if you accept the preposterous notion that waterboarding isn’t torture - something no legal authority in human history ever has before Dick Cheney came along - and even if you accept the amazingly detailed limits that Bradbury placed on the frequency and severity of waterboarding to make it “legal,” even then, we now know that the CIA violated those standards.
Anyone who participated in these war crimes should have the evidence against them weighed and appropriate measures taken. Prosecution for some, embarrassment and professional ruin for others. Let’s start with impeaching Bybee, the sham he put on at OLC should be enough to end his legal career.
I’ve been fascinated with Dubai since they started direct flights from SF and advertising them heavily. At first I thought it was kind of a mid-east Las Vegas: vast stretches of ridiculous urban development in the middle of a desert. I think the reality is much, much different.
Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.
…
As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don’t like it, the company told him, go home. “But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket,” he said. “Well, then you’d better get to work,” they replied.
Ugh. Just ugh. All this makes me feel extremely fortunate.
So protesting stuff is a matter of tradition in San Francisco. There’s all kinds, from the ones you don’t hear about to the massive market street demonstrations that properly get permits to shut down lanes and allow buses to be rerouted. My favorite/most hated variety are the type that take obscure issues and foist them upon us San Franciscans by preventing us from going home. Bonus points for property damange. The best ones are timed with the 5pm rush hour to inflict maximum pain.
Note: I’m being this specific because I don’t want to conflate any of this with the good kind of public demonstrations, for example, the candle light march at the conclusion of Milk is particularly moving and is very much woven into the fabric of the culture of this city.
So what happened on Monday that cost me 45 mins on the bus ride home? A former Berkeley tree sitter was critically injured when he went to Israel and got hit in the head with a tear gas canister at a pro-Palestinian rally. I feel bad for the dude, clearly he’s passionate about his cause. Without commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m pretty clueless as to why it’s necessary to have a rally in San Francisco that stops people from getting home, fucks up people’s cars and assaults some police officers. I’m sure Cricket would be proud of everyone who went out there to inflict misery on the city and beat up some cops and cars. The Israeli police forces will certainly be reviewing their crowd suppression practices after this public outcry.
From the Chronicle editorial board:
Their purpose clearly was not to express ideas, but to interfere with the lives of other people, particularly people with real jobs and places to go. And for some - those who showed up with masks because they planned on breaking the law - the point was to disrupt and intimidate citizens.
I don’t agree with the sneering attitude of the columnist on Monday’s market street demonstration and I think many of her points could have been made more potently had she decided to forgo the smugness and ad hominem name calling. But honestly, who do these people think they are and what do they think we are going to do about the fact that their buddy got fucked up because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Oh well, and Cricket, if you’re out there, I hope it made your day that your friends caused some misery half way around the world on your behalf.
Jill and I just got the first produce box of year (what a friggin’ growing season we have in SF!) and among the goodies were some amazing looking italian parsley, beets, and spring garlic. Spring garlic is the stuff that looks like scallions but tastes like garlic instead of onion. I usually try to substitute the garlic for scallions in recipes with mixed results. This time, fresh off of watching the mayo episode of good eats, I went for the gold. I’ve been hearing the benefits of homemade mayo from all sorts of people and have been dying the try it out, and I have to say, the results were amazing. The recipe below comes from the Two Small Farms website (our CSA).
The mayo comes out with a good dose of garlic flavor, but light and fluffy with a nice rich taste to it. Nothing like the strong flavor of packaged mayo. Put it this way, I happily spread the garlic mayo over toast and thoroughly enjoyed it. In contrast, I’d never eat store bought mayo as the primary flavoring for anything (yuck).
Anyway, here’s the goods. You’ll need a food processor and lots of patience (though it really only takes like 20 minutes to make this).
Ingredients:
- 4 stalks of spring garlic, prepared like a leek (cut the green parts off, and chop the white parts roughly. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take much to get the garlic flavor in there)
- 2 eggs
- 3 tea spoons of lemon juice
- 2 tea spoons of white wine vinegar
- 1 tea spoon of dijon mustard
- 1/2 tea spoon of salt
- 1 1/4 cups of vegetable oil (I used soy oil)
Directions:
Everything but the vegetable oil goes in the food processor and whipped together thoroughly (use the blade attachment). At this point, set the food processor pretty high (I did the ‘puree’ setting) and slowly drizzle the oil in. I mean like painfully slow. In fact, my processor has a food pusher with a tiny hole in it. I filled the pusher and let it drizzle in over the course of about 20 minutes. After the oil is in, let it go for a minute or two and voila! You should have fresh mayo.
I can’t wait to use this stuff on sandwiches and on the leftover mushroom burgers from the other night. In the mean time, I’ve been spreading a thin layer on toast. Yes, it’s that good.
Everything imaginary chess is supposed to be: