locussolus

Riding around from club to club

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:55:23 -0600

Here's a feel-good story about an Indianapolis couple who were in a famous photograph from 1957 and didn't know it. The photo appears in Robert Frank's collection The Americans, which has just been re-released in the past month or so. We're headed to Indianapolis this weekend, and with any luck we'll find time to see the exhibit mentioned in the article.

Dusty strings

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:52:07 -0600

One of the things I planned to do when Miriam was born was learn to play the guitar, but I haven't so much as picked one up in a year now.

The other day I met some ukulele players and they taught me a few chords. It seemed easy, and now I'm contemplating getting one. Maybe that will lead me back to these guitar strings.

Territorial markers

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:23:28 -0600

Blogging obviously hasn't been a priority, but here are two quick items of interest:

1. It turns out displaying bumper stickers is correlated with more aggressive driving. More here.

2. Gregg Easterbrook has a fascinating/disturbing article on the chances that an asteroid will hit the earth and the policy implications of this problem. I don't know if it has any truth to it, but I was told by one of my political economy professors that Bill Clinton had a compulsive interest in near earth objects.

Because they're hugely more acidic

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:32:45 -0600

Time Out has a feature this week where Chicago chefs specializing in various ethnic cuisines reveal some of their favorite cheap restaurants around the city. The first chef (and the only one to appear in the online edition) is Rick Bayless, and along the way he shed some light on a discussion my wife and I were having about how sour tomatillo based sauces are:

"There are two flavor profiles in Mexican food," he says between bites of a taco at Don Pedro Carnitas: home food and street food. "Street food almost always has this super well-cooked fatty element in it that is completely balanced by straight, bright acid."
He squeezes some lime on his taco.
"When Mexicans go to Europe, they're just incredulous. There is nothing to balance all that heaviness. They consider it a really super one-dimensional cuisine. They're always reaching for a lime or a pickle or something -- an acid."
He swallows, takes another bite.

I actually bought a copy of the magazine (which is a pretty extreme move for me), and I was pleased to find that I was unfamiliar with the majority of the restaurants mentioned, even in neighborhoods I'd say I know reasonably well. Lots to try.

Masse shots are not allowed

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:41:22 -0600

The folks at Gapers Block used some of my photos to illustrate this nostalgic little piece by J. H. Palmer about Marie's Golden Cue near Kedzie and Montrose. You can see more of my photographs from pool halls here.

What you eat and where you eat it

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:22:28 -0600

Speaking of food production, yesterday Ezra Klein linked to a study showing that transportation is responsible for a much smaller portion of the greenhouse gas emissions related to food production than you might think. The conclusion there is that eating less meat (and dairy) will do much more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than eating locally.

If you haven't already seen the Mark Bittman talk on this subject, here's the link again.

An aggressive attempt to rewrite the food model

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:17:29 -0600

I am so impressed with Chipotle. We were there yesterday for the first time in a while and I noticed that all their meat is now hormone free and vegetarian fed. I don't know if that's a change or if it's just a change in the way they're promoting it. But anyway then I was reading the back of one of their soda cups and it explained that they've recently moved to the same kind of hormone free, vegetarian fed livestock for their sour cream as well.

Of course, they don't make the sour cream themselves, so they had to work with their supplier, Daisy, to ensure that the livestock supplying their milk was hormone free and vegetarian fed. What interested me about this is that Daisy is a big name in sour cream -- one you can find at your local grocer -- and they were able to work something like this out for a high volume customer like Chipotle. I'm guessing this doesn't mean all of Daisy's sour cream is hormone free and vegetarian fed, mainly because they don't mention anything about it on their website and it seems like they'd want to if they could. Still, I think it illustrates the power of a high volume customer to insist on terms -- and in this case, terms that are better for our health and the environment.

I remember reading some months ago about the Chipotle in Charlottesville VA working closely with a nearby farm to get pork that was locally raised. While the model seemed to be working in Charlottesville, there wasn't really any talk about scaling the relationship up, because there simply isn't enough capacity in locally produced pork to sustain the quantities eaten at a national chain like Chipotle. But what Chipotle does have is leverage -- leverage that could be used to change practices on a much larger scale, as they did with Daisy.

I guess my takeaway from this is just that while the current food culture tends to demonize -- or at least frown upon -- large scale food production and its methods, that's where the action is going to have to be if society is going to change its eating habits.

When it's properly used

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:04:51 -0600

If you want to play some chess online but you're intimidated by the sharks at the Internet Chess Club (where some of the best players in the world are known to play), you might check out Wuchess.com. RZA of Wu-Tang fame is apparently a chess fanatic and wanted to create a place where fans of the Wu-Tang could go for a game.

I picked this up on Gambit, the occasional chess blog at the Times, where you can review one of RZA's blitz games if you're interested.

UPDATE: Guess I missed the full article that came out today.

Specular highlights

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:57:00 -0600

I linked to these tips on how to spot a fake photo a few weeks ago, but this article from Scientific American is much more thorough.

Cheese of the week: Grand Cru Gruyere

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:09:38 -0600

This week's cheese is the Grand Cru Gruyere from Roth Käse that I mentioned the other day; I actually had a chance to try both the regular offering and the Surchoix, their top label. I don't feel entirely comfortable comparing the two, since I ate them at different times and acquired them in different places. But it's easy enough to say that they were very similar; if anything the Surchoix may not have been quite as strong as the regular Grand Cru. I recommend them both happily, and I will seek them out again myself, both to eat and to turn into quiche. They were at least as good as any Swiss Gruyere I've had occasion to eat (although to be fair I've never looked much further than my local Dominick's).

An aside: if you're planning to eat these cheeses by themselves (or with a bit of wine), I think it's worth letting them warm up to near room temperature first, because they get more flavorful. This is probably good advice for cheese in general, but I think it's especially true for this Grand Cru Gruyere.

Degenerating into a racket

Tue, 27 May 2008 06:32:31 -0600

Josh Marshall links to this fascinating (and none too sympathetic) big-picture piece by George Packer on the decline of the conservative movement and then adds some comments of his own. First of all, read the Packer piece -- it's full of historical perspective, but there's also a lot of insight into what thinkers on the right make of the current crisis.

Josh Marshall's comments go where you'd expect: looking at how the Democrats today look like the Republicans in decades past, suggesting parallels that might hint at what's coming. Maybe I'm a skeptic by nature, but it's hard for me to see Democrats as a movement right now; instead, it feels to me like they're simply reaping the benefits of huge mistakes on the other side. Suer, they're on the right side of a lot of important issues, but where is the coherent, compelling core message that explains who they are? I still have hopes that Obama will be the one to articulate that message, but it may be harder with McCain in the race.

Strange features of our universe

Sun, 25 May 2008 08:26:41 -0600

If I understand this correctly, the idea is that before the Big Bang, time was moving in the other direction. In other words, the Big Bang caused the universe to expand in all directions, including time. It's a mind bending notion, but more importantly a beautiful one -- and I think that's a big part of Sean Carroll's point about observable and unobservable features.

Cheese of the week: Midnight Moon

Sat, 24 May 2008 23:39:46 -0600

This week's cheese is Midnight Moon, a gouda-style aged goat cheese from Cypress Grove in California. I chose it because Jon suggested it in comments a couple weeks back, and also because I was determined to try something from outside the midwest after a question from Suttonhoo about cheese from the coasts. I didn't notice until I got it home that the cheese is actually manufactured in Holland and not California! But I decided to include it here anyway.

I picked it up at Target in Broadview, where they have a much better selection of serious American cheese than I would have expected from a Target. I do think the textures suffer a little from the shrinkwrapping there as compared with the paper-wrapped cheeses I get over at Marion Street, but I love that Target carries stuff from Roth Käse, Carr Valley, and other serious local cheesemakers.

I liked it, but not as much as some other reference cheeses I've had -- for example, the goat milk half of the Mobay from a couple weeks ago, or Rembrandt Gouda, which I've been eating and cooking with a lot lately. The flavor profile is very much like a gouda, but weaker and less complex. It's a dense cheese, but the texture isn't as grainy or crumbly as I'd like. Still, it's a pleasant enough cheese for eating, and it would be good to cook with too -- in an omelet, maybe? I'd like to give it another go at some point, particularly if I see it at Marion Street.

When in Rome

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:05:45 -0600

I've missed a week on the cheese of the week, but there's one coming soon -- hopefully tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a shot from our visit yesterday to the Wisconsin Dairy State Chees Company in Rudolph, about 20 minutes from Stevens Point. We didn't do a tour or anything -- in fact, they apparently make cheese there every day of the week except Wednesday, so we missed out on that. What we were able to do was marvel at the incredible variety of cheese they had in their shop and sample the ice cream. We left with some cheese curds (not my favorite thing in the world, although I do like them fried) and a nice wedge of Grand Cru Gruyere from Roth Käse, something I'd been wanting to try for a while. Yum.

Less meat, less junk, more plants

Wed, 21 May 2008 22:19:23 -0600

Mark Bittman's braising plus broiling technique reminds me a lot of my mom's method for adobo, a version of which I posted a while back on Too Many Chefs. For the adobo I skip initial browning step and really brown the heck out of it near the end -- this way there's no need to add oil.

Meanwhile here's Bittman speaking pretty compellingly on what's wrong with our meat-heavy diet.