On my recent trip to the Midwest I brought some cheese curds back to my coworkers. This is a variation on the standard curd that has dill in it.
To keep the curds as fresh as possible, I only allowed my coworkers to eat them in the refrigerated walk-in. Here’s Jeremiah tasting cheese curds for the first time.
Bunnies are little more interesting than squirrels, don’t you think?
Saw this one and its twin frolicking in someone’s yard while biking down Chicon. I seem to see unattended livestock every couple of months. There’s a guinea hen near 51st St. that has a habit of sleeping in the road, standing on one leg, its head tucked under its wing. And chickens are pretty common. I once saw a chicken in the Target parking lot. It kept running under SUVs as I tried to catch it.
Whenever I see unattended livestock, I always wonder if I should catch it and try to eat it. But then I wonder if its owner wants it running around like that.
My co-worker Matty says he’s seen these bunnies there before. "I’ve stopped my bike to play with them," he said.
"Really? The bunnies let you play with them?"
"Actually," he said, "that part didn’t work out so good."
There are a series of required activities and events for anyone wanting to get into the holiday spirit. One of those things is to eat lots and lots of lutefisk. Another is to walk among the luminaries at the Hancock golf course.
That’s my food-frakking deputy, Julia, standing at the tip of a christmas tree made of candle-lit luminaries.
There are certain obvious technical restraints when it comes to photographing a pitch-black golf course, dotted with candles. In person, it’s a tranquil and magical moment amid the blizzard of holiday emotions. It doesn’t record well, as you can see in this picture of a water hazard surrounded by lights. The white blurs are discrete droplets of the quiet mist that blanketed the night.
They set these up at the Hancock golf course for only two nights, and then it’s back to just being a golf course. It’s probably my favorite holiday light-based event. Much better than Transsiberian Orchestra.
As the holiday’s approach, we turn to food to remind us what it means to be an American. And nothing is more American than burgers. Take for instance this burger from Burger Tex.
It’s called the "bulgoki burger." Instead of boring old hamburger, it uses Korean barbecue meat.
Here’s another patriotic food, the Dallas wings from Hillbert’s.
Tastes just like Dallas, greasy and bony.
You’ve probably seen Jeremiah before. Here we see him voluntarily consuming a bottle of Jone’s Soda Company pumpkin pie soda.
He let me taste some. It goes in the category of things that aren’t quite as disgusting as you think they ought to be.
Barbecued oysters from a seafood place down by Caesar Chavez.
This was actually not disgusting at all. It’s on the threshold of not belonging on this blog at all.
Now, if I were to use the phrase "Waco gas station," what would be the first thing to go through your head? If you’re like me, the first thing you would think is, "I sure hope there’s an entire wall of locally produced pickles of various types."
The Oma’s Choice squash might actually taste better than the cucumbers.
Speaking of pickles, at a gas station on the East Side of Austin I found this pickled sausage.
If pickles and hotdogs had an affair, their mutant love child would be exactly like this.
During a recent dinner with Julia, we fried up some carniceria fajitas.
One of the signs that I’m moving up in the world, I recently bought some of the frozen udon ramen noodles.
They’re pre-hydrated! They cost a little more than a buck per serving, but as a hedonist, I figure that I deserve to pamper myself with some high-class ramen. I even put some dumplings in there.
Also pretty classy is this bowl of jjajang noodles (noodles covered with a slightly sweet black bean paste).
The instructions for preparing this were five steps long, virtually eliminating the convenience advantage of ramen.
My pal Peter Gabriel and I took a pilgrimage down to La Mexicana on South First this week. I love that place. It’s a bakery with table seating and a torta menu. They also have filled up their extra lobby space with little entrepreneur booths, people selling fruit cups, car insurance, and phone cards. Because I am the person I am, I ordered the item on the menu that I didn’t recognize.
It’s called "pambazo" (although I could have sworn they spelled it "panbrazos" which means "bread arms"). It’s filled with picadillo de res (ground beef), crema, and ruffle-cut french fries (!!!). The bun was prepared with a slathering of a red chili paste (on the outside!) and then fried. If you had to invent sandwiches from scratch, and you were ten years old, this is the sandwich you would make. Which is to say it’s amazing.
Of course I couldn’t visit La Mexican without buying some bakery products. The triangular one is an empanada filled with an apple paste.
The one on the right with the hole in the middle might very well have been the lightest and crispest baked good I have ever tasted. At least a third of it’s mass turned to crumbs as I ate.
I want to give everybody a final warning, there’s less than a month to enter in the 8 Minutes anthology contest run by our good friend D.D. Tannenbaum.
The theme of the anthology/contest is pretty simple: "Something has happened to the Sun. In 8 minutes, everything changes!" Does that whet your creative juices? Are you, even now, ruminating on possible story concepts? Would your story be dramatic and violent? Would it be something personal and poignant?
Now, I don’t think you should enter to get a shot at the fabulous prize money, or to get your work in front of the most award winning writer in Sci-Fi history, Mike Resnick. You should enter this contest because you are a science fiction writer, and because you know in your one-or-more heart(s) that you are better, smarter, and more talented than all the other writers out there.
You deserve this opportunity to beat your so-called colleagues at their own game.
Unless you don’t think you’re that great a writer. Then you shouldn’t bother entering.
Chicago is a city of mystery, of city of finance, a city of fashion. But most importantly, it is a city hot dogs. Here’s a hot dog-oriented journal of my recent visit to the Windy City.
At the Shedd aquarium, unprotected from a blustery wind coming off Lake Michigan, one can find a little family-run hot dog cart. Befitting its pedigree, it’s a very authentic Chicago dog. It has a beef hot dog, kept in a steam tray, wrapped in a slightly mooshy bun from a steam tray, topped with a pickle that’s larger than the meat, decorated with uranium-green relish, and sprinkled with celery salt.
The sign by the cart’s window states in no uncertain terms that "a hot dog with everything does NOT include ketchup."
My brother-in-law took the family down to Hot Doug’s, a hot dog restaurant that you may have read about in the shoutbox to the right.
The walls are covered with ironic hot dog-themed content
The big draw is the specialty hot dogs.
My sister got a regular Chicago dog, but it was served grilled. The slight char around the outside gave it a brilliant flavor and an extra backyard kick.
Julia got the rib-eye dog, a meaty whirlwind of dogness.
Out of a sense of duty if nothing else, I had to sample the foie gras dog. Let me quote the description from Doug’s website:
"Foie Gras and Sauternes Duck Sausage with Truffle Aioli, Foie Gras Mousse and Sel Gris"
I am still in awe. This is not merely a tube-based meat product, this is a conceptual triumph. It has taken the lowest, most humble of cuisines and transmogrified it into an expression of royal perfection. If the Queen of England were to visit Chicago, she could do no worse than to wrap her lips around this rod of juicy duck flesh. Thank you, Doug. Thank you for your obsessive exploration of excellence.
On the way out of Chicago, I had one last chance to dog it up at the airport. Essentially every food counter at Midway sells hot dogs. This one was a queer variation from Chicago dog dogma. It was a quarter-pound pork dog(tasted like a Decker), served with regular-shade green relish. All the condiments were served still in their travel packets.
The lady gave me a couple of packets of ketchup. I’ve never been so insulted in my life.
For those of you who regularly contribute to Space Squid, you might have noticed that the return times are a lot better than normal. That is due to the hard work of Space Squid’s new assistant editor, Elle Van Hensbergen. Reading the slush is one of the biggest drains on Space Squid energy and resources, so we’re all very lucky that Elle is volunteering her time.
At the moment, we’re standing at well over a hundred submissions and only two fiction subs have been accepted. Which is to say it’s a wide open market! So send in your stories, your flash, and your apocrypha, and you can expect the high level of editorial service that has become synonymous with the name Space Squid.
For those of you who are interested in volunteering your time and resources to this skeezy little zine, drop me a line on the Space Squid submissions email. There will be additional volunteer opportunities in the coming months, such as stapling, mailing, and research.
I certainly hope you’ve seen this already, but if you haven’t, you really should check out the Symphony of Science project that autotunes Carl Sagan to create a truly magnificent video, A Glorious Dawn.
I’m not going to lie to you, I cried a bit watching that. Of course I also cry when I hear the music from Gojira.
But before you listen to Carl’s song, I want you to recall the stopsign solar system project I did earlier.
As it turns out, I wasn’t entirely correct in some of the details. As a recap, if the sun were the size of a stopsign, then the Earth would be about a block and a half away, and the nearest star would be on the other side of the planet, somewhere in China.
Here’s where I was wrong: Alpha Centauri is not the nearest star to Earth. It is the nearest star system. Alpha Centauri is, strictly speaking, three stars, or a trinary system. If I were to make a scale model of Alpha Centauri out on Clarkson Rd. and 53rd St., I would have two suns, each slightly larger than a stopsign, one of which would be at Clarkson Rd. and 53rd., and the other would be roughly the distance of Saturn’s orbit, or down near 49th Street. These two stars orbit each other roughly every 80 years, but for the microscopic humans living on the lima-bean-sized Earth over in China, these two suns (Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B) would look like a single, reasonably bright star in their sky.
The nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, the supposed companion to Alpha Centauri A and B. Proxima Centauri is about 12,000 AU away from the other pair, so by the stopsign scale it would be out by Birmingham, Alabama. A significant distance, but hardly China.
Now here is why I brought this up. This next piece of information is going to help you put the universe into a still more accurate perspective, thereby allowing you to appreciate Carl Sagan’s autotuned lyrics that much better. Here it is, the core concept:
The nearest star to Earth is not visible with the naked eye.
Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, a relatively small and cool star. Red dwarf’s are some of the oldest stars in the universe because they’re so small. The hydrogen convects throughout their mass, fusing into helium in a slow and even manner that will gently smolder for billions upon billions of freaking years. Essentially until something really horrible happens to the universe in general.
It’s believed that red dwarfs make up the majority of the universe, but they only say that because we see a good deal of them in our immediate stellar neighborhood. Red dwarfs are too dim to be seen at any large distance from Earth, even with the most powerful telescopes, so it’s just a reasonable guess that they’re everywhere.
You may have heard the theory of the Nemesis Star. It’s possible that our solar system has a red dwarf companion the same way Alpha Centauri does, a star somewhere beyond the oort cloud that causes periodic showers of extinction-causing comets. Now you’re probably thinking, how could there be a star out by our stellar Birmingham, and nobody knows about it? Well, think about it, you’re the size of a microbe and you’re standing out on Clarkson, looking in the direction of Birmingham, or even just Bastrop. You’re only going to see something half the size of a stopsign if it’s pretty damn bright.
Question of the day. What’s the most famous recurring comet we know of? It’s Halley’s Comet: http://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery/is-seeing-a-comet-like-halley-s-a-once-in-a-lifetime-event/
But that’s why we have powerful telescopes and sky mapping software. If there is a Nemesis Star, it’s already been mapped and recorded. We just don’t know how far away it is. With red dwarfs it’s hard to calculate their distance because of their low luminosity. The Nemesis Star could have fallen between the cracks. A star in a haystack of stars.
So I hope that gives the universe a little more depth. Now go and listen to Carl Sagan, and when he mentions the galaxy-rise of 400 billion stars, remember that most of those stars are so dim that their light was lost in the great darkness before even their closest neighbors could see it.
In this blog I have often explored the esoteric cuisine’s of other cultures, but rarely have I had the chance to frak food from my own heritage. Yesterday, Julia and I drove three hours into the Texas hinterland for the chance to taste lutefisk.
For those of you who are not of Norwegian descent, you have probably only heard lutefisk mentioned as a passing joke on NPR’s "Prairie Home Companion." Lutefisk is cod that has been cured in lye. Cooking and re-hydration makes it edible, but it’s general knowledge that it never tastes particularly good. My grandfather made it for the family once, over Christmas, and I distinctly remember it tasting like a bowl of fish Jello.
But Norwegian-Americans don’t eat lutefisk because it tastes good. Eating lutefisk over the holidays is an act of communion. It’s a way to remember the hardships of ancestors who crossed an ocean looking for a better life.
In Minnesota and Wisconsin, lutefisk can be acquired through a few specialty shops, theme restaurants, and yearly church dinners. In Texas, to my knowledge, you can only get lutefisk at the annual lutefisk dinner in Cranfills Gap.
I was feeling sad that I wasn’t going to be seeing too much of my family this year, so I went online and found this dinner. Cranfills Gap is part of a Norwegian enclave somewhat west of Waco. For years they have been throwing the lutefisk dinner as a fundraiser for the school’s sports teams.
So I filled out the PDF form and mailed in my check. The school secretary mailed me back with my tickets and a letter with the school’s phone number and her home number too, just in case I had any questions.
Cranfills Gap is about an hour and a half from any major highway, and the googlemaps directions had us driving through the sketchiest one-lane backroads you can imagine, but we got there eventually. While we waited to be seated at the dinner, we sat in the school gymnasium, where they had a little ethnic fair. I bought a recipe book from the booth run by the local Methodist church. They also had children and old folks in traditional garb performing traditional folk dances. You know, like the chicken dance.
Then we were seated in the school cafeteria, where high school girls in traditional Norwegian waitress costumes bustled about with handkerchiefs pinned over their head. The meal was served "family style" which meant sitting at the long cafeteria tables with a bunch of strangers and asking them to pass the gravy and potatoes. Which worked out pretty well. Everyone was friendly and helpful. It was sometimes a little quiet, but that’s to be expected with a table full of Norwegian-Americans who don’t know each other and are having a very serious moment reaffirming their heritage by eating as much as they can. Most of the people weren’t actually from the town. Some had driven down from Dallas because their grandparents had lived in Cranfills Gap and they weren’t ready to leave the traditions behind.
There was plenty of side dishes, gravy, and turkey. And when you sat down at an empty spot there was already a slice of pie waiting for you. But everyone was there for the lutefisk. People would say, "Would you please pass The Fish," or "You’re giong to want some white sauce for The Fish," with subtly inflected capitals.
The lutefisk itself was devilishly difficult to photograph. It has virtually no color. And hardly any taste really. It was slightly gelatinous, slightly fishy, and mainly bland. Here’s a couple of photos with different color settings so you can get an idea for what it looked like.
After the dinner, Julia and I went to the back of the school to the "fish shack," a building which I presume was made specifically for the preparation and storage of a notoriously difficult and smelly food. The shack has two doors toward the back. One door is stainless steel and leads to a refrigeration unit and the pre-prepared lutefisk. The other door is made from barn wood and sits crooked on its hinges. This is where they keep the dried and unprepared lutefisk. The girl who went back there to fetch me a half pound of uncooked lutefisk brought it out unwrapped in her bare hands. They gave me a bag for it as an afterthought, just so it would be easier to carry.
Not that it actually fit in the bag. But not to worry, in this stage it’s technically not a food product. Technically it’s a toxin.
Once back in Austin, Julia and I went to a party, where I passed around the lutefisk. It was indeed the hit of the party.
In my ongoing series on my recent trip to Chicago, I would like to show you some of the things I put in my mouth.
The journey begins in the airport at Austin, where I have an early morning breakfast that consists of the most expensive and worst tasting breakfast taco I’ve ever bought.
You can clearly see the slice of American cheese.
Looking for some Chicago-style pizza, we wander into a restaurant that actually has "pizza" in its title, only to discover that they don’t actually serve pizzas at all. They do have this pizza pot-pie, that’s all the fixings for a pizza baked in a dish, and then inverted onto your plate.
The Mexican groceries in Chicago appear functionally identical to the ones in Austin. But Julia, the food-frakking deputy, pointed out these series of advertisements for Jell-o dishes.
Near where we were staying there was a Mediterranean grocery and bakery. So I bought this flatbread straight out of the oven, and then we smeared it with labna, some sort of yogurt thing.
The flatbread was about the size of an extra-large pizza and piping hot. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in a while was not buying two of them.
I also got this "traditional floss-style halvah."
Imagine cotton candy flavored like pistachios and sesame paste.
These Turkish cookie things prove once again, that only America should be allowed to make cheap cream-filled cookies.
Then Ms. Thora took Julia and me to see a meat and sausage shop in the Lincoln Plaza area.
They had a bowl of turkey necks right out on the counter. They were only 50cents each!
Yum! Julia satisfies her turkey neck craving.
There is surprisingly little meat on them turkey necks.
I also had the deli guy shave off a pound of the "Tongue Blood Head Cheese."
The deli boy said that it was probably good as a cold sandwich meat, but he was too candy ass to have tried it for himself, so he didn’t really know.
It tasted exactly like wafer-thin sheets of tongue packed in gelatinous blood paste.