Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Ayam kuluyuk

9 september 2008, selasa sore,

Dah dari kemarin2 kepingin bgt makan ayam keluyuk ini....so baru hari ini deh terlaksana...tinggal bumbuin tuh ayam pake kecap inggris, garam lada...trus taroh kulkas deh, ditinggal pergi kursus drive. PUlangnya baru nyempetin goreng, n bikin saosnya...tinggal ditumis deh pake bwg putih n bwg bombai...wah hasilnya enak juga...

Richelieu?

September 9

I’ve mentioned before that Greg Lindsay is a smart guy, and now we have documentation, as he is a Jeopardy! champion.
He’s also popular, and so despite the fact that Gawker insists on portraying him as an irredeemable dufus at every opportunity, he maintains very good standing among New York media and was able to fill the Barrow St. Alehouse (or at least the back half of it) with supporters (some, it’s true, who were not in the media) to cheer him on.
And boy did the show start out badly for him. The other two contestants were competing to answer questions (or, rather, provide questions for answers in Jeopardy!’s silly but signature gimmick) while he seemed to just stand there, finally jumping in with a guess to an answer he didn’t know, knocking him $600 in the hole.
He rallied with sports questions and a few other odd facts, but the champion was just a terrifying, vicious woman who seemed to have mastered the buzzer, and much of Double Jeopardy! was a relentless sweep by her. But Greg did manage to buzz in for an obvious question (the answer was a video one, had someone sitting in colonial-era stocks, which the contestants were supposed to identify, which was easy since Wall Street was mentioned somewhere in there).
And then came the final Double Jeopardy! answer, which was a Daily Double that Greg had all to himself. It was another video one: the interior of Virginia’s first legislature, which also was the first legislative body in the colonies, which Greg was required to identify (he had bet $6,000 of his $6,200, “to keep it sporting,” he said on the show).
The question is obvious — obvious! — if you remember your sixth grade American history, which Greg had temporarily forgotten.
The Greg on TV actually answered relatively quickly and with some confidence, but the Greg in the bar said they edited out the several seconds during which he just stood there, the answer shrouded in the deep recesses of his mind until, at the last instant, it sprang forth into his consciousness and he said "The House of Burgesses.” Right! That put him in second place.
Final Jeopardy category: The Vatican.
Commercial break, time to chat.
Greg’s bright, but his friends are no dunces either. I had spent the pre-show interval chatting mostly with his friend Dom, who used to be a physicist until he decided to go into finance. He said he didn't want to live in the small college towns where physicists live. Presumably, he also wanted to make money.
His specialty was solid-state physics. In particular, he had been working on dealing with the metal in electronic circuitry that soon would become so thin that quantum mechanics would have to be taken into account.
See, down at the quantum level, particles behave randomly — at least individual particles do. But as an aggregate, it’s possible to chart a curve as to how most of them are likely to behave. It’s also possible to change the shape of that chart based on what other materials are in contact with that metal.
Now, the metal in electronics isn’t thin enough (a few hundred angstroms, say) for us to concern ourselves with that right now, but it will be in the next couple of decades, and our scientists are getting ready. Which I think is really cool.
But now Dom is involved in debt structuring, which is of course very important these days. Among other things, he’s looking back on what assumptions were wrong that caused the current mortgage crisis — you know, like that it’s a good idea to lend money to people who don’t have a history of paying it back.
I believe one definition of insanity is believing you will get different results by repeating the same actions.
And now, Final Jeopardy!
The answer is:
I didn’t actually write down the answer, but it had something to do with a statue currently being built in the Vatican of someone who was imprisoned there in the 17th Century.
Any guesses? A good chunk of the crowd in the ale house suggested Galileo. Turns out they were right. So was Greg and, to everyone’s shock and delight, the crazy champion guessed Richelieu.
Richelieu? Really? What a bizarre guess, and of course it was wrong.
I mean, Richelieu?
And the crowd went wild!
It was a lot of fun.
People cleared out pretty fast after that, although I did have a chance to catch up with Lockhart Steele of the Curbed empire, which of course includes Eater, which was kind enough to link to this blog yesterday. That explains why yesterday’s visitors included riff raff making idiotic comments as opposed to the usually very fine visitors who stop by.
Then Greg and his wife, the excellent Sophie Donelson, were heading to Arturo’s for pizza and invited people to join them.
I was the only one who took them up on their invitation, which could have been awkward but I don’t think it was.
Among other things we discussed was pizza, and how, Greg observed, in New York we were minimalists: To us, pizza is about the sauce, the crust and the cheese. One extra topping is acceptable, or maybe two if we’re feeling a bit louche.
Greg, however, is from Illinois and wants more on his pizza, and so we had Arturo’s fiesta: sausage, mushroom, pepper and onion.

Blais’s glory

September 9

I’ve never had enough fame to know what it really does to a person. I’m not sure I’d handle it very well. Back when Rocco DiSpirito was declared “Sexiest Chef Alive” by People, and the magazine ran a picture with his shirt open and his chest oiled up, I went on the record as saying that if a magazine declared me the sexiest food writer alive I’d totally unbutton my shirt and spread on the oil.
So I can’t fault Richard Blais, who was a promising chef with a budding career, for deciding to become a contestant on Top Chef, or, after his season was over, for deciding to leave high-end dining to focus on opening a burger joint. I like burgers.
But one of my colleagues was working on a story about him as chef at Home in Atlanta, and then the story had to be scrapped when we found out last night that he has left the restaurant, or maybe that he was made to leave.
It’s a drag when you have to scrap a story.
From representatives of Home: “We wish Richard all the best on his individual endeavors, but his focus was not at Home with all his additional projects going on.”
Those include a burger joint, speaking engagements and some sort of Top Chef reunion tour.
Restaurant management continues: "We will promote Jeff Wright to be the Executive Chef from Sous Chef. Jeff has been the backbone of the kitchen since day one and we are thrilled to have him lead the kitchen and continue with the incredible food the team and him put out every day.”
So, congratulations to Jeff Wright.

Turnedo

Iván Ferreiro - Turnedo

Turnedo es una canción que habla de rencores y de lo que sentimos cuando nos abandonas, pero ¿alguien la ha escuchado alguna vez desde el otro punto de vista, es decir, desde el que se marcha? ¿Alguien se ve reflejado con aquella persona que pasea por la playa bajo la lluvia, aquella que grita que el otro no es capaz de quedarse? ¿Alguien que no quiere que lo quieran, sólo quieren que lo abracen...?

Nunca me he sentido así del todo, pero es algo en lo que pienso a menudo. Indudablemente, el que se marcha suele sufrir menos que el que se queda... pero nadie tiene en cuenta nunca sus sentimientos, ya que es "el malo" de la película.

Me han dejado muchas veces (con motivos, sin motivos aparentes... como a tod@s), y al escuchar Turnedo, veo los rostros de todas esas personas; y es tal vez por ello que no siento rencor, porque sé ponerme en el lugar del otro. Dolor, pena, dudas... pero rencor... ¿para qué?.

El rencor te ayuda a sobrevivir algún tiempo, pero no alimenta una vida; la vida hay que llenarla con otro tipo de sentimientos... amor, odio, esperanza, alegría, tristeza... pero no con rencor.

Creo que ya se ha dicho por ahí... yo quiero que me abracen, que de querer y lo demás ya me encargaré yo... voy sobrada de esos sentimientos.

Self Preservation, Part One

For the rural dwelling wild food fan, early autumn is undoubtedly the pinnacle of the year. With a profoundly disappointing summer (how I despise living up to the stereotype of an Englishman talking about the weather but it is relevant, and, according to anthropologists, performs an important social function but we’ll ignore that for the moment) the leaves have turned earlier and the hedgerows are positively aching under the weight of countless blackberries, the branches of apple trees bow thanks to the sheer number of fruit and the white flowers of the elder have turned into full clusters of tiny, deep purple berries. There is a banquet just waiting to be collected.

And so that’s exactly what we did.



The countryside that surrounds our house is vast and empty with numerous pathways and hedgerows crossing the fields from which to gather this wonderful bounty free of charge. We went out a couple of weeks ago armed with no more than a couple of bags and a keen eye and came back laden with tasty goodies.

Even though it was early and many of the blackberries on the brambles were little more than tightly packed red nuggets, there were a good number that were fully ripe, deep in colour and delightfully sweet. By the time we’d half filled a bag, my fingers (and lips) were stained with a familiar purple that beautifully illustrates the season.



The fruit of the blackthorn, also known as sloes, was also ripe and ready to be picked over to make a batch of sloe vodka. The hidden thorns can be a pain and I regretted not packing any gloves but the haul was worth getting scratched for, certainly enough to make a litre, or so, of sweet and leg-wobblyingly strong vodka that should be ready by this time next year.

We also came across two walnut trees whose fruit, the same colour as the leaves, was hidden within the thick canopy above us. It was hard work and involved a great deal of jumping and grabbing of branches but we ended up with two or three kilos of unripe walnuts (that bare no resemblance to the wrinkled little brains that they become once they’ve been cracked) to pickle, providing the shells haven’t begun to form.



Finally, we couldn’t pass up the thousands of elderberries that seemed to be covering every other tree along our route. By the time we returned home we had an entire bag full of bunches of these tiny little berries.



The plan was to transform this haul of fresh, seasonal produce, along with the glut of courgettes from the garden, into a series of jams, pickles, jellies, alcoholic drinks and chutneys, so after a trip to the supermarket to buy the necessary items we set to work…

www.justcookit.co.uk