On Wisconsin

Two videos from the protests:

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest Pt 2 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Boycott

After a month of travel, working long days in hotel rooms and working more at night (either on computer or, more draining still, in company of dinner work meetings), no dip in the pool (it was winter in Senegal), goofy malaria politics, multiple last minute presentations, and an overall positive outcome, I will be boycotting being awake for the next five days.

See you next week.

All That's Solid Melts into the Olive Oil

Jamie Oliver's recipes are always full of both extraneous detail and approximation. Makes for fun reading, but sometimes a little hesitation once I start cooking-- a "large handful of pine nuts," a "glug" of olive oil. Clearly he wants home cooks to relax--just a glug--whatever, don't worry about the amounts so much. Instead, here I am anxiously wondering, is Jamie's glug bigger than mine? How about his wine glass, since the primary liquid in the pasta con accughe e pomodoro [pasta with anchovies, pine nuts and raisins] is "a large wine glass of red?" As in, filled to the brim, or just a few good glugs' worth? 3/4 of a cup seemed a bit much, but (OK, point Jamie) it also seemed not to matter. And the anchovies truly did "melt" away into the olive oil and if you had a decent exhaust-fan for the cooking you could probably even serve this meal to the anchovy-phobic. Perfectly delicious with half the pine nuts and twice the anchovies, if there are truly 24 fillets in that tiny can. But if you've only thought to check after dumping into the sizzling oil, you can't count them once they're there, because they melt.

How to Pickle Green Tomatoes

1) Try Bittman. Try McGee. Try Vegetarian Epicure. Nope. Now try the internet.
2) Note that all the recipes involve parboiling and spices you don't have and the slicing of tomatoes.
3) Decide that for "parboiling" you will substitute colander-rinse, and for "pickling spice" you will use coriander seed and extra salt because you have coriander seed and extra salt. Re: slicing--oh please, these are tiny green unripe cherry tomatoes. No slicing.
4) Plunk the [rinsed, not boiled] tomatoes into small mason jar containing mixture of white and cider vinegar, salt, coriander seed and a little water.
5) Taste one two days later. It's terrible, but that's because it tastes exactly like a tiny green unripe cherry tomato. What did you expect?
6) Taste one two days later. It's terrible, and this time there is an additional taste. That is the taste of resignation. Acknowledge that perhaps boiling, pickling spice or slicing is as necessary as all of the world's Internets decreed.
7) There's still no pickling spice, there will be no boiling 4 days in, and re: slicing, see 3). Poke the larger tomatoes with a fork on the theory that it will speed the vinegar's absorption into the obstinate and oblong pale green marbles, and return to the fridge door. Then take them back out and add some more vinegar. The extra vinegar will have no effect.
8) Forget about them.
9) One month later, next to barbecue sauce you moved from the old house despite it being a year out-of-date even then, you discover pickled green tomatoes. And you know what? Puckery goodness. Hah! Take that, internets.
10) Eat another. Eat them all, actually, because some folk will not eat pickled things, not even these miracles of edible, crisp-tender jade. Yes, Keller, it gives me particular pleasure that I achieved crisp-tenderness without a stockpot's worth of boiling water or a delta's worth of salt.
11) Rejoice, knowing that the solution, as is always the case when someone is wrong on the internet, is time, vinegar[y prose] and poking with a fork.

Dakar

All is well in Dakar. The training we're leading is going well and the participants are very interested, and working hard on their communication strategies. We're making a lot of notes as to what's confusing for them and what can be improved the next time - much of it has to do with simple things like layout of the worksheets, and having shortcut icons for them to the web-based software we're using (oh, technology - a blessing and a curse!).

Last night we had a girls night out at the Dakar bowling alley, Red Bowl. Hot music videos on big screens above the lanes, a dark corner full of pool tables and very serious men, dark lounge atmosphere with fluorescent accent lighting and booming techno.



Kerri, an old friend from Gabon via Cameroon, now a fellow with the Congressional Hunger Center and CRS, joined us, and we discovered that Claudia had heard about her appendix removal from friends in Bamako, and that Andrea had heard about her malaria episode through mutual friends. Small world strikes again.

Afterwards we headed to a mysterious sushi buffet place, which turned out to be the same Korean restaurant that Andrea and I had tried earlier in the week (and which had no sushi on the menu). For a very reasonable price we got all we could eat nagiri, sashimi, shrimp tempura, bulgogi, various veggies, nems, dumplings, and scallion pancakes. The sushi was great and I stuffed myself.

It was a nice walk back to the hotel through the Place de l'Independence, which is still lit up from the New Year's celebrations.

Finally, Chinese

It's the end of the month and what the heck have we been doing the last few weeks?

Well, for one, we finally got a decent chinese cookbook (something related to stir fries and woks. Not Breath of a Wok, but the same author). And we found an asian grocery (Asia Food on York road) where one can get various noodles and dried fungus and condiments. And dried black beans. So we made black bean chicken stir fry with mystery mustard greens in oyster sauce. Super delish. Crappy picture though:



We were so hungry I already ate the mystery mustards.

Then we had to finish the pork stock (from the PIG ROAST) so what the heck we made fake ramen, I mean, it's not Tampopo or anything, but you throw some ginger and garlic in a pot and add your pork stock and the rest of that beef stock in the fridge because ramen is all about different meats anyway, and then shoot you have those dried shiitakes burning a hole in the cupboard so throw those in, then add the leftover 2 chicken thighs (3 meats!!!) and some other mystery greens, and some soy sauce, and HELLS YEAH that's a good freakin' soup. I forgot the noodles, you have to boil those separately, and they are not ramen, but like, at this point, who cares.



Three meat soup. Right on.

Also we did the following before I jetted off to Senegal:

- Save Your Soul dance party night at the Lithuanian Hall, including tiny cups of honey liquor (viryta, not etymologically related to veritas). The soul DJ was good and the surf-rock DJ was not good.
- Dinner at Dogwood on the Ave - somewhat disappointing, next time we will stick with the small plates.
- Dinner at the bar at Salt - duck fat fries, oyster stew appetizer, and wild board tagliatelle - super delish beyond expectations. The fries came with three mayonnaises (chipotle, truffle and malt vinegar), and surprisingly, I found the tang of the malt vinegar most delectable, perhaps because it cut the richness of the duck fat a bit. Bartender was awesome and so was my Corsendonk.
- King's Speech was great. How did they find the wallpaper for Loge's office?
- bought some shelves and drilled some holes in the walls
- had Nick and Johanna and Oscar over for dinner, Kima was superb
- had Kira and Rosemary over for dinner, Kima was a bad girl
- saw Hope and new baby Anders. Thanks for the wedding gift!! It will keep us warm while cycling, obviously:

Mmm Butter

We got Ad Hoc At Home for Christmas and promptly fell to making three recipes at once from it. It was a bit chaos in the kitchen but we pulled through, flipping back and forth in one cookbook for three recipes is a challenge we will try not to repeat.

The key ingredient was butter. Clarified butter (we used ghee, meme chose) for the scallops (which were also brined for a bit), and a stick of butter for the melted leek rounds, and more butter in which the brussels sprouts and radishes were braised (after blanching the brussels sprouts - key step to avoid bitterness, apparently. Anyway it worked).


The leeks also got parboiled and the kohlrabi we didn't have was supposed to get that treatment too. The radishes ended up crisp-tender without parboiling, and not bad at all. We've had roasted and cooked radishes other places that have been mushy, and kind of boring, but these were at least toothsome, though without their radish bite. The sprouts were _delish_. And the scallops, oh, I mean, it is hard to fuck up a scallop if you are following directions, but these were great. Nicely caramelized just as advertised.



Can you see the butter?


Normally when we are cooking these 'big' dinners and running around swearing a lot something has gotten forgotten, like the starch, or the green veg, but no, we cooked everything we were supposed to! We sat down and enjoyed with a nice Pinot Grigio.

Then Josh noticed we had left the scallop pan on and the ghee, clarified though it was, was smoking. The pan is a 'workhorse' however and was no worse for wear after a brief cooling off period in the backyard.