Joy Ray

Come on, guys

If you're a guy, and you're on a plane, and an obviously pregnant woman is struggling to hoist her roller bag into an overhead bin, and you're standing right next to her...give her a hand.  It will take you five minutes and you'll look like a hero.  And not a chump.  Especially if you happen to be in a airport in TEXAS, for heaven's sake.

The best pasta ever, a recipe!

Today I am going to share a failproof pasta recipe that I have been perfecting over the last year.  It isn't fast to make (it takes about an hour), but it's easy and delicious, perfect for cooking with a glass of wine in one's hand.  It's very flexible in terms of ingredients, but there are a few secret tricks that I will share that are absolutely crucial (especially right at the end). 

Let's start, shall we?

For this example I used the following ingredients:

• Several fresh tomatoes, chopped into large-ish pieces
• Diced onion (about half of one large onion)
• Minced garlic
• Olive oil
• Diced hot pepper (optional)
• Sausage (optional - but oh so yummy - for best results, remove from any casing)
• You can also add things like diced bell peppers, squash, herbs, chickpeas, etc.  I've experimented with several items and the ones shown above are my faves.  
• The amounts shown here result in enough pasta for two people plus some leftovers; modify as needed.

You will also need at least one type of cheese.  I had a few types lying around so I included:

• Soft spreadable herb cheese (CRUCIAL)
• Buffalo mozzarella
• Parmesan

And of course the pasta.  To make this recipe correctly, you'll need something durable like spaghetti - not a stuffed pasta like ravioli.  I love home-made noodles but the sauce is so awesome you won't notice a difference with storebought, I swear.

Here's a tip: if you're using spaghetti, break the noodles in half before cooking.  I had to do this in Argentina because our pot was so tiny - but it makes them much more pleasant to eat.

I like to get all my ingredients chopped and ready to go before I start cooking.  Maybe so I can pretend I'm the host of a cooking show.  Or maybe because I'm a Virgo.  At any rate, we're ready to start cooking now. So let's do it!

First, put a few tablespoons of olive oil in a pan over a low heat with some minced garlic.  As every occasional chef knows, this is primarily to impress your guests and make the house start to smell good.

When the garlic is starting to brown just a bit, add onions and any other "hard" vegetables such as peppers or chickpeas.  (We'll add "soft" veggies such as tomatoes in a moment.) Again, keep your heat low.  No rush here.  Have more wine.

Once these have started to soften and brown, you can add your sausage (unless you are vegetarian, in which case you have my sympathies).  Cook that until it's nice and brown, and make sure you're kind of chopping the sausage up into small pieces as it cooks (no big lumps).  I took a picture of this but it looked kind of gross so I will spare you and cut to the next step.

Once your sausage has browned, now is the time to add tomatoes and any other soft veggies (e.g. squash) that you might be adding.  Mix this together thoroughly.  You may need to add more olive oil, you really want those tomatoes to simmer away nicely. 

Make sure the heat is low, cover your pan, and set it aside for 20-30 minutes (this is the part that takes the longest).  Have a little more wine while you wait.

Here are the tomatoes, cooking away.  You want this to get nice and juicy.  When the tomatoes have gotten really soft, smash them up with a fork.  Keep mixing up your sauce, but keep the lid on at all other times so that the moisture doesn't escape.  You don't want to end up with a dried-out sauce.

Now you can finally get your water boiling and cook your pasta. 

One thing I like to do right before the pasta is done cooking, is get a cup full of pasta water and save this aside.  (This is a Mario Batali trick.)

If your sauce isn't liquid enough, you can add this at the end (not usually necessary, but good to have just in case).

NOW COMES THE CRUCIAL PART.  THE PART THAT MUST NOT BE SKIPPED.

Once you have cooked and drained your pasta, put it in the pan with the tomato sauce, and put your cheese(s) on top.  The most important cheese to add is a couple tablespoons of a nice, flavorful soft cheese, e.g. Rondele cheese spread.  You can also use gorgonzola crumbles or any soft herbed cheese.  I also threw in some buffalo mozzarella but this won't add much flavor, just a little extra creaminess.

Now get a sturdy spoon and stir the s*** out of it!  The glutens from the pasta, the cheese, and the sauce will combine into a miracle of pure deliciousness, like so:

Please, whatever you do, do NOT serve the pasta and sauce separately. 

Do NOT neglect to add some kind of gooey soft flavorful cheese  (parmesan alone will not do the trick). 

While everything else is pretty negotiable, these two steps are the key to "the best pasta ever." 

Now serve, eat, and enjoy!  And let me know how it went, or if you have any other tips.

Chase the robots?

Is it just me or is anyone else kinda creeped out by Chase's California ad campaign?

I mean, as a former WaMu customer, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of handling the transition.  (Apart, that is, from baiting consumers into low-interest loans and then jacking the rates up.)  But my bank account still works.  I can, like, write checks and deposit checks and stuff like that.

But seriously, they seem to have taken Minority Report as their ad inspiration.  "I've got it.  Take classic California imagery, turn it robotic blue, and replace the SUN with our LOGO!"

 

Is it really possible to read this tagline as anything other than a threat, probably from a different species?

WE'RE HERE FOR YOU, CALIFORNIANS.  EVEN YOUR BIKES AND BOATS CAN'T SAVE YOU NOW.  THE GREAT BLUE EYE OF CHASE IS WATCHING YOU, FOREVER.

 

Or consider these stills from a Chase commercial, casually using a Beatles song as if to say, yeah, we're freakin' RICH, man.  Succumb.  In the brave new world of Chase, we Earthlings are forced to live dreary lives of monotone isolation, drinking bad coffee with other unemployed people at a blue-collar diner, driving for days through unpaved desert landscapes, warmed only by the eery light of the blue Chase octagon.

 

 

 

Okay, already, you win.  I'm scared.  Now can I close my checking account?

Waiting for fire

There were rumors flying around town yesterday that the fire was coming.  Someone in town was trying to sign people up for home flame retardant protection, saying that fire was expected here in 36 hours.  The fire captain shot down that rumor.  (Hey - it's a recession!  Guy's got to make a living!)  A shopkeeper said the sheriff had told her an evacuation order would probably come through in the next day or two.  Well, it's a small town.  Rumors are practically legal tender here.

 

Luckily we have friends in high-information places who told us nothing like that was in the works.  YET. Still, they said, the fire had moved from Glendale to Juniper Hills in the course of a few days -- so the idea of it reaching us in Wrightwood was not totally unrealistic.  I looked on the California fire map and saw that indeed, the biggest group of devilish-looking flames was the one headed straight for us, with nothing in its way except a near-empty and tinderstick-dry National Forest.

So after enjoying a perfectly-cooked Porterhouse steak (thanks Jay!), I thought it might behoove us to pack up a few things.  Sort of a pre-evacuation maneuver.  I got out some old empty boxes and put them on the living room floor, then walked around trying to figure out what to take with us.

Right before we left Argentina, I had a dream that we came home and our house had burned down.  I walked around the neighborhood, fresh from the airport, still dragging my rolling bag behind me.  The homes were nothing more than still-smoldering charcoal.  The firefighter who was showing me around was apologetic,  But, in my dream, I was relieved.  I had everything I needed: Jay, our dog, my laptop, my favorite clothes.  The rest was just...stuff.  I thought this was a metaphor.  What if it was prophecy?

We're currently a one-car family, with a lone Honda Element to carry two people and a dog.  We'd have room for a few boxes but not much more.  I picked up a few things to take with us.  The ashes of our old dog Dewayne.  Photo albums.  My mom's wedding china from the 60s.  A photo of my Silverlake kickball team which featured Vince Vaughn and Noah Wyle before they were famous.  Tax documents.  Paintings.  Scanning shelves, opening cupboards, looking for items that fell within the perfect nexus of Portability, Necessity, Irreplaceability, Sentimental Value and Monetary Value.  The nice lawn furniture, the flat-screen TV, books and movies and skis and knick-knacks, a giant ceramic Hello Kitty, all of these would have to stay and take their chances with the fire.  Would our Vespa have a better chance of making it if we parked it inside the house?  Or could we somehow manage to drive it to...wherever we would go?  We looked up dog-friendly hotels in San Diego, away from the smoke.  We called friends with vacation homes in Palm Springs. 

This morning things seem more hopeful, at least in our location.  Someone posted on our local message board, "The fire looks like it's really laying down this morning. It doesn't look like it made it across Littlerock drainage, and it's lightly raining here now...Today looks like a good day for fire fighters."

Let's hope so.

Oh my.

Who needs Halloween II when you have this?

It ain't me, babe

Last night I ran into some friends who, as it turns out, unbeknownst to me, read my blog.  How cool!

They had developed a theory that the sentiment expressed in my recent post about a Dylan concert (to paraphrase: "Fuck you, Bob Dylan.") is akin to the sentiment expressed so beautifully by Joan Baez in her song "Diamonds and Rust," which is of course a tribute to her ex-boyfriend, one B. Dylan.

That got me thinking about that song, which is one of the songs of my childhood.  My mom had the album it is from, and I used to listen to it all the time.  I didn't know who Bob Dylan was then, of course, and I didn't know the song was about him.  But even when I was very young, I found "Diamonds and Rust" to be intriguingly haunting, a blurry window into adulthood that seemed impossibly far away.  It introduced me at an extremely young and impressionable age to ideas like how glamorous it is to fall in love with someone that is both charming yet undependable, and how you can end that relationship yet still miss it.  "My greatest mistake," as Sheryl Crowe would put it more pithily and, of course, more shallowly, years later.

Here is the song, as performed live by Joan Baez in 1975:

As flattered as I am by the comparison to the song, and as much as I'm sure "Diamonds and Rust" is now part of my subconscious, I'm not sure that the sentiments are actually the same.  My blog post was expressing disappointment about Dylan's purposefully obtuse and eardrum-blasting concert, whereas the song seems to express disappointment that the first blush of passion and promise that Joan Baez felt for Bob Dylan didn't pan out.  She's nostalgic, but maybe not for a real person.

On second thought, maybe my friends are right.

Here is another YouTube clip I found, a performance with Dylan and Joan Baez at the Newport Festival in 1964.  Notice how he cheerfully drowns out her voice and hogs the microphone.  Notice her swooning regard.  Notice his impish grin. 

How can anyone NOT love Joan Baez?

Addicted to stats

One of my favorite things about TypePad is that I can see where people are coming from when they visit my blog.  This is endlessly fascinating to me.

For instance today I saw on my stats that I got this visit:

I then can click on the link (right column) and it takes me to the page the person actually saw, namely:

So searching for "buenos aires graffiti" somehow got a complete stranger to one of my blog posts.

Beyond that, the post really does have a picture of buenos aires graffiti - and it's a pretty entertaining one. 

Cool.

Calories on menus: an idea whose time has come

We went to an AMC Movie Theater tonight and saw something that I have never before seen - when we went up to purchase treats, the calories of each item were shown on the menu.

Here's what it looked like:

 

I have to say: THIS IS AN AWESOME IDEA.  It totally works, in terms of behavior modification.  When we first walked up, Jay said, “Hey, that mini pizza looks pretty good.”  Well, not when you see that it has almost 800 calories.    I was thinking: I don’t want to eat that fatty movie theater popcorn.  I’ll get something healthier, like a pretzel.  But as you can see, 1 “gourmet pretzel” has more calories than a medium popcorn!!  So, like usual, we split a diet coke and a medium popcorn, which according to the menu was a mere 220 calories each. 

Health just feels different, right?

Anyway, kudos to AMC.  And all chain/fast food restaurants should start doing this.  It’s very hard to order ‘naughty’ stuff when you can see the cold hard facts right in front of you. 

Like – who would ever order ‘movie nachos’ again, knowing it has almost 1400 calories??  Ick...

Why does Bob Dylan hate my eardrums?

Last night we went to see a show that I had high hopes for, something we’d heard about at the last minute through a fortuitous Facebook ad on Jay’s page.  Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp were playing at a baseball stadium in Lake Elsinore which isn’t too far away.  Tickets were pretty cheap, and the event was far from sold out.  We bought tickets and rounded up some other friends to go with us.

Lately, I’ve been making a point of getting every chance I can to see old guys play.  I’ve missed my chance with too many, like Johnny Cash or Frank Sinatra.  And generally speaking, they tend to be really great.  Leonard Cohen. Kenny Rogers.  Neil Diamond.  I’ve already seen Willie (at the Wiltern, fabulous) and Cougar (at the Hollywood Bowl, surprisingly fun).  But I’ve never seen Dylan and didn’t want to miss this chance.

As the show drew closer, I started to hear ominous rumblings from people who had seen Dylan play disastrously in the past.  Too drunk, too mumbly, songs unrecognizable from the popularized version, etc.  Alarm bells were quietly starting to go off – but I remained optimistic.  He’s cementing his legacy, some said – this will be different.

So yesterday, 5 of us squeezed into a Suburu and drove down to Lake Elsinore, where I’d never been before.  It’s one of those incongruously rednecky Southern California towns.  Here are some shots of the ballpark we were in, home to the Storm.

 

 

 

I saw my first ever live-blogging-in-action here! UPDATE.  I think this is her.

Willie Nelson was up first, keeping it casual in the late afternoon heat with a floppy straw sombrero and a ‘family band’ whose sound was like something you might hear in a thrown-together jam at Willie’s house on a Sunday afternoon.  A little sloppy but his voice was beautiful and strong, making me wish (not for the first time) that he was my grandpa or at least my penpal. 

Jay bought this souvenir Willie doll. 

We admired the efficient equipment ‘conveyor belt’ that had been set up, a giant walkway connecting the stage to nearby waiting trucks.

As the daylight faded it was time for the Coug.  He put a lot more effort into his show, with a full band, really awesome sound, and more audience pandering aka showmanship.  We went down onto the baseball field for a closer view.

 

 

 

I have only a few comments about this portion of the set.  1) I wish that he’d played Jack and Diane.  2) Based on the lyrical content of his newer songs, he is apparently obsessed with dying and trying to deal with this fear through songwriting.  3) His cutish 13-year-old son (who came out to jam with the band for a song or two) has the unfortunate name of “Spud”.  Any bets as to how long it will take him to rename himself Bob or Mike or something more conventional?  4) The Coug is now adding an “h” after every “s”.  For instance, “shmall town”.  Why?

Next up was Dylan.  By this point the crowd was well and truly messed up, with pot smoke a-floatin’, drunks a-stumblin’, hippies a-dancin’, and seven maids a-sleepin’ on the lawn, passed out.  We went back down to the baseball field to see this iconic figure up close and personal.  Dylan came out wearing some kind of bizarre mariachi-inspired suit.  Compared to The Coug, his sound was glaringly terrible – both the quality (through the PA system) as well as the musicianship of the group.  Now perhaps the Coug’s band was too tight and slick – but Dylan took things too far in the other direction.  For instance he was halfway through his second song before I realized it was “The Times They Are a Changin’”!   

UPDATE: Oh, and by the way. If you want to get a better sense of what his vocals sound like, think Benicio del Toro in The Usual Suspects.

We made our way back up to the bleachers where our friends were sitting and watched in horror as the set grew progressively worse.  And – fun times – louder.  I literally was sitting with my fingers in my ears for the last half hour of Dylan’s endless rambling hurky-jerky set.

The set was long enough, and unengaging enough, that it led me to all sorts of ruminations.  For instance, why was Dylan’s set so bad?  Does he not care?  Does he not KNOW?  Is he deaf, does he have bad taste, is he surrounded by incompetent deaf people with no taste who give him bad advice?  Is it on purpose – some kind of statement or joke that I’m not cool enough to get? 

Or could it be that our older self is truly a different person from our younger self?  That the man who once was Young Bob Dylan is long gone, leaving in his place a shallow and unserious carny huckster set on leveraging Young Bob’s brand and songs to squeeze the easiest possible dollars out of smalltown drunks and stoners?

I entertained myself by thinking: if each set was a car, what car would it be?  I decided that Willie Nelson was like a big old flatbed pickup, parked in someone’s yard, with a big party on the back.  John Cougar was like a perfectly cherried out vintage pickup, complete with fuzzy dice.  Too perfect, too shiny, maybe even never taken out of the garage except to drive down the street in a local parade. 

But our boy Bob? Like a 1973 dune buggy.  You’re at the beach trying to relax and get a tan, and here comes this dune buggy, spinning out and coughing out exhaust fumes, doing wheelies around you and getting sand in your face, squeezing an ah-OO-ga horn every five minutes and laughing like a clown at your dismay.

 

The comparisons to Leonard Cohen were hard to avoid, given that the visuals of the show appeared to be somewhat cribbed from Cohen, not to mention the fact that the two are of a similar generation.  Leonard Cohen cares about his performances.  The show we saw was flawless, an improvement over his recordings, true to the nature of his songs, every word clear and embued with passion, a love poem to an audience whom Cohen seemed determined to respect as much as a treasured idol.  Dylan’s show came off, to me, as a big Fuck You.

To which I can only respond: Fuck YOU, Bob Dylan.  Go see Leonard Cohen and take some notes.

A complaint

When did people in airplanes stop thinking that it was polite to wait for those in the seats ahead of them to deplane first? What's the freakin' RUSH, people?

Salmon Rushdie: why was that.

I've been on a Salmon Rushdie kick lately, ever since picking up The Enchantress of Florence a couple of months ago on a whim, and discovering that he is truly an amazing storyteller. (Although it's a little hard to concentrate on his writing when I'm constantly thinking: he was married to Padma Lakshmi???)

The book I'm currently reading is the unfortunately-named Shalimar the Clown. In fact, the only part of this book that is worse than The Enchantress is the title. Well, and maybe the cover, which for some reason always reminds of the old joke, "I'm a frayed knot."

Shalimar, too, has a wonderful story, told from different points of view, spanning decades and locations from LA to Paris to Kashmir - but also resonates with Rushdie's palpable fury at what terrorism and nationalism and greed have cost the world. Our souls, our hearts, our hopes? All that and more. That lost Eden is represented by the country of Kashmir, portrayed prior to its becoming an object of desire and conquest for India and Pakistan alike as an integrated, tolerant society of artists, chefs and dancers.

Last night I came across two passages that just floored me. Here they are.

The first passage - which is really just one sentence, the final sentence in a longer diatribe - is talking about how the pandits (Hindus) of Kashmir were neglected by the Indian government as they fled from the threat of Pakistani brutality to refugee camps.

There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return had died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

And just a few pages later, the second passage, which describes the Indian army's destruction of the idyllic Kashmiri village of Pachigam, and the Muslims that remain there. (Here, the "sarpanch" is the village elder, the former leader of the village's famed troupe of performers. And the "lazy-eyed woman" is his wife.)

Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man's nose? Who broke that young girl's heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancee? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?

Please go read this book, and any other book of Rushdie's that you can get your hands on. Now I need to go finish reading - only 50 pages left to go!