Foodie Friday - Break Fast edition

Aside from a whole roasting chicken, my favorite meats are the cheap cuts, the shanks and shoulders, and my favorite animal is lamb. That's not to say that I don't love a beautiful, bloody steak from time to time, a pink, delicate, rare rack of lamb, a slice of raw, salt-cured pig. I do. But cooking at its most mindful is done slowly, and the tough cuts, which are often the animal's most worked muscles, are slow to give in but ultimately give up the best rewards. Here is a recipe for lamb tagine most appropriate for this early fall. It's made with boneless lamb shoulder, a trussed, fatty, ugly cut that turns melting and tender under long, low heat. I really, strongly advise getting yourself a ceramic tagine--they're as little as $25 and are the most beautiful of cooking and serving dishes--but if you won't or can't, a dutch oven will do. The recipe calls for late tomatoes, the sugar-heavy harvest that comes when the nights have turned cold but not quite cold enough to frost.

Tagine of lamb with almonds and figs

1 3/4 lb. boneless lamb shoulder, slightly trimmed of fat, cut into 1" cubes
1 medium yellow onion, cut into 1" sections
5-6 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed with the flat side of knife
3 medium heirloom tomatoes, cut into 1" sections
10 dried figs, quartered
1 cup whole raw almonds
1 cup fresh parsley, chopped
1/2 tspn whole cumin
1/2 tspn whole mustard seed
1/2 tspn whole coriander
several whole allspice berries
1-2 cloves
medium coarse sea salt
extra virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 300.

While the oven is heating, gently toast the spices in a small sauté pan over medium heat, just until they become fragrant. Grind roughly with a mortar and pestle.

Combine the lamb, onion, garlic, figs, almonds, and parsley in the tagine. Mix together. Add the spice mixture and salt generously. Pour in several tablespoons of olive oil. Mix thoroughly with your hands. Cover. Place in the oven.

Cook for the first hour at 300, then reduce the heat to 275 and cook for an additional two hours. Remove, uncover, and serve immediately. I serve this dish over a long-grain white rice.

The Wine-Dark Whheeeeeeeee

CASSANDRA: They call me crazy, like a fortune-teller,
A poor starved beggar-woman - and I bore it!
And now the prophet undoing his prophetess
Has brought me to this final darkness.
Instead of my father's altar the executioner's block
Waits me the victim, red with my hot blood.
I will go in and have the courage to die.
Look, these gates are the gates of Death.
I greet them, and pray that I may meet a
Deft and mortal stroke so that I may close my
Eyes as my blood ebbs in an easy death.

-from Agamemnon

Environmental Cassandras must be careful with their predictions lest they commit what climate alarmists consider the unpardonable faux pas of denying that the world is coming to an end.

-George F. Will

I actually have some sympathy for Will on this issue, not so much because I deny human-catalyzed climate change (I do not), but because I percieve the potential catastrophe as being a fine, fitting, and poetic means of reducing our numbers, and therefore wish that everyone would shuddupaboudit so that Motherfucking Nature might have her just revenge. That said, would it kill our columnist to read before making popular reference? The thing about Cassandra's predictions, you see: they were right.

That Which Is True of Our Ideas of Things Must Be True of the Things Themselves

Accordingly, a large proportion of the erroneous thinking which exists in the world proceeds upon a tacit assumption, that the same order must obtain among the objects in nature which obtains among our ideas of them. That if we always think of two things together, the two things must always exist together. That if one thing makes us think of another as preceding or following it, that other must precede it or follow it in actual fact. And conversely, that when we cannot conceive two things together they cannot exist together and that their combination may, without further evidence, be rejected from the list of possible occurrences.

-John Stuart Mill

Here is an interesting exercise in a priori from the New York Times op-ed page. Because the recently revealed nuclear facility at Qom, Iran makes no sense as a nuclear-bomb-making facility, it must be a part of a diversified bomb-making program. Yes, this is the sort of Jesuitical logic that makes the Times America's leading publication.

Over the Line

You know, I myself dabbled in pacifism. Not in Nam, of course.

-Walter Sobchak

Remarkably, it appears that the Chinese are transparently, clearly, openly, and plainly acting in their own obvious self-interest. I am, by the way, especially fond of the implication that "noninterference in [the] internal affairs" of other countries represents some kind of frightful ideology.

Top Model

Oh Lord. Oh, Fred Hiatt.

Well, I love a challenge:





Via Montag in comments.

All the World's a Stage

Richard Cohen.

So, now that we've had that little laugh, I was shocked to find, in the middle of an otherwise whackadoodle column about Obama's insufficiently totalitarian mannerisms (bref: "The candidate has yet to become commander in chief"), that the Uncle Joey of American opinionisti had buried a sensible point:

Where, in fact, was the crisis?

In fact, there was none. The supposedly secret installation had been known to Western intelligence agencies -- Britain, France, the United States and undoubtedly Israel -- for several years. Its existence had been deduced by intelligence analysts from Iranian purchases abroad, and it was pinpointed sometime afterward. What had changed was that news of it had gone public. This happened not because Obama announced it but because the Iranians beat him to it after discovering that their cover was blown. They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug.

Haha. Get it. Persians and rugs! America's got talent, y'all.

In any event, and despite the blowzy leadermongering of the rest of the piece, I do give him some credit for his accidental insight: the crisis, such as it was, was manufactured; the participating governments had plainly held these cards to their chests for years just in case they found themselves in need of a dramatic reveal. But Cohen isn't smart. He is barely conscious. Thus does he fail to arrive at the most obvious analytic end, that it is not merely the quotidian revelation of the non-secrets of the Iranian regime that represents a manufactured crisis, but rather that the Iranian crisis writ large, the whole damned and damnable narrative of Iranian aggression and perfidy, that this is itself manufactured, that Iran is an artificial and largely arbitrary enemy.

Now I say "largely arbitrary" because the Iranian governing elite are often quite willing to play the part assigned. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is one of the bigger hams on the international stage, a scenery chewer in the late Pacino mold, and for his own reasons he's seen fit to act the unpredictable antagonist, one moment waxing poetic, the next philosophical, the next cackling and threatening retaliatory destruction. Jonathan Shwarz at A Tiny Revolution once wrote an entertainingly terrifying post about how regular people mostly experience other countries solely through the hijinks of their most mutually insane citizens, which is to say, their respective leaders. (I'd be obliged by a link to that particular post, btw.)

But rather than drawing the plain conclusion that we are being manipulated by cynical rulers in pursuit of their own power and profits in the commission of a game in which our own lives and welfare are irrelevant except as further tools of stagecraft, Richard Cohen, like most of his compatriots, simply barks that the fake crisis is distracting from the real crisis, which he takes on faith despite the evidence of fundamental dishonesty on the part of our managers. Cohen is more honest about this sort of thing than the more prestigious press operators, being merely a moron, less an intentional accomplice than a useful idiot. Nevertheless, you can see in this sort of column the clear operation of the thesis underlying the theory of manufactured consent: under the appearance of criticism, dissension, and argument, the "debate" in fact moves in only one direction; while he appears to criticize Western governments, Cohen actually advances their aggressive agenda vis-à-vis Iran.