Foodie Friday: Onion Edition

If French cuisine built its international reputation on luxury foods, truffles and foie gras and all that, its real genius is in its treatment of the onion. Caremalized and served with long-simmering beef-and-red-wine stock as onion soup; puréed with potatoes for Vichysoisse; baked with crème fraîche and lardons on a think bread crust as tarte flambée . . . even when I make boeuf bourguignon, I make sure that my serving gets a few extra pearl onions on it at the expense of a few extra pieces of beef. My recent favorite is the Provençal version of the tarte flambée, or the Provençal version of a pizza, depending on whom you ask--the pissalladière. There are several different versions of it, some with a bread crust, some using a short pastry pâté brisée, but I make mine with puff pastry, which is light and rich all at once. Puff pastry, by the way, is one of those intimidating recipes until you try it. It's actually a delight to make, and versitile for both sweet and savory dishes.

to make the pastry

1 cup unbleached AP flour
1 cup pastry flour
2 sticks butter, diced and kept cold
about 1 tbspn fine sea salt
about a cup of ice water
bench flour
long rolling pin

The important thing here is keeping the pastry cool. If you have a baker's marble, that'll work. I have a metal prep table in my kitchen, which is even better.

Mix the flour and salt together and dump into a shallow mound on the work surface. Take the chilled, diced butter from the fridge and crush each little cube flat between your thumb and forefinger, tossing the smashed bits into the flour. Using a pastry scraper (or, frankly, I just use my big Chinese butcher knife), mix and chop the flour and butter into each other. When all the butter is mixed in, begin slowly adding ice water, slowly incorporating it into the dough with the pastry tool. The end result of this process isn't going to look like dough; it will be a fairly crumbly mess, just barely holding together in clumps. Mound it all together, thoroughly flour your rolling pin, and roll it down to about a quarter inch of thickness. Then, using the pastry tool, fold the top third down toward the bottom and the bottom third up toward the top, as if folding a business letter. Roll it out again to a quarter inch thickness and repeat. By the second or third repetition of this step, it will look like a nice, smooth pastry or pie dough. Repeat six or so more times, using bench flour liberally to make sure it doesn't stick. If the dough does become too wet and sticky to work with, that is because it's gotten too warm. Just mound it up, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for twenty or so minutes.

Now fold the dough in on itself once more, but instead of rolling it out, wrap it in plastic and refridgerate until ready to bake.

to make the onion sauce or filling

3 large yellow onions, peeled, halved, and sliced paper thin
about a dozen meaty green olives, like Castelvetranos, pitted and roughly chopped
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt

Heat the oil over a high flame in a heavy sauté pan. When it is popping hot, add the onions and a few pinches of salt. Toss together and sweat out over a high or medium high heat until soft and translucent. Reduce the heat to very low and, stirring very occasionally, caremalize until golden brown--40 minutes to a hour. When golden brown, add the olives, stir together, and remove from heat.

putting it together

Preheat the oven to 425.

Lay some parchement papper on a baking pan and brush with water. This is very important. If you don't remember this step, your pastry will burn.

Take your puff pastry from the fridge, unwrap, and roll out to a little less than a quarter inch thickness. Cut into smaller rectangles (you should be able to get four 4x6 or 5x7 out of it). Lay on the baking sheet. Spoon the onion filling onto each rectangle, leaving about a half inch bare around the perimeter. Fold each bare side onto itself, pinching the corners together.

Place in the oven and bake until the crust is golden, about 25-30 minutes.

Building Friendship Bridges to the Future Past

One of my biggest concerns about the Afghan war has been that we seemed destined to be upstaged by the Soviet withdrawal. Fortunately, the Pentagon has moved swiftly to address my concerns.

Capitulation Nation

If you peruse the reader comments of the newspapers or, heck, even the comments on this-a-here internet world wide web blog, you will find sentiments reflecting the following line:

I don't really want to fuck with the actual TSA workers themselves. I'm guessing that most of them took their jobs because it paid more than Blockbuster.

-Paul Alexander

It is worthwhile to note that your sympathies are being deliberately manipulated here and that this is one of the ways that the exercise of power becomes self-concealing and self-effacing; it is worthwhile to compare this to the experience of talking to a call center employee when trying to address or fight against some unfair exercise of corporate power. In either (and any similar) case, the actual exercise of power at the point of human interaction is assigned to a person least able to do anything about its unfairness. The call center employee cannot reset your just jacked-up APR rate. The TSA slug cannot change the policies of the surveillance state; cannot exempt you from a search; is just doing his job, which, like Paul Alexander says, he only took because it paid marginally more than some other job.

I have no particular solution to offer. My sympathies also lie with the low-wage employee, even if he is enacting the prison planet all over my ass, and not in a good way. And previous posts aside, I do pause before making his life miserable, just as I try to refrain from anything harsher than a mild, "Please transfer me to your supervisor," when talking to some corporate help desk, just as I always bring a book and suck up my impatience at the DMV. It is important to recognize that the loci of oppression and authority are alienated from the point of enaction. Most TSA employees do not actually want to touch your cock and balls or pat your vagina or grope your breasts, and yet most of them want even less to be fired.

It's sobering to consider how easily those of us on both sides of the strip search are coopted by the mechanisms of our own oppression.

Law and Order: Kandahar

"This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”

-New Yuck Times

Representative Peter King, who by the way bears a shocking physical resemblance to a snapping turtle, probably meant to say something like, "unlawful enemy combatant," since the more mundane "wartime enemy" wouldn't be subject to any sort of trial at all . . . or would they? It seems to me that the default position of the United States is that it is illegal to fight against the United States, whether or not America has chosen to invade your country.

If al-Qaeda were half as smart, savvy, and dangerous as we're supposed to believe they are, the gang would double its efforts not to kill, but to capture an American, and then hold a really awesome YouTube trial. I mean, do the whole thing in righteous American drag, too, with a jury of illiterate Afghan villagers dressed in off-the-rack, ill-fitting suits.

Odebama

The president on whom so much depends is a peculiar person, stranger than any of us realised when we voted for him.

David Bromwich

Who's this fucking we?

In fact, if you dislike this president, Bromwich's article is an interesting catalogue of his curious, and curiously contradictory, personality quirks, that uncomfortable comingling of arrogance and diffidence; the tendency to combine oratorical and occasionally oracular vagueness with the more quotidian vagueness of management-speak and euphemism. And yet the thesis that these traits have been revealed by his first two years in office rather than self-evident all along is as wrong as the more familiar right-wing insistence that we know nothing about him. We know everything about him. And we always have.

In many ways, he is the perfect president for this first full flowering of the so-called information age, a vast album of obviously posed candids narrated by a running stream of overcomposed status updates. He is less inclined to project than to reflect, and what he reflects overwhelmingly is the general governing consensus of the American empire. Once again, this has always and transparently been the case. Actually, it is Bromwich's description of Timothy Geither that I think most accurately describes Barack Obama:

Geithner has the air of a perpetual young man looking out for the interests of older men: an errand boy.

Obviously this is an easier observation to make about Geithner, who is white, than about Obama, who is half less so, but it is so thoroughly accurate that I can't resist applying it, especially because Obama's pose of deliberative sagacity is so plainly calculated to appeal to precisely those older men--the financiers, the generals, etc.--to whom he inevitably defers, even as he casts himself at the center of the decision-making drama.

This probably spells his doom. The president is an errand boy, but he is also a figurehead, and therefore he cannot appear the former under any circumstances. George Bush was an errand boy, and so was Bill Clinton, and yet each, in his own way, projected a faintly Roman virility which is necessary to the rôle. Like so many management hacks, Obama enjoys very much the appearance of power, but he violently shuns its actual exercise whenever possible. He likes the corner office, but he could do without all the direct reports. When his term is up, he'll make speeches to corporate boards, delighting them by recasting in crassly aspirational terms all the things they already believe themselves to know. When he passes on to the great corporate team-building retreat in the sky, his tombstone will read: Here He Lies.

Opt-In, You Dummies

National Opt-Out day ain't gonna do shit. Obviously the proper tactic here is to submit to the invasive search and then litigate. Litigate the fuck out of that shit. Accuse the people who touched you of rape, molestation, assault, etc. etc. Sue them in civil court. Get together a thousand fondled men and women and go for a class action. Demand a bajillion googleplex dollars for emotional harm. Tie up every TSA official in depositions and whatnot for the next thirty years. Require ACT clearances and their by-state equivalents of every screener. Demand citizen review boards. Keep shitting in the same toilet until the goddamn pipes explode.

I Am Number Bore

More megalulz, this time from infamous not-actually a drug addict, therefore not-actually in recovery, Jimbo Frey, first much-beloved, later much-bedraggled dog-hag Oprah hanger-on, now converted into genuine "art-commerce starfucker." As previously noted, I actually have a degree of sympathy for Frey, who, I believe, is telling the truth when he says that his literary AREYOUCALLINMEAFAG? chest-bump, the truly épouvantable Gazillion Bits-n-Pieces, was packaged and sold as a higher truth-quotient memoir by agents and publishers looking to cash in on a craze. Frey wrote exactly the sort of book that the daytime emoticon audience wanted, and when Deepak Oprah found that this little Celestine Prophecy of redemption was rather loose with the names, dates, times, and anything in it ever having really happened--that is to say, that it was something somewhat less than the Statistical Abstract of the United States, or what have you--well, you know the story. They forced him to apologize! Needless to say, Oprah and her audience were shocked, shocked that someone might use her rigorously empirical forum to peddle an exaggerated tale of emotional woe.

The linked article is pretty hilarious. (I have to admit, my sympathy for Frey, the hack, is greater than my sympathy for Columbia MFAosi too stupid, overeager, and self-regarding to read and understand a contract before signing it.) Frey is a titanically unaware name-dropper, and the names he drops, ohboy! Prince, Hirst, and Koons! These guys are basically the reigning triumvirate of the contemporary fraud known as contemporary art, selfsame knick-knack makers, cryptopornographic scrapbookers, and bricoleurs--the three least talented, least interesting, least novel, and therefore most representative artists of our era, a trio of embarrassing white men who believe themselves to be Warhol's progeny when they are, in fact, his punchline.

Wind-up

Since several commenters seem to be misunderstanding this post, it seems worthwhile to clarify that, of course, human activity alters the natural world in which it is embeded. I am dancing around the terminology deliberately. The language that describes "climate change" is problematic. (Global warming is actually better, if cripplingly overgeneral; it actually describes something that is happening.) It slips very swiftly into a mode of thinking that makes human activity and its resultant effects on environments, both locally and globally, exogenous rather than endemic. There is nature, and there is the environment, and then there are humans, both of and not of nature and the environment, and then there is human activity, by which we mostly mean industry and large-scale agriculture, which are categorically distinct, external agents of harm to non-human nature, which in turn affects the well-being of in-between human creatures. I say this sort of thinking is confused and unnecessarily complex, and more pointedly, I find that it leads to a concomittant error: a meliorist's belief that "climate change" is merely symptomatic of poor public policy choices rather than an ineradicable and inextricable component of "advanced" human civilization. Which obviously it is not. Fossil fuels are bad, though efficient, but can you really blame our clever ape brains? There are now seven-some billion 50-60-kilo bipedal mammals occupying the earth. She's gotta feed the monkey! Didn't that, like, ever occur to you, man?

What I am . . . what is the word? What I am skeptical about is not that billions of mammals can cause harm to themselves and others by burning too much carbon in the troposphere, but rather that there is a technological solution to a natural, if highly exaggerated, problem of population and consumption, short of, say, the engineering of a supervirus that reduces our numbers, uh, significantly. Climate change rhetoric, particularly as a component of Western political liberalism, is misleading not because the global environment (in aggregate) is changing (at a rate that we believe to be substantially accelerated) in a way that will be detrimental to the life quality of (some portion of) people, not to mention, of course, all the tigers and caribou and tuna, but rather because it totally misrepresents the import and meaning of this problem. The problem is emphatically not that seven billion people are consuming calories produced in the wrong way. The problem is that there are seven billion people consuming calories.

So, with due respect to the gallery, both this and the prior post are emphatically "another episode in the 'civilization ain't green' series."

Steelers Midseason

You can hate Tom Brady, but goddamn the guy can throw a football. And he's got dreamy hair.

Pass coverage has never been a strong point for the Steelers defense, which has traditionally depended on the blitz against the passing game. This makes the decision to drop their pass rushers into coverage on almost every play hard to understand, by which I mean really fucking stupid. Brady had all the time in the world to find recievers, who were always open anyway. Actually, both squads were plagued by dropped passes, but for the Pats these came mostly on bullshit checkdowns long after they'd established a dominant lead. For the Steelers, they came in the end zone. I actually thought Roethlisberger looked okay, if as ugly as ever; it was his wide outs who absolutely stunk up the joint, second only to a mostly second-string O-line that was positively manhandled by the Patriots rush, which sacked Big Ben 137 times. The Steelers also continued their inspired practice of injuring 40 players per game, while the league continues not penalizing the supposedly illegal helmet-led hit, although the bill's in the mail.

They did not look like the 6-2 team that they were, like the 7-2 team that they wanted to be, nor even like the 6-3 team that they are. They looked like last year's mediocre squad, with the exception of Jeff Reed, who looked like he'd been tailgaiting.

Be the Climate Change You Don't Wish to See

So here’s the math: 98 climate scientists out of 100 will tell you that man’s continued carbon emissions pose the risk of disruptive climate change this century. Two out of 100 will tell you it doesn’t.

-Friedman

Now I happen to agree that human activity is impacting the environment, but, look, "climate change" is bogus. It rests on one hugely false premise: that "climate" or "the environment" or what have you is a static system, a delicate equilibrium which human beings are more or less divinely tasked to shepherd and conserve, lest Manhattan drown and Polar bears show up in Mexico City. Well, all right, but the environment isn't static; it's dynamic. It is constantly changing. And every since photosynthesis, living things have had a dramatic and constant effect on it.

Crackpot positivists like Tommy F. like to imagine themselves on the side of science, but they constantly produce howlers like the excerpt above. 9 out of 10 dentists agree . . . Colgate is the best! But obviously, "science" is not democratic; the fact that a majority consensus exists does not make anything right. Science is an investigatory method, not some closed, universal ontology. "Science says . . ." Well, no, it doesn't. Science doesn't say anything. Here is how you recognize bullshit: when the descriptive becomes prescriptive. Human activity affects the climate is a valid observation. 99% of scientists agree that we need to produce more solar panels in American than China or else we're all gonna die is not.

Now I happen to agree that humanity would be better off in the long term if it liberated itself from internal combustion, but I am not tethered to words like "growth" and "opportunity." Quite the opposite in fact. I have said it before and I will say it again: refinable, combustible carbon fuels represent a uniquely efficient, effective, and portable source of energy. You may, if you wish, entertain a future in which we all have cars, only, powered by fuel cells. We all live in houses ablaze with electricity and heated by forced air . . . only, wind! Fusion! The truth is that a meaningful reduction in human "emissions"; a "solution" to "global warmning--these are only accomplished by changing human civilization. Building more solar cells than China, ahem, "investing in green technology" does nothing but shift slightly the loci of pollution in any case, even if they were (they're not) adequate to power societies on the scale of those that currently exist.

The Friedman formulation, if we do not grow faster than China, then our children will die, is an inverted truth. More like: because of growth, our children will die. Our children, such as they are, are going to have to adapt to a darker and less swiftly circumnavigable globe.