So I'm an old-fashioned girl when it comes to my plates--five hundred years of beautiful tradition from Platina to Julia Child and all that--and I like a starch base beside or beneath my, ahem, meat. Here is a recipe for a very simple and very elegant potato purée.
4-5 medium Russet (or other starchy) potatoes, peeled, rinsed, and diced
1 medium yellow onion, grated
1 quart whole milk
1 pint heavy cream
1 whole clove
freshly grated white pepper
sea salt
Combine the milk with an equal volume of water in a heavy pot. Lightly salt and pepper. Bring to just below a boil, slowly, over medium heat. Add the clove, the potatoes, the onion, and a bit more salt and pepper. Cook for 5-10 minutes until the potato is almost falling apart. Strain out the liquid through a fine sieve. Put into a blender. Begin to blend on the purée setting, very slowly adding cream. You will not need the whole pint--you will add just enough liquid to allow the blender to do its work. Initially, you'll want an ever-so-slightly wet consistency. Remove to a warmed, shallow bowl and let rest, unconvered, for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent any skin from forming. The starches will naturally stiffen slightly, thickening the purée to its desired, silky texture. Makes a lovely base for a little rare filet or duck breast.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Foodie Friday: pommes purées
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Tiny Tim
I will say simply that Tim Tebow looked strikingly different from the quarterbacks we have grown accustomed to watching on television. He lacks those quarterback things that we love, or that we're conditioned to love by analysts such as Jon Gruden: tight footwork, efficient throwing motion, precision craftsmanship, pocket presence, predictability. Tebow is a study in the opposites: bad mechanics, slow delivery, happy feet, poor defensive-recognition abilities, wobbly balls.Obviously turning to Slate for sports analysis is like asking the set decorators at FOX to help you prep your living room for a World of Interiors shoot, but this is really too much. The football world is afraid of Tim Tebow in the same way that Marc-André Fleury is afraid of Johnny Weir's backhand; they may play on the same surface, but it is an altogether different sport. Tebow does indeed lack "those quarterback things that we love." What he does not do, unlike, say, a certain lumbering rape-yeti who, between seventeen sacks, four broken toes (fortunately, he has sixteen), and a lawsuit per game, has managed a career impressive both in analyst-statistician land and in the ledger of Superbowl victories. What I mean to say is that the problem with Tim Tebow is not his unorthodox style of play. He is not an unorthodox quarterback. He is a bad quarterback. Insofar as he strikes fear into the hearts of NFL fans, it's that we fear he represents the quality and type of quarterback coming out of the hopelessly bonkers world of college ball.
Tebow is not a Jon Gruden kind of player. Sure, he might trumpet Tebow's competitiveness and his will to win and all those intangibles, but I'd bet that a large part of him is rooting for Tebow to fail. After all, a quarterback like Tebow is a living affront to that secret knowledge, possessed primarily by a fraternity of former coaches and players who now talk on TV for a living, of what it takes to succeed in the NFL. A successful Tebow is a quarterback who craps all over the conventional football wisdom, and this has the football world very afraid.
-Nate Jackson at Slate
What gets me is that Jackson could have written exactly the same column substituting the words "Cam Newton" for "Tim Tebow" and come off as something less that a total moron. Sure the Panthers stink, but Newton looks like a real prospect rather than a regrettable but now-inescapable mistake.
Knowledge Is Power, France Is Bacon
In Atlanta, Mayor Kasim Reed ordered the police to arrest more than 50 protesters early Wednesday and remove their tents from a downtown park after deciding that the situation had become unsafe, despite originally issuing executive orders to let them camp there overnight.WHY CAN'T THESE CIVILLY DISOBEDIENT PROTESTERS BE MORE OBEDIENT?
And like many of his mayoral colleagues nationwide, Mr. Reed openly expressed frustration with the protesters’ methods.
“The attitude I have seen here is not consistent with any civil rights protests I have seen in Atlanta,” Mr. Reed said in an interview, “and certainly not consistent with the most respected forms of civil disobedience.”
-The Times
The situation has become unsafe. But for whom?
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Commode of Hammurabi
Okay, you pesky commoners, you want me to say it, I'll fucking say it:
As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.Is this what they teach you in law school? What is an equal playing field? Hello, Tom Friedman, is that you? "Legitimize outcome inequalities"? Um what again? I suppose it's a pleasant self-flattering fantasy to imagine that one's sort-of vocation is in the service of ensuring an equitable social order. The law does nothing of the sort. The law doesn't legitimize outcome inequalities; the law preserves inequality. The law doesn't guarantee equal opportunity; the law determines starting position. The law is an invitation to The Masters. Since it was first written down--since before it was first written down--, the law has distinguished, in one way or other, explicitly or by implication, between masters and slaves.
-Glenn Greenwald
Cookie Monsters
The stepped-up suppression of the various Occupy sites--the prolific zunguzungu has been in Oakland--is obviously unsurprising, and I won't bore you with hand-wringing over police militarism or what have you; you've heard that song before. I do however think that what I will call the administrative aspects of the ongoing efforts to repress the movement, the mazes of permits and eviction notices and "illegal" assemblies and evictions and on and on, ad nauseum, should be an anarchist antidote to those of you who still cling to the leaky life-preserver of a vague libertarianism, the floating spar, in the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, of the social contract model. Are you indignant that the plain text of the First Amendment has been so thoroughly obviated? Well, of course it has been. There is no contract between the state and its subjects; the contract is with itself; the First Amendment isn't a constraint on the power of government to fuck your shit up; it is a mere New Year's Resolution; having used up that January membership at the gym, fatty is going to take a day off . . . two days off . . . well I'll go back next week . . . mmmm are those double-stuff oreos? . . . nom nom nom crunch crunch crunch.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The Parable of the Absence of Specific Demands and an Identifiable Leader of the Movement
My little beagle howled at the garden door.
I asked, What do you want? What do you need?
and in response she squatted there and peed
an acrid trickle on the just-cleaned tile floor
which pooled around my Hudson boot. I swore;
I should've found a more obedient breed
that didn't bark and heeled without a lead,
much less self-willed. In other words, a bore,
my boyfriend said; you'd rather that she wrote
a laundry list of treats she likes and toys
she won't disdain? If you just listened to
her body-lifting baying then you'd note
the lyric lexicon within the noise;
not demands, a poem! not real, but true.
Damages
Sovereign Citizen Cain
As both an anarchist and a pro-abortionist, I fully support Herman Cain's position that every individual should be able to nullify any existing law.
