“Pretty P”
Just after I posted the blog last week, I received this nifty little tool from Amazon. What do you think this is used for? It’s a $10 item that freed Finn from a hazardous task. We were going to beg him to climb up in the empty alcove at the bottom of the stairs where the bulb has been out for years. Diana changed the next one over, which is easier to get to from the stairs, but we were not comfortable having her try this one. I remember Finn climbing to the top of a friend’s very tall pine tree to install the Christmas star – he used to be such a completely unafraid climber. No need, 2 minutes with the right tool and I had the bulb replaced.
I enjoyed a new streaming series with my workouts early this week. “3-2-1 McCartney” features Sir Paul discussing his music with über (I finally figured out all the secret codes necessary to add accents to letters in this blogging software) producer, Rick Rubin. As Diana would say, this is “right up K alley.” Particularly the parts where McCartney is sitting at the piano, showing Rubin how songs came about. A very simply produced (black and white mostly) series that I highly recommend.
I loved the story of a roadie asking Sir Paul to “pass the salt and pepper”. McCartney heard Sgt. Pepper and thought what an interesting character that might be…
The boys gave me a full interior and exterior detail service for Penelope for my birthday. I thought that should get done before I lost the coupon, and so scheduled it for Monday morning. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate with torrential rain until around 10:30am. The guy who came to do the service had to wait a while for a break in the rain. He came in a special truck outfitted with everything he needed – didn’t even want a hose – “we use special de-ionized water.”
P hasn’t looked this good since the day that I bought her. The wheels are spotless throughout and she really sparkles in the sun. I hope I haven’t set a bad precedent with her now.
The last piece of the kitchen project arrived this week. Jose installed the new ovens (and a couple of new ceiling fans for the back patio). They certainly seem to heat up and cool down faster than the old ones (which took forever.) Finn cooked a great batch of lemon bars last night. Clorinda is a big fan of those. Diana particularly likes that the doors open vertically rather than horizontally – much easier to get close to the racks to remove hot treats. Penelope got a chuckle out of the fact that the oven is made by the same company, Bosch, that manufactures most of her spare parts. It’s nice to have this project behind us. Well, one small update still required – a couple of the new floor boards pop when you hit them just right. Apparently Jose will need to drill small holes and pump some glue in to fix that.
We managed to break Clorinda away from Olympics watching to work on a jigsaw puzzle for a while. Maybe we shouldn’t have started with one of the super challenging Frenchy ones – but thought the fatter wood pieces would be easier to manage.
Outdoor exercise is having to happen earlier in the day as we enter the Texas summer. We were out at 8am this morning for our walk/run and my shirt was still drenched by the end. It does feel good to get that behind me so early in the day. I now have my sights set on brunch at C.T. Provisions – yes, I’m having the voodoo shrimp Benedict again.
We lost one of our very favourite humans this week. Stan Bassett passed away in Brisbane, Australia, after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. He was able to accomplish some major life goals that seemed impossible after the initial diagnosis – he danced with his daughter at her wedding, met his new grandchild, and moved his daughter, son-in-law, and baby into a house across the street from his home. That’s Stan at the back of this family photo.
I first met Stan in the lobby of a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and we hit it off right away. He spent many nights at our home, enjoying making unique combinations from Diana’s meat and cheese platters. So much kindness and positive energy radiated from Stan. There was the evening when we discovered that he knew every word to every song on Meat Loaf’s “Bat out of Hell” album – a result of having just a couple of cassette tapes when driving across the Outback. And the next morning (a Sunday) when he came downstairs to catch a flight to London – in full suit, tie, and military style spit-polished shoes. “Why are you all dressed up to sit on a plane for 8 hours Stan?” “It’s work time and this is how I dress for work.” Thanks for all the wonderful memories Stan!
On Gypsy Hill in Pacifica, CA, the three musketeers headed out for a walk. I love the way this picture captures Frankie happily leading the way, while Luciano is on the lookout for wildlife.
I finished “Dirt, Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking” by Bill Buford, and promised some quotes. I enjoyed this book but found it a bit of a slog in the middle – too much rambling about the tiny details of French cooking.
Buford attends a culinary school run by the famous Paul Bucose, and describes attempts to make the perfect, French style omelet. Not something that I’ve come anywhere close to yet.
“A student presented his omelet. The instructor poked it and shook his head. He didn’t bother to taste it; he tipped it into the trash. An omelet wants to be soft in the middle, pillowy to the touch. It should have bounce. This one was hard.
The next student’s omelet was too big: big in the sense of too much volume. The instructor remonstrated him. “Why did you use a whisk? Un fouet. “I told you a fork.”
The class was kitchen basics. A whisk aerates the protein. It is what you use to make a soufflé or a meringue. An omelet gets it tenderness by being mixed, not whipped. You want the egg whites quiet and small.”
I enjoyed this description of Buford’s wife responding to commentary from fellow diners in restaurants. I’m with the first gentleman on laughing too loudly – I get really tired of groups of ladies who feel the need to cackle at the tops of their lungs to let everyone know how much fun they’re having.
“No civic official, I am confident, had ever seen an American like Jessica once crossed. She had been emancipated by the French language. There is a quality about French rudeness – a self-righteousness, probably – that provoked Jessica to the point of rage, especially if she was the target: as when a diner (again, a man) crossed the very small restaurant where we were eating dinner with friends to tell her that she laughed too loudly, or when a diner (a man, of course) at the next table at the Bouchon des Filles leaned over, after observing that she had filled my glass, and told her that, in France, it is the man, not the woman, who pours the wine. Jessica expressed exaggerated surprise, given that the woman in question was a wine expert, that she also consulted on the wine list of the restaurant, which was pointedly called Bouchon des Filles, and was owned and run by women. (The man was witheringly silenced, and his wife spent the rest of the evening apologizing for the behavior of or her spouse.)”
A description of just how seriously the Lyonnaise take their food, even in public schools.
“The canteen menu was posted each week outside the school’s entrance: three courses, plus a produit laitier; a milk product – yogurt or cheese. There were no repeats, a feature so radical that I am compelled to repeat it. No menu was ever served twice during the entire school year. (Jessica, who had become a member of a parent-teacher executive committee, discovered that, at strategic intervals, certain foods were repeated – turnips, kale, beets – to help children become familiar with them.”
The first course would be a salad – say, grated carrots with a vinaigrette, George’s current favorite (“Carrotes râpées!”), which he asked his mother to make for dinner. The second, the plat principal, might be a poulet with a sauce grand-mère (made from broth that the chicken had been cooked in). There was a cooked vegetable (maybe Swiss chard in a béchamel sauce), and a fruit or dessert. The boys’ favorite had been moelleux au chocolat, hard on the outside, like a brownie, and soft in the middle, with a warm meltingness.
L’École Robert Doisneau was an underfunded, overcrowded public school. It had roof leaks, an asphalt playground that was breaking up and weeds growing through the cracks. In its confidence that eating could be taught, it wasn’t exceptional. The food our boys ate made them different from their parents.”
I didn’t know that da Vinci finished out his years in France. Buford has an ongoing theme in the book that most of French cooking actually has its roots in Italian cuisine from the Medici era. He presents a lot of seemingly credible, and deeply researched information to support this theory.
“I had been to Vinci, where Leonardo comes from – da Vinci – in Tuscany. Leonardo is the undisputed genius of the Florentine Renaissance. Just about everyone knows this. What I hadn’t known, even when I was visiting the village where he grew up, was that he would die, in 1519, effectively a Frenchman. The detail is seldom mentioned in Italy. It seems to be mentioned less in France, even though Leonardo’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is hanging in the Louvre because it was one of the canvases he brought with him. The other was Saint John the Baptist.”
This reminded me of the delicious zabaglione that my Mum makes. Maybe I can have one if we make our visit in August.
“A sabayon is a foam sauce as much as it is an emulsion. As Harold McGee points out: Yolks will foam pretty well on their own, but they will foam spectacularly with water. Mine had failed because they didn’t have enough water. I had reduced it too much.
Dictionaries describe the French word sabayon as having appeared in the French language in 1803, even though the technique was probably in place long before. It comes from the Italian zabaglione (sweet wine, Marsala usually, the water element, plus egg yolks, whisked and cooked).”
Ahh, the French cheeses:
“Like the fact that there are so many different kind of cheese in France, more than anywhere else in the world, twelve hundred of the twenty-two hundred unique European varieties, according to Michel Bouvier, the former curator of food and drink at the Gallo-Roman museum near Vienna. And now, my hands still smelling of milk, I find it miraculous that there would be so many. The miracle isn’t because France has a varied landscape with varied food making practices arising out of it, although it does; it is implicit in the sheer antiquity of how long cheeses have been made here, each one originating out of a specificity of place that is probably pre-civilization, when the horizon was not much more than the perimeters of where you could walk in a day.”
Buford’s twins struggled on returning to New York after several years in Lyon:
“They had issues with the food. At the school, the “chefs” didn’t wear toques, George complained at dinner. Also, they didn’t cook, he said.
“They use a microwave,” Frederick explained. The expressions of both boys conveyed utter astonishment that a microwaver would ever have the audacity to call him or herself a chef.”
I also read “Sorry for Your Trouble”, a collection of short stories and novellas by Richard Ford. I loved his books “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day” and had high hopes for this collection. The two novellas (around 45 pages long) were quite good, but the short stories didn’t work as well.
It was clear from the stories that Ford has spent considerable time in New Orleans and Ireland – an internet search shows that he actually taught for a while at Trinity college in Dublin.
“They were at the Monteleone, the shadowed old afternoon redoubt with the bar that was a carousel. It wasn’t crowded. Outside the tall windows on Royal a parade was shoving past. Boom-pa-pa, boom-pa-pa. Then the trumpets not altogether on key. St. Paddy’s was Tuesday. Now was only Friday.”
This review from the New York Times sums the stories up quite well:
“Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence…One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald…Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it’s gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage…Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the “well-crafted, writing-class story,” that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings.”
I got on a bit of a Stevie Wonder kick this week, listening to most of the triple album “The Secret Life of Plants.” What a superb collection of music in so many different styles.
One of my favourite Stevie Wonder creations from the “Hotter than July” album:
And finally, I’ve been revisiting some old (late 70s) Alan Parsons Project – the production and orchestration are so good:
Stay safe and kind (just like Stan)!