Just The Caffeine Talking

New Year's Dinner

I made the traditional New Orleans dinner for New Year's Day: Hoppin' John (=black-eyed peas and rice), Brown Cabbage, and sausage. It came out very well: the Hoppin' John was wonderfully rich, thanks to the goodness of a smoked pork hock, while the sausage was a pretty decent facsimile of andouille (as decent as one can expect from a company in Wisconsin).

The black-eyed peas trace back to the Roman custom of eating lentils; the legend is that you'll get a gold coin during the year for each one you eat. It makes more sense for the coin-shaped lentils than the basically bean-shaped black-eyed peas. There's also a tradition that the cabbage leaves symbolize money, but I don't know how far back that goes. Sausage, I suspect, is simply something that goes well with both beans and cabbage.

Anyway, hope everyone had as good a dinner as I did. Happy New Year!

Post-Thanksgiving Food Bragging Post

This year we had two and a half guests for Thanksgiving¹and so decided to really pull out all the stops for an epic meal. The menu:

Hors d'Oeuvres

Pickled Herring in Sour Cream    Oyster Patties

Cremant de Bourgogne

Viandes

Roast Stuffed Breast of Turkey    Sous-Vide Breast Turkey en Mole

Juliénas Beaujolais

Legumes

Oyster Stuffing    Tamales

Roasted Brussels Sprouts    Roasted Root Vegetable Medley

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Figs and Green Onion

Dessert

Apple Pie    Pecan Pie

Prosecco

Coffee    Tea

The only dish which was less than perfect was the stuffed turkey breast. Being skinless, it got a bit leathery on the outside, despite being wrapped in a buttered dishtowel. From now on, unless we're doing a whole bird, I think it's going to be sous-vide all the way.²

Hope you all had a delicious Thanksgiving!

¹My daughter counts as half a guest because while she does live in another state and her brother has taken over her old room . . . she is still my daughter, after all.

²Or fried. That will require some groundwork, including getting hold of a turkey fryer, and persuading Dr. Kelly that it will not involve any Great Peshtigo Fire re-enactments.³

³Too soon?

Science!

A neglected episode of the classic TV series Cosmos.

 

 

There's No Pleasing Some People

I do most of the grocery shopping for my family. Yesterday I went on my usual big monthly run to the discount club, to stock up on stuff that comes in large packages. One of the items my talented wife asked me to pick up was cereal.

So I bought cereal.

Was my return with cereal greeted with cries of rapture and gratitude? Were there squeals of delight? No. I got a lot of guff, that's what I got. You give someone magic-cupcake-flavored rainbow unicorn cereal, and you get guff. Rank ingratitude, I call it. Next time they'll get Grape-Nuts and like 'em.

Kitchen Report: Chinese Braised Pork Belly

Warning: if you are interested in healthy, low-fat recipes, GET OUT NOW!

I discovered this dish, or something very like it, at the Ginger Garden restaurant in Amherst. When I first moved to the area at the dawn of the new millennium, Ginger Garden was a very ordinary Chinese food joint, with a big all-you-can-eat buffet of General Tso's chicken and Hunan beef and lo mein and fried chicken fingers. I sometimes took my daughter there after school when I couldn't face Friendly's yet again. When she stopped going to school in Amherst, I stopped going to the restaurant.

A couple of years ago I went back and was astonished at how much the place had changed. Apparently it's under new ownership and they did a major overhaul of the menu — and the cooking. It's good now. One even sees Chinese students from the local colleges eating there, which wasn't true before.

One of the new dishes on the menu was an amazing dish of pork and green onions, deliciously rich. I enjoyed it immensely and it quickly became one of the things I looked for on the menu at Chinese restaurants. A few other places have it.

I hadn't really thought about making it myself until a specialty butcher shop called Sutter Meats opened in Northampton. It's full of artisanal sausage and free-range pork and locally-sourced chicken and home-schooled beef and the like. It has become my main connection now for things like pigs' feet and duck confit. And one afternoon I noticed that they sold . . . pork belly.

Hmm. I know a pork belly dish I'd like to make, I thought. How hard could it be?

So I bought a couple of pounds and hunted up a recipe on-line, then cooked it for the family. Just recently I made it again for company, so the following account is sort of a hybrid of the two cooking experiences.

First of all, the big confession: if you can get three pounds of pork belly and have all afternoon to spend in the kitchen, this dish is actually very simple. Pig-easy, one might say.

Get three pounds of pork belly with the skin removed. Dice the pork into one-inch by one-half-inch pieces. Put it in a pot of water and bring to a boil, then pour off the water and put the meat aside. (I'm not 100 percent sure if this stage is necessary if you're using good-quality pork belly from a selective butcher, but it doesn't seem to do any harm.)

Then chop up about 1 cubic inch of peeled ginger. Cut half a dozen green onions into three-inch segments (for the bigger ones I cut them in half lengthwise. Use a little oil in the pot and sauté the ginger and onions for just a minute, then add 1 cup of soy sauce, 1 cup of water, 1/4 cup of dry white wine, and some black pepper. Bring the mix to a boil and add 1/3 cup of packed brown sugar. (I've been tempted to try a little molasses in place of the sugar.) Then put the meat in, get it just barely simmering, and let it cook.

For FOUR HOURS.

Stir occasionally.

When it's done, the meat has shrunk a good deal, because of course pork belly is about 75 percent fat and a lot of that is rendered out. Scoop off the layer of clear liquid fat and put it aside. If you can't find a use for a couple of pints of rendered pork fat flavored with ginger, you're just not applying yourself.

The texture was described by my youngest guest as "melty." Yes, you're basically eating cubes of soy-flavored fat, and it's wonderful. Serve over rice or noodles, and for God's sake have some kind of vegetables with it so your gall bladder doesn't try to crawl up your esophagus and run away from home. Cabbage is always good with pork. (The restaurant version had more green onion on the plate. Since the onion cooked with the pork completely disappears into the sauce, I'm betting they stir-fried some more onion and added it at serving time. I may try that, too.)

Verdict: yum.

 

For stories which are also good with pork, buy my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

An Ancient Dessert

In the course of a recent bookstore raid I got a copy of Arcana Mundi by Georg Luck. The bulk of it is a compilation of writings by classical authors on occult topics. While reading it I stumbled across a passage translated from Homer, describing how the enchantress Circe turned Odysseus's men into swine. To get them nice and cooperative before she started throwing polymorph spells around (Circe obviously understood that casting a spell can provoke an attack of opportunity), she prepared them a little snack:

". . . a dish of cheese and barley, clear honey, and Pramnian wine."

That stirred a recollection of something I'd read in a different book, Lobscouse & Spotted Dog, by Anne Grossman and Lisa Thomas. It's a "gastronomic companion" to the sea novels of Patrick O'Brian, and so naturally focuses on 18th-century recipes. One of their recipes is for Frumenty, a breakfast or dessert dish which originated in France and was popular in England. It's a kind of porridge of boiled cracked wheat mixed with sugar, milk, egg yolks and heavy cream, and the authors mention that it was often served with a generous dollop of rum.

Or, perhaps, Pramnian wine. If you remember that Homer's "cheese" might be more like modern cottage cheese (or even yogurt or clotted cream) then the similarity becomes a lot more apparent. (It also starts to sound a lot like the yogurt-and-granola goo sold in plastic cups to people who think they're eating a healthier breakfast that way.)

Clever Circe whipped up a spiked dessert dish to put her victims at ease, and almost the same dessert was still being enjoyed in a land Homer never even heard of, far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, more than two thousand years later.

Another version of Circe's dish is the Kykeon consumed by the initiates into the Eleusinian mystery cult. From the description it was "runnier" than Frumenty; more like Syllabub (a blend of wine, cream, and spices). It may have had psychoactive herbs in it as well — which suggests that when Circe mixes drugs into the dish for her guests, initiates in the audience could have exchanged knowing glances with each other. This also suggests a much more allegorial interpretation of the whole episode.

Now I'm tempted to try making this some time. I'll report back when I do.

 

Circe lived on an island, surrounded by fierce creatures. An island of monsters, if you will. So obviously she would have enjoyed reading my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Commercial Holidays

One feature of American life during my half-century in it has been the annual complaints about commercialization of holidays. The primary subject is Christmas, of course. Christmas gift buying is such a key part of our economy that devout believers have given up trying to keep the focus of the holiday on its religious or even cultural role. Buying stuff is now the whole point of Christmas: not just gifts, either, but giant home decorations, antlers for your minivan, holiday cards, seasonal clothing, candy, travel — almost anything you can buy will have a Christmas-theme version. (I don't know about industrial supplies or pharmaceuticals, but I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if Kobe Steel tried a special "rolled sheet metal for the holidays" promotion.)

But never mind about Christmas. What about other holidays? Some have been successfully commercialized, but others resist. I've identified four main criteria for commercializing a holiday.

1. Booze. You have to be able to sell liquor, especially at lame "parties" at bars and nightclubs. (Christmas is an oddity here: there are plenty of Christmas parties, but they're all privately-hosted. Christmas in a bar is the grimmest thing you've ever seen.)
2. Candy. You have to be able to sell candy, preferably candy shaped or colored for the occasion, so people have to throw it away afterwards. Other seasonal foods are nice, but since groceries are a low-margin business, selling some extra hams or turkeys isn't enough to warrant commercializing a holiday. People will eat food no matter what day it is.
3. Decorations. It's not a big-league holiday if you don't decorate your house. Christmas is the clear winner here, but Halloween has been gaining steadily, to the point where they are nearly neck-and-neck. The other holidays are way, way behind those two.
4. Dressing Up. Not as in "dressing nicely" but as in "wearing special clothes or disguises." The opportunity to temporarily take on a new identity is a powerful draw for kids and adults. This is Halloween's strong suit, although Valentine's Day now features a lot of special "sexy" outfits, some of which are literally Halloween costumes in different packaging. Christmas has Santa hats and ugly sweaters, but I think there's still plenty of untapped potential for "sexy elf" outfits.

So how do the others rate?

Halloween has come to rival Christmas. It has all four categories locked down. I have a roleplaying game supplement, Warehouse 23, by S. John Ross, which is a compendium of weird and paranormal items found in that legendary Big Secret Warehouse where all the weird and paranormal stuff is hidden. One item in a table of random "throwaway weirdness" is an object from some parallel reality: Halloween house lights which play cheesy seasonal music, just like Christmas decorations in the real world. Yesterday I saw those lights (they were purple and orange) in one of those pop-up Halloween stores, down on Route 9.

Apparently we have shifted into an alternate reality since that book came out.

Halloween now includes candy (which appears in the supermarket in August!), costumes (including the whole panoply of costumes for grown-ups — and the inevitable line of "naughty" adult costumes), home decorations rivaling Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, Halloween-themed booze for your party, bars and restaurants holding Halloween "parties," Halloween cruises and vacation packages, Haunted Houses, and almost certainly some things I'm afraid to Google.

It's a far cry from the days when my grandfather celebrated Halloween by dismantling someone's buggy and reassembling it on the barn roof.

Valentine's Day is now almost a mirror-image of Halloween. It has a solid lock on three of the four categories. Tons of candy, costumes, and depressing "parties" at nightclubs have surged. Decorations seem to be limited to a few cardboard hearts. And what used to be the core of the entire holiday, the Valentine's Day card, is sliding into obscurity as people have shifted away from mailing things.

Easter has never really gotten beyond chocolate bunnies and candy. People did once "dress up" in the nice-clothing sense, but with the decline in annual clothes-buying, the old tradition of a fancy new outfit for Easter has disappeared. A few years ago I did see some ambitious candy-maker trying to repurpose the Hanukkah-gelt production machinery to make Easter-themed "Bunny Money" — but I only saw it once. I guess someone pointed out that you really don't want to be giving your kids thirty pieces of silver for Easter, even if they are filled with delicious chocolate.

There are some Easter house decorations, but they're relatively restrained, and it's been ages since I've seen really elaborate candy eggs. Apparently Christians have been able to reclaim Easter so the marketers are wary.

Saint Patrick's Day has some minor house decorations — the odd shamrock for the door or Irish flag — and it's way ahead in the booze department, but I can't think of any St. Paddy's Day candy, and dressing up is limited to the odd green bowler or boutonniere.

Thanksgiving is all about the food. It's a grocery holiday, and not much more. That may be why it seems the least tainted by commercialism. I know some restaurants have Thanksgiving dinners for people who can't get home (or have no family), and there are probably some sports bars open, but those are definitely substitutes for the "real thing" and everyone knows it.

July 4 has decorations and fireworks, and a certain amount of beer is consumed, but marketers haven't been able to come up with any "signature product" which people are expected to buy. Seems as if the candy companies are missing an opportunity here. It's in the middle of summer, so the only dressing up most people do is to put on swimsuits.

New Year's has booze.

Memorial Day is like a dry run for July 4: summer, patriotic theme, emphasis on barbecues and outdoor activities. But other than the inevitable radio station "Top 500 countdown" (spoiler: it's gonna be "Stairway to Heaven" again) there isn't much in the way of observances.

My conclusion: if you want to make a ton of money, start making candy and costumes for July 4 and St. Patrick's Day, or Valentine house decorations. The market is waiting.

 

Halloween is coming! The perfect opportunity to give someone my new ebook Monster Island Tales.

Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Day 2

The first day of the Interstellar Workshop featured the Starship Century and Breakthrough StarShot groups. On Thursday the Tau Zero Foundation took center stage. The Tau Zero group aren't as wedded to a single goal or mission profile. Instead they've put a lot of effort into identifying key technologies which will benefit any interstellar exploration, and have tried to support research in those directions.

The opening talk was by Marc Millis, chairman of the Tau Zero Foundation, explaining their modus operandi, and discussing some of the motives for interstellar voyaging and how those affect the specific mission plans — if you want to colonize other star systems, you'll have to work on extremely long-duration missions, but if you want bragging rights for the first interstellar probe, you should work on a StarShot-style flyby.

One obvious key technology for any space exploration is launching things off Earth and making use of resources in near-Earth space. So Jonathan Barr of United Launch Alliance gave a talk about their new Vulcan booster and the adaptable ACES upper stage, which could become the workhorse of cislunar space. ULA wants to sell more rockets, so they're trying to come up with ways to increase the number of people in space; the goal is 1,000 humans living and working off-Earth by 2050. Amazingly, Mr. Barr managed to get through the entire presentation without ever uttering the dread syllables "SpaceX."

He was followed by Jeff Greason, the Chairman of the Tau Zero Foundation, formerly with XCOR and now the head of Agile Aerospace. He had an amazing presentation about the possibilities of plasma sails, inspired by research done by John Slough of the University of Washington. With only 10 kilowatts of power, a spacecraft can gnerate a "virtual" magnetic sail to capture the charged particles of the solar wind. In the inner solar system, this allows for some remarkable velocities — up to 400 kilometers per second, which is 20 times faster than the New Horizons probe to Pluto. The chief drawback is that like all sails, the thrust only goes away from the Sun — so you can use a plasma sail to zip over to Mars in a week, but you can't stop when you get there!

But the prospects of a drive allowing such tremendous speeds for a relatively low power requirement and no propellant at all are still incredible, and everyone including Mr. Greason was astonished at how the plasma sail technology has been overlooked.

After a coffee break we saw some presentations about antimatter. Marc Weber of Washington State discussed how to store antiparticles (answer: with great difficulty, that's how). Then Gerald Jackson, late of Fermilab, talked about how to make antimatter in commercial quantities. The current goal is to get production up to 2 grams per year of anti-Carbon; over 8 years that would generate enough to launch a probe to Proxima Centauri.

George Hathaway finished up the batting roster for the morning, with a discussion of all the issues involved in testing "advanced propulsion concepts" — in other words, busting frauds and crackpots. Proper testing of radical new technologies means the testers have to be obsessively methodical, considering and compensating for everything from seismic vibrations to the tides.

After lunch I attended some shorter talks. The first was a presentation about alien life and how unlikely it is that even a life-bearing planet with an oxygen atmosphere would be ready for settlement by interstellar pioneers, simply because of chemical incompatibility.

The second short talk was by Ore Koren, a grad student from the University of Minnesota, who discussed some important issues about minimizing social strife aboard a "generation starship" traveling for centuries.

And finally Dr. Giancarlo Genta spoke about some experiments he and his team had done in creating computer simulations of a spherical laser-sail interstellar probe, to investigate potential issues of stability and dynamics. Professor Genta was careful to point out that his work was still preliminary, more of a proof of concept for the computer modeling than a definitive answer about the ideal sail configuration. That headed off what looked like a scientific slap-fight brewing among partisans of other sail designs.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to my Working Track group, brainstorming museum-exhibit ideas. At the end of a couple of hours we had covered half a dozen large poster-pad sheets with potential exhibit items. I hope at least some of them eventually get built.

That evening, all of us carpooled over to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center museum for what has to be the most "Huntsville" event possible: Biergarten Night at the Saturn V exhibit. A good-sized crowd gathered to enjoy bratwurst, schnitzels, red cabbage and potato salad, along with some excellent beer — all served up underneath the hanging bulk of the museum's historic Moon rocket.

As a finale to the long day we gathered in the museum auditorium for a lecture by Dr. Andrew Siemion about SETI research, especially the Breakthrough Prize Foundation's "Breakthrough Listen" project he's connected with.

And so to bed. Tomorrow: the final day!

 

It's October, and that means it's the right time to read about scary monsters — so buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!

Kitchen Report: Sous Vide

I know, I know: I'm about ten years late to the party on this one. Sous vide cooking techniques have become universal in the restaurant business, and probably half of the "foodies" in North America have a sous vide gadget sitting in a kitchen drawer somewhere. I'm a late adopter: I prefer to let other people get the bugs out of things before I take them up.

If you're even later to the party than I am, sous vide is a method of cooking which uses food vacuum-sealed in plastic bags (though you can do a perfectly adequate job of vacuum-sealing with a zip-lock bag and your lungs). The bag is then immersed in a water bath which is kept at a precise temperature. (The availability of cheap electronic thermostats in recent years moved it from high-tech cookery to something you can do at home.)

The process allows for very long, slow cooking of meats to exactly the desired level of done-ness. When meal time arrives, the meat can be quickly seared in a pan or flash-broiled to give it a proper Maillard-reaction exterior crust. You don't have to balance time and temperature to get the interior properly done without overcooking the outer layers.

One reason I was late to the party is that sous vide is always promoted as a way to cook steak. But since my preferred steak is essentially "beef sushi" I never saw the point. It's already done as much as I want inside; it comes that way straight from the cow.

Nevertheless, my tech-loving wife gave me a sous vide cooking device (it's a thermostat, an immersion heater, and a circulating pump, but there's no good name for the whole thing) for our anniversary. Events intervened this summer, so we only really got to start playing around with it in the past couple of weeks.

She used it to prepare a hanger steak, but neither of us could tell the difference between a "vided" hanger steak and a regular one. (See the remarks about "beef sushi" above.) I was starting to think it was all hype, but resolved to give it a fair test. So I bought a four-pound chuck roast, put it in a gallon ziplock back with a couple of minced garlic cloves, some salt and pepper, and some rosemary, then put it in the water bath at 135 Fahrenheit for six hours. Shortly before dinnertime I took it out of the bag and seared it, then cut slices.

I was expecting something like pot roast, but the interior was still quite pink. Effectively I had a four-pound steak on my hands. The long low-temperature soak had converted most of the connective tissue to gelatin so it was quite tender (though not "fork-tender" as one of the recipe sites I looked up claimed). The fat was mostly un-rendered, so it was wonderfully moist. (Indeed, after six hours of cooking there was no more than a couple of tablespoons of juice in the bag.) Delicious, really. I'd guess that among the three of us we must have put away a third of it — though I must point out that one of us is a growing fourteen-year-old.

We discussed other things to cook in the same way. Vegetables don't seem to be high on anyone's sous vide list, if only because you really do have to get close to boiling to make most of them tender, and long low-temperature cooking doesn't really do much for the flavor. It would also be tricky for any stew-like dishes (boeuf bourguignon, ragout, curry, etc.) since they also contain vegetables. Although it would be great for keeping a pre-cooked dish like that ready at serving temperature . . . which of course is what many restaurants do nowadays.

It seems that it's better to think of sous vide not as a cooking method but as a pre-cooking technique, analogous to marinating. Use it to prepare the meat before you actually cook it. I've got some ideas I'd like to try: cooking a leg of lamb in the water bath all day and then finishing on the grill with some aromatic woods, or possibly a pork loin. I'm very nervous about using this method for poultry, however. It may take me a while to work up the nerve to try that.

So, the final verdict: cooking meat sous vide works very well. I'll be doing it again.

 

For stories involving beings made of meat, buy my new ebook, Monster Island Tales!

What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 2

Charleston is a fascinating city to visit, but in August its most insistently noticeable feature is the heat. I have ancestors who lived in Charleston before relocating to New Orleans, and now I understand they were looking for a place that wasn't quite so hot and muggy.

The high temperatures really weren't all that hot: upper 80s, maybe breaking 90 at the hottest part of the day. The problem was that the lows at night were only a few degrees lower than the highs. This may be a seasonal problem; there are few places south of Canada which are actually pleasant during August.

I spent my first full day in Charleston being a tourist, and I make no apologies for it. In the morning, I walked around the old part of town with my wife and son before meeting up with my sister and brother-in-law. They had made a great discovery: the grave of one of those Charlestonian ancestors I mentioned above, in the churchyard of the oldest Catholic church in town. The inscriptions were blurred with age, but we could still make out most of the words.

Then we all piled in the car and drove north to the modern industrial part of the city in order to see a piece of history: the submarine Hunley, raised from the sea floor outside the harbor mouth and currently halfway through an exhaustive stabilization and de-corrosion process at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center. The archaeologists have done an amazing job identifying the remains of the crew, even down to pieces of clothing and jewelry.

It's bigger than I had thought, and considerably more sophisticated. I had not known that the Hunley had a snorkel device for air circulation, or a flywheel system so that the whole crew didn't have to keep cranking. The Hunley was a real sub, limited only by the lack of a good propulsion system — and the need to get right next to the ship it was attacking.

The Hunley points up one of the things which always amazes me about the American Civil War: the tremendous technological innovation that went on. Even the supposedly traditional, agrarian South managed to deploy a number of revolutionary weapons, including the Hunley itself. To my mind, the most startling example of the war's technological fecundity was the duel between the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor. Here's the South's unstoppable high-tech superweapon, and on its second sortie it is met by the North's unstoppable high-tech superweapon. In fiction it would seem implausible, but it happened.

After our visit to the mother of all subs, we had lunch at what can only be described as a hipster diner called the Iron Dog. By this point the ladies and my son were getting worn out, but my brother-in-law and I gamely went back for a second hike around Old Charleston, admiring the famous "single houses" and speculating with a total lack of knowledge about how the style developed.

When we had enough walking we retired to an air-conditioned eatery for some cooling beverages, then picked up some groceries and crossed the spectacular Ravenel Bridge to the rental cottage. Rather than heat up the house we lit the backyard grill (not without some difficulty) and cooked up a feast: sausage, grilled peppers and onions, a pre-marinated boneless leg of lamb, a tomato-and-avocado salad, and seared peaches for dessert. All washed down with a couple of bottles of wine.

Full and happy, we retired for the night, hoping for good weather on the big day.

Next Time: Totality!

 

Two science fiction crime capers go horribly wrong: Outlaws and Aliens, by James L. Cambias.