Monday, December 26, 2011
Micro-Projects underway
working on getting (NFP and Me)'s not-for-profit off the ground starting this new year
correcting general areas of ignorance:
- button sewing
- logarithms
- music theory
- history of 20th century american journalism
just ordered about a dozen books from The List (below)
heading to Medieval Times tonight.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
Nikki's First BLT
Apparently, growing up in an immigrant household can severely limit childhood exposure not only to American movies (Nikki didn't see Jurassic Park until 2009), but also to the great american sandwiches. When I suggested making a B.L.T. last night, I heard this little voice over my shoulder say,
"what does that stand for anyway?"
...
So I decided to use my newborn sourdough ciabatta and whatever we had in the kitchen to make the closest thing to the classic that I could come up with. What appeared (see the blur below) was a 'Deconstructed BLT.'
local cherry and plum tomatoes, sliced then spiked with coarse salt
uncured, smoked bacon ends, sliced thick
local spicy greens, wilted in the rendered bacon fat
homemade mayo with shallot, apple cider vinegar, tomato pulp from the over-ripe specimens above, fresh thyme.
served separately with sliced ciabatta.
The end result were little BLT sliders that tasted great, but were messy since ingredients kept escaping through the holes in the bread. I'd say, 8/10 for flavor though. They would actually be great finger-food for a party if they were pre-assembled and bound.
With it we had a bottle of Brooklyn Brewery's saison beer made with a new variety of hop from Japan called 'Sorachi Ace' that tatses like lemon cream. I think it convinced me to give it the nod for hop lead in our upcoming beer production:
Golden Snitch HPA
Which will be a butter-beer inspired pale ale hybrid: scottish yeast but at a high temperature fermentation, caramel malts, but with ample spicy hops, and now this lemon/cream note. The aim is a diacetyl tinged (but drinkable), rich and intriguingly hopped session ale. If it works, it might become our first House Beer.
"what does that stand for anyway?"
...
So I decided to use my newborn sourdough ciabatta and whatever we had in the kitchen to make the closest thing to the classic that I could come up with. What appeared (see the blur below) was a 'Deconstructed BLT.'
local cherry and plum tomatoes, sliced then spiked with coarse salt
uncured, smoked bacon ends, sliced thick
local spicy greens, wilted in the rendered bacon fat
homemade mayo with shallot, apple cider vinegar, tomato pulp from the over-ripe specimens above, fresh thyme.
served separately with sliced ciabatta.
The end result were little BLT sliders that tasted great, but were messy since ingredients kept escaping through the holes in the bread. I'd say, 8/10 for flavor though. They would actually be great finger-food for a party if they were pre-assembled and bound.
With it we had a bottle of Brooklyn Brewery's saison beer made with a new variety of hop from Japan called 'Sorachi Ace' that tatses like lemon cream. I think it convinced me to give it the nod for hop lead in our upcoming beer production:
Golden Snitch HPA
Which will be a butter-beer inspired pale ale hybrid: scottish yeast but at a high temperature fermentation, caramel malts, but with ample spicy hops, and now this lemon/cream note. The aim is a diacetyl tinged (but drinkable), rich and intriguingly hopped session ale. If it works, it might become our first House Beer.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Sunday, August 28, 2011
woohoo!
we're fine. the bird house in the back yard had its roof blown off- unless it never had a roof, I'm not sure. Nik and I are avout to stroll around and survey the landscape.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
dinner update
soup:
carmelized onions, polish sausage, kidney beans, chickpeas, gemelli pasta with oven roasted tomatoes simmered together in chicken broth, topped with pecorino cheese.
carmelized onions, polish sausage, kidney beans, chickpeas, gemelli pasta with oven roasted tomatoes simmered together in chicken broth, topped with pecorino cheese.
flown through a flaw in the flue
Nikki and I are now residents of:
279 21st street
APT 2B
Brooklyn, NY 11215
In the past 2 weeks I have:
Built-
1 bed loft
3 book cases
1 kitchen island
1 custom shelf
Installed-
1 window AC unit
hanging hardware into drywall
Living in the studio apt. with us-
1 aloe plant
1 tomato plant
1 fig tree
1 culture of sourdough starter
1 bin of Red Wiggler worms for vermicomposting
16 shelves of books
Aside from the above, learned:
the difference between a blender and food processor
what it means for a building to have metal studs
how to cook an artichoke
where not to park within a 5 block radius of the apartment
Eaten:
unpronounceable polish meats
hungarian goulash
lots of salad
home cooked Italian food
the Best of NY style pizza
pics to come
so far so good
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Here I am! You can stop looking now...
Finished in the NICU, finished with being a medical clerk for a few weeks. So now I'm doing in whatever I want, which is apparently sitting in a basement, listening to music, sipping red wine, trying to figure out how things work by building them from scratch. Actually, that sounds about right.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
cooking today
Bub Rub
ingredients:
vanilla bean
chipotle powder
brown sugar
fresh rosemary
salt
applied with canola oil to chicken,
smoked over applewood, coffee ground, and dried herbs
pretty decent.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Coffee plantation, deployed...
I finally got around to germinating the 10 dwarf coffee tree seeds that I impulsively bought on the internets last year for $5 from an Australian Horticultural website. If I manage to get one or two to live and then bonsai them, they should be producing their first crop of coffee cherries sometime around the year 2015.
http://www.sweetmarias.com/growingcoffeeathome.php
Hopefully by my last year of residency I will be able to wake up at least once to a cup of single estate/apartment uber-local coffee.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Progress
-Chicken legs
brined in red wine, black peppercorns, lavender flowers, dark cocoa powder
smoked over oak chunks
-successful test of "Brinkmann Fumarium"
-converted my igloo cooler into a Mash Tun, one step closer to all grain brewing
-herb garden alive and well
Basil- Tha, Genovese, and Cinnamon
Thyme vulgaris
Chives
- learned how to make soap out of bacon grease
Sunday, April 3, 2011
ôsəm day
woke up today to:
"clement weather, no traffic, no obligations"
Which I remember reading somewhere is Beck (musician) 's elegant definition of heaven.
Here was my lazy-yet-productive Sunday in bullet points:
gas and food shopping for the week- in shorts-
home, coffee, build and fill a book shelf
set up maple syrup, sage, juniper berry brine for CKN and Pork
soak mesquite chips
smoke 4 chicken breasts and 2 pork tenderloins from 4:30-7:00
devour food, beer with friends
work, plan, launder, shower, fold, clean, hydrate, scheme.
gardening, guitar...
"clement weather, no traffic, no obligations"
Which I remember reading somewhere is Beck (musician) 's elegant definition of heaven.
Here was my lazy-yet-productive Sunday in bullet points:
gas and food shopping for the week- in shorts-
home, coffee, build and fill a book shelf
set up maple syrup, sage, juniper berry brine for CKN and Pork
soak mesquite chips
smoke 4 chicken breasts and 2 pork tenderloins from 4:30-7:00
devour food, beer with friends
work, plan, launder, shower, fold, clean, hydrate, scheme.
gardening, guitar...
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Well, I'm alive
not my description, but I'll take it.
"Colour: gold.
Nose: the sea, nothing but the sea, maybe a little sherry. Kelp (both fresh and dried), seashells, iodine, wood smoke
(‘a bonfire on the beach’), peat smoke...
Add to that notes of Seville oranges, smoked tea (lapsang souchong), hints of white chocolate, hints of resin and camphor, smoked ham and sausages, bacon, whiffs of ‘clean’ wet dog, wild mushrooms... Truly fantastico, world-class malt, extremely well balanced and truly complex and complete. Mouth: a rich, candied and smoky attack, starting all on ‘smoked toffee’, bitter oranges and white pepper, maybe a little sweeter and less complex than expected after the fabulous nose, but still excellent. Gets a little more resinous and dry after a while, with also more sherry it seems. Big mint after that, mint-flavoured liquorice, tar and liquorice sweets... Picks up steam, especially the finish is long, thicker, on pepper, liquorice and cough sweets. Excellent, really. A slightly more complex palate would have propelled this one even higher than 90 points in my books."
Monday, February 21, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
"it is a tale...
Told by an Idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
I am aware of these things happening in the week or so since I last wrote:
I ate the incredibly flavorful celebratory food of Tet, the Lunar New Year, at the home of my friend Quan. He is a street book-seller turned tour guide, whom I met last year when he offered to sell me a book by saying, instead of "YOU BUY BOOK ME, YES?", he quietly said "Hello, would you like to buy a book from me?" Because of his excellent English he was recently hired to take tour groups to the deservedly famous Halong Bay, which I visited back on my first RICE trip in 2009. The bay is an increasingly popular day trip from Hanoi, with most tourists booking tour packages which including a night spent on a majestic if rickety wooden boat.
Starting the next day I became incapacitatingly nauseated and feverish just as our reconstructive team began to trickle in from the US.
The next morning my fever broke, though it left me unable to be more than sprinting distance to a bathroom for the day, during which the team examined about 75 patients and planned a dozen operations for the following week, such as for the young teen who had most of the skin vaporized from the front of his body, including his entire penis, in a traffic accident.
On Monday we began to operate, doing things like repairing the eyelid of a patient whose post-traumatic scars had turned the lashes of his eye inward against his naked eyeball. Without this repair, he would have eventually lost sight in the eye from ulceration and scarring.
Some operations went well, or tolerably well; others not so much. One of these 'other's was the boy without a penis, which we actually succeeded in creating for him out of an incredible feat of 'skin origami', by which the excess skin, fat, and fascia of a forearm is made into a functional, sensate, penis..
Unfortunately, due a series of bizarre misadventures including an unprecedented and possibly never-before-described equipment failure, the fully formed penis had to remain attached to its native blood supply- on the forearm of our patient- where it will have to persist for one year until we are able to return to Hanoi and reattempt the microsurgical transfer. Our patient is a teenager. His family name - Dong- is relatively common in Vietnam.
-as an aside, the working hypothesis for the mysterious equipment failure was that it was caused by the use of a re-sterilized device originally designed to be single-use and disposable. This is a very common practice in Vietnam. In fact the hospitals where our team operates routinely re-sterilize and reuse the disposable things that we bring and use while operating here. Lives, limbs, livelihoods, livers etc. are saved because of this practice, as these pieces of equipment are often limiting factors in operations in even the premier medical institutions in Vietnam.
Our instruments for the trip are kindly donated by device representatives for large medical supply companies in the US.
For example take Covidien; a group that makes about ten billion U.S. dollars per year selling things like the Ligasure hemostatic dissection device intended to make traditional surgical dissection using a replaceable $1 knife blade with blood loss controlled by application of 10 cent silk strings, obsolete. This device, a disposable plastic curling-iron looking robo-pincer job that can cook and crush its way through a human abdomen in a fraction of the time of traditional, painstaking dissection with steel, costs only about $925 a pop, If you do the math the price is clearly aligned to be just under the cost of the OR time theoretically saved by using the instrument, justifying in some philistine sense the ballpark 2000% markup.
Successful innovations like this one, given enough time, actually do make obsolete their more time consuming forerunners. Given enough time, as practice shifts and training accommodates then perpetuates the change, the old techniques are abandoned, and finally the old products lost to history. New innovations utilize the new tools, sometimes become dependent upon them, with any technical alternative lost except to a few borderline-senile Emeritus professors.
These innovations are published in the literature and eventually trickle down to places like Vietnam, where a vital procedure's success might hinge on something like an $80 disposable suture (priced to gouge the bloated American market) , preventing the carrying-out of the operation despite its clinical necessity or superiority.
The profit made through ventures such as this is such that said companies can donate their products to places like Vietnam quite generously.
- end aside
Today was post-op rounding day, requiring only a few hours of hospital time in the a.m. We undid dressings, examined wounds, took photos, said our goodbyes- leaving the remainder of the day free.
As I left the hospital, I was surprised and glad when my friend Quan called and said that he was also free this afternoon- I knew he had been scheduled for a tour to Halong Bay. So we sat on a busy street corner, sipping tea while the motorcycle traffic boiled beside us.
It turns out that all the tours for today were cancelled, and for tomorrow, and likely for the foreseeable future. It turns out the Vietnamese government issued a moratorium on overnight tours of the Bay, as early in the morning one of the overburdened wooden boats sank over the sleeping heads of a dozen passengers- 11 of them international tourists. It turns out this included 2 Americans and 2 French in their 20's.
This is the deadliest tour boat accident in the history of Vietnamese tourism. The Bay has been a backpacker destination since visiting it became possible 25 years ago- 1986-, around the time of the births of most of the current wave of tourists, myself and the Halong Bay unfortunates included. This occurred when, disappointed with a decade of sluggish economic recovery following the end of the war, the VN gov. instituted a wave of significant capitalist reforms and loosened prohibitions on travel, which in turn fueled rapid economic growth, especially in areas like tourism.
The date is significant because it fell 10 years after reunification of North and South Vietnam, the Americans having been booted out the year before. The country was unified, its independence complete, on July 2nd 1976 - two hundred years to the day, since the penning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
to quote Kurt Vonnegut quoting Bokonon:
"Round and round and round we spin,
With feet of lead and wings of tin..."
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
I am aware of these things happening in the week or so since I last wrote:
I ate the incredibly flavorful celebratory food of Tet, the Lunar New Year, at the home of my friend Quan. He is a street book-seller turned tour guide, whom I met last year when he offered to sell me a book by saying, instead of "YOU BUY BOOK ME, YES?", he quietly said "Hello, would you like to buy a book from me?" Because of his excellent English he was recently hired to take tour groups to the deservedly famous Halong Bay, which I visited back on my first RICE trip in 2009. The bay is an increasingly popular day trip from Hanoi, with most tourists booking tour packages which including a night spent on a majestic if rickety wooden boat.
Starting the next day I became incapacitatingly nauseated and feverish just as our reconstructive team began to trickle in from the US.
The next morning my fever broke, though it left me unable to be more than sprinting distance to a bathroom for the day, during which the team examined about 75 patients and planned a dozen operations for the following week, such as for the young teen who had most of the skin vaporized from the front of his body, including his entire penis, in a traffic accident.
On Monday we began to operate, doing things like repairing the eyelid of a patient whose post-traumatic scars had turned the lashes of his eye inward against his naked eyeball. Without this repair, he would have eventually lost sight in the eye from ulceration and scarring.
Some operations went well, or tolerably well; others not so much. One of these 'other's was the boy without a penis, which we actually succeeded in creating for him out of an incredible feat of 'skin origami', by which the excess skin, fat, and fascia of a forearm is made into a functional, sensate, penis..
Unfortunately, due a series of bizarre misadventures including an unprecedented and possibly never-before-described equipment failure, the fully formed penis had to remain attached to its native blood supply- on the forearm of our patient- where it will have to persist for one year until we are able to return to Hanoi and reattempt the microsurgical transfer. Our patient is a teenager. His family name - Dong- is relatively common in Vietnam.
-as an aside, the working hypothesis for the mysterious equipment failure was that it was caused by the use of a re-sterilized device originally designed to be single-use and disposable. This is a very common practice in Vietnam. In fact the hospitals where our team operates routinely re-sterilize and reuse the disposable things that we bring and use while operating here. Lives, limbs, livelihoods, livers etc. are saved because of this practice, as these pieces of equipment are often limiting factors in operations in even the premier medical institutions in Vietnam.
Our instruments for the trip are kindly donated by device representatives for large medical supply companies in the US.
For example take Covidien; a group that makes about ten billion U.S. dollars per year selling things like the Ligasure hemostatic dissection device intended to make traditional surgical dissection using a replaceable $1 knife blade with blood loss controlled by application of 10 cent silk strings, obsolete. This device, a disposable plastic curling-iron looking robo-pincer job that can cook and crush its way through a human abdomen in a fraction of the time of traditional, painstaking dissection with steel, costs only about $925 a pop, If you do the math the price is clearly aligned to be just under the cost of the OR time theoretically saved by using the instrument, justifying in some philistine sense the ballpark 2000% markup.
Successful innovations like this one, given enough time, actually do make obsolete their more time consuming forerunners. Given enough time, as practice shifts and training accommodates then perpetuates the change, the old techniques are abandoned, and finally the old products lost to history. New innovations utilize the new tools, sometimes become dependent upon them, with any technical alternative lost except to a few borderline-senile Emeritus professors.
These innovations are published in the literature and eventually trickle down to places like Vietnam, where a vital procedure's success might hinge on something like an $80 disposable suture (priced to gouge the bloated American market) , preventing the carrying-out of the operation despite its clinical necessity or superiority.
The profit made through ventures such as this is such that said companies can donate their products to places like Vietnam quite generously.
- end aside
Today was post-op rounding day, requiring only a few hours of hospital time in the a.m. We undid dressings, examined wounds, took photos, said our goodbyes- leaving the remainder of the day free.
As I left the hospital, I was surprised and glad when my friend Quan called and said that he was also free this afternoon- I knew he had been scheduled for a tour to Halong Bay. So we sat on a busy street corner, sipping tea while the motorcycle traffic boiled beside us.
It turns out that all the tours for today were cancelled, and for tomorrow, and likely for the foreseeable future. It turns out the Vietnamese government issued a moratorium on overnight tours of the Bay, as early in the morning one of the overburdened wooden boats sank over the sleeping heads of a dozen passengers- 11 of them international tourists. It turns out this included 2 Americans and 2 French in their 20's.
This is the deadliest tour boat accident in the history of Vietnamese tourism. The Bay has been a backpacker destination since visiting it became possible 25 years ago- 1986-, around the time of the births of most of the current wave of tourists, myself and the Halong Bay unfortunates included. This occurred when, disappointed with a decade of sluggish economic recovery following the end of the war, the VN gov. instituted a wave of significant capitalist reforms and loosened prohibitions on travel, which in turn fueled rapid economic growth, especially in areas like tourism.
The date is significant because it fell 10 years after reunification of North and South Vietnam, the Americans having been booted out the year before. The country was unified, its independence complete, on July 2nd 1976 - two hundred years to the day, since the penning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
to quote Kurt Vonnegut quoting Bokonon:
"Round and round and round we spin,
With feet of lead and wings of tin..."
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Life's Dram is but a Quarter dry
Sitting here in the Boston Logan Airport, literally in the shadow of a 6-foot-tall "sculpture" of a Dunkin Donuts "coffee." I don't put scare quotes on DD's saccharine-sprinkled, malarial-swamp version of the sacred skittish water because I'm snobbish about coffee- in fact Harrison recently revealed unto me the dark magic of Folger's Black Silk Coffee, which retails for about $4 a pound. Its spot in front of the International Departures ticketing counters is really fitting, as it's hard to imagine a better 6 foot symbolic spur to encourage people to get far far away from this country. Unless, the Daughters of the American Revolution paid this guy to hand out greasy Apocalyptic pentacostal pamphlets while topless.
Anyway, I received a really special birthday present in the form of a dispelled long-held belief regarding brains. Stemming from a psychology class I had back in high school, I had always thought that by the age of 25 the brain had substantially reduced the overall number of neurons (peaking in adolescence) in order to optimize efficiency at the expense of interconnectivity and plasticity. Apparently that is false, which is good news because I still can't speak a foreign language or play a musical instrument- though I'm working on both (I swear!).
Lastly, I just now thought up the idea of the Whiskey Vital (play on Uisge-beatha ['water of life' in gaelic]- meaning a bottle of scotch distilled in the year I was born from which I will take a hundred-part (7.5mL) each year a progressively more delicious and dire reminder of:
"Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. "
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