Rants of the Hedgehog

Alex and Jeff's Excellent Adventure, Part IV

2011-10-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

Alex gains a hat

Saturday, oddly enough, was pretty subdued. Maybe the staying up late drinking had worn us out. When I got up late (especially for me) that morning, Alex appeared to be in the midst of a near-death experience and obviously wasn't ready to charge into the day. I went in search of breakfast and the nice lady at Reception recommended Mother's, which was only a few blocks away. I believe it was her responsibility to tell me ahead of time that the recommendation came with an hour+ wait out in the sun--it's a very popular place.

So I ended up where I started, crossing St. Charles from our hotel to the Hilton, which has a terrific brasserie on the ground floor, Lüke. Only drawback? Insane portions.

That's the Plat Lyonnais, which I believe should have come with a warning "delicious potatoes buried under four huge sausages." My waiter told me I wasn't required to finish, although he had seen a few people manage it. Everything, including the presspots of coffee, was fantastic. After I'd finished as much as I could and the waiter took away the evidence of my failure, I got a text message from Alex wondering where I was and reporting that he was raring to go. Or, anyway, ready to eat. He ended up with the Croque-Madame et Frites.

A few days earlier, I'd commented to Alex that I thought he'd look great in a pork pie hat, and he said he'd been thinking the same. We spoke to several people about hats, because New Orleans seemed like a good place to look. Everyone said the same thing: go to Meyer the Hatter. Period. Meyer the Hatter has been in the same location since 1894, providing all manner of hats to musicians, movie stars and hipsters for more than a century. It's also about two blocks from our hotel, not far from Canal Street. The jam packed store floor is topped by two more stories of hats in storage. More colors, more sizes, more styles...

Alex was fitted by a tiny French lady (one of the staff told us she'd been there since the French Revolution) who peered up at him and announced "7 1/2 long", pulled out a hat and plunked it on him. Perfect fit.

I have no idea what we did after that. Walk around? Eventually we decided on an early dinner and landed at one of Ryan's many recommendations: Coop's Place. Walked in, grabbed two bar stools, ordered Sazeracs and dinner and watched as people began standing around outside, out of the rain. It wasn't until we left that I realized that was the line to get in, which hadn't existed when we arrived. Timing is everything.

Coop's Place is an unassuming bar with no attempt at slickness, on the walls or behind the bar. The kitchen is out back, outside, where they also smoke the most incredible tasso I've ever tasted -- well, that's not adequate, because I haven't had that much tasso. Let's say some of the most incredible smoked meat I've ever tasted. The tasso was in my jambalaya supreme (rabbit, sausage, shrimp and tasso) which was brilliant. Very poor photo follows.

We were beat. Another trip to Cure was considered but seemed overwhelming. Back to the hotel it was.

On Thursday, waiting for Jenaya to pick us up, Alex and I had briefly sat in the hotel bar, which specializes in champagne cocktails and is a very pleasant space. The bartender spoke to us and then left to serve her tables, and we decided to go outside instead. She ran over just as we reached the escalator to ask where we were going, and we promised we'd come back later. So we did, two days later. Courtney was born and raised in New Orleans and pretty much fulfilled every story I'd ever heard about the warm and friendly locals. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, and talked with her about the city, cooking, music, and what we'd experienced over the last few days. Even though she built us no original and complicated cocktails, Courtney goes on the list of best bartenders ever.

Sunday it rained, New Orleans style. During a break in the downpour, Alex and I headed to the French Quarter for a muffaletta, except Napoleon House is closed on Sundays. A quick check with Ryan steered us down the block to Johnny's Po-boys, a relative newcomer that's only been open since 1950. Johnny's was packed.

After awhile the crowd thinned out a little, because people left and it was raining so hard that no one was swimming through it to come in for a po-boy. As ordered by Ryan, we had a roast beef po-boy, dressed. We split it.

That was pretty much it. Walking in the rain was not fun and we were drenched. We drank hot tea in the hotel bar for awhile and eventually headed out for our evening flight back through Houston (bbq in the airport!) and home.

I believe I promised deep thoughts, but I've misplaced them. This I will say: New Orleans is not like any place else. It's not like any other American city (although outside the city proper a lot of it looks like the worst of Southern California). I really had no idea what people were getting at when they told me of their affection for the city, or why people would put up with storms and heat and even move back after huge sections of New Orleans had been pounded and flooded and dismissed by the rest of the country.

I don't believe anyone can have even a faint grasp of how special New Orleans is without actually being there. Me? I don't know anything about NOLA at all, except that there is so much there to experience and immerse myself in. I'm definitely going back.

Alex and Jeff's Excellent Adventure

2011-08-28T08:04:00.000-07:00

Some time in the spring my son, Alex, asked me if I wanted to travel with him to Tales of the Cocktail, a bartenders' convention. In New Orleans. In late July. I scoffed.

Weeks later I gave it more serious thought. After all, how many times in my life would I have the opportunity to go on a real adventure with one of my kids? Here was the opportunity to share our mutual enjoyment of cocktails and food in a city and a culture neither of us had ever experienced. I wasn't particularly interested in attending programs at Tales, but I figured I could do a little exploration on my own while Alex and two of his friends soaked up knowledge, booze and networking connections. I was only worried that it would be so godawful hot and muggy that I'd never go anywhere.As it turned out, the friends dropped out and neither Alex or I attended Tales. We did, however, have a great time and my preconceptions and view of New Orleans were turned upside down.

Wednesday--We have landed

Although I was braced for the sort of horrid humidity and heat I faced in DC last year, when we landed at mid-afternoon it was warm and almost cozy outdoors. Our cabbie seemed eager to get rid of us, one way or the other, and rocketed along well over the speed limit. The hotel was a great score, thanks to Hotwire, very quiet and located a short walk from the French Quarter. And, as it turned out, our first destination, Herbsaint, was only a few blocks in the other direction on St. Charles. The highpoint at this little bistro would have been the frogs' legs but the day's amphibians were too wily for Herbsaint. I did, however, get my first Louisiana gumbo and it was good. It also reassured me that I was on the right track at home.

Next stop, and one of our primary destinations was Cure, a fairly new and serious cocktail bar on Freret. Just getting there was entertaining enough; our cabbie was full of information and advice delivered from the filthiest mouth I've ever heard. Driving everywhere, over some seriously torn up roads, he insisted we tour the Garden Distrct, which is filled with the most beautiful and exotic mansions I've ever seen. (Sorry, no pictures. Look it up.)

Cure was everything we'd hoped for and more and immediately moved to my short list of best American bars. Fantastic service for food and drinks, an enormous selection of spirits and cocktail ingredients, homemade bitters and terrific original cocktails. I was ready to stay the week.

First up for me was the Gun Shop Fizz on the right, and Alex's Disappearing Ink (Dolin Blanc, Sherry, Strawberry Bitters, Rosewater, Lemon Peel, Mint) on the left. Cocktails are generally made with one or two dashes of bitters, but the fizz uses two ounces of Peychaud's. I expected a puckering challenge to my mouth, but the Gun Shop is bright and refreshing. More wonderful drinks followed, including Rhiannon Enlil's delicious Bees for Pele. (Rhum Agricole, Yellow Chartreuse, Lemon, Honey, Spice Bitters, Angostura Bitters) and a Sazerac made with Thomas H. Handy rye.

We had chosen to sit on the short side of the bar, opposite the kitchen rather than the bottle display. This made it very handy when the cooks reached over to deposit our small plates, including the fresh crab and watermelon salad. We were later given a dish of white chocolate-dipped blackberries with crumbled bleu cheese and walnuts.

Later, our server told Alex and I we should follow Rhiannon and it didn't appear that we were being ejected. Instead, we were taken to a pair of tall glass-fronted cabinets near the door which was storage of their most special beverages. "Do you see anything you're interested in?" Well, yeah, hell yeah, but it was too overwhelming to focus. Rhiannon ended up choosing a bottle of Byrrh, a rich and delicious aperitif, and then offered to make us each our drink of choice using the Byrrh. Alex was served a variation on the Negroni, and I on the Manhattan. And I've run out of superlatives.

Rhiannon above, Alex's Negroni below.

Off we went to the hotel and off I went to deep sleep. As it turned out, Alex was restless and went for a walk, thereby discovering that the French Quarter was only a few blocks away and that drunken college boys fling strings of beads even when it's not Mardi Gras.

More to come.

Alex and Jeff's Excellent Adventure, Part II

2011-08-28T08:01:00.001-07:00

Thursday--A Full Day

Although New Orleans was our primary destination, I wasn't going to travel that far into the Deep South without seeing countryside and the Gulf, and knocking another state off my list (it's now down to six unvisited). Thursday was a beautiful sunny day, and we drove our rented car east on Hwy 90, through the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, past Lake St Catherine into Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast's Long Beach.The car's air conditioning was very welcome, for as beautiful as the day was it was also hot and humid.

I admit to real bigotry about the region, wondering why the hell anyone would want to live there, especially outside New Orleans. I also admit to being a dumbass. The drive to Gulfport, through a wide variety of woods and waterways and beaches, was utterly beautiful (and some of the most picturesque, seen from bridges and causeways, frustrated the photographer).

The Hwy 90 bridge over Chef Menteur Pass, which connects Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne. The highway then travels along an isthmus bordering Pontchartrain and soon enters Mississippi.

We saw ample evidence of the rebuilding along the coastal areas with homes built on platforms high above the ground. Virtually every residence we saw was brand new or under construction.

A long stretch of white sand (appropriately called Long Beach) runs from the mouth of Bay St. Louis all the way to Gulfport, Mississippi, and almost certainly all the way to Biloxi. It was hot and nearly empty. In contrast to the ocean I'm most familiar with, the Gulf was extraordinarily warm and murky. The temperature really was like a bath, but neither of us was tempted to swim in it.

The "goal" of the trip, or at least the target, was lunch at the Half Shell Oyster House. Lunch turned out to be very late, and we were ravenous. Grilled oysters got us started. Alex had a seafood pie and I ordered the Royal Red shrimp, which were luckily in season. Big shrimp, with a flavor more like lobster than the usual taste. The only downside was that they resisted peeling.And grits.

And for dessert, my first-ever real Key Lime Pie. It was good. Alex had to get his own.

And a busy evening

Our great friend, Jenaya, had recently repatriated to New Orleans, having been washed out by Katrina in 2005. She had made us promise to give her one night to get a taste for her city, which we looked forward to eagerly. Jenaya picked us up at our hotel and drove us on an apparently random and twisted path through the French Quarter to the Bywater neighborhood. On the way, we saw our first "second line", this one for well-loved club owner Ray Deter, and a huge brass band of youngsters in bright yellow t-shirts. (Our first brass band but by no means the last. Music everywhere!)

It's almost impossible for me to describe Bacchanal, other than to say it's just about the coolest place I've ever been. From my perspective, it's in the midst of nowhere immediately across from an old Army depot, railroad tracks and the Mississippi River. It seems obvious that Chris, the owner, isn't relying on pedestrian traffic for customers. This is a place that you make an effort to go to, because you've been there, or you've heard great things about it, or you're fortunate enough to be taken there by a friend. If you were looking for it, you might easily pass by entirely.

When you watch the first season of Treme (which you absolutely must), Bacchanal is featured in at least two scenes. In the first, Sonny buys his girlfriend a bottle of wine--the interior of this brick building is a funky and well-stocked wine shop, and was the original Bacchanal. Customers enter, choose a bottle of wine or two and take them and their glassware out to the large and wild backyard. We got there early enough to select a table, but later on, with the band playing and the chef knocking out superb food, it was filled with happy guests in the warm and sticky night. Many of the guests were attractive women of all ages.

Jenaya's friend Chris had been out fishing the day before, and provided 60 pounds of tuna for the chef. And, oh god, was it good, along with our ceviche and flatiron steak. And wine. Lots and lots of rosés. In Episode 9 of Treme, there is an entire scene set in the back yard, and Janette's portable kitchen is set up exactly where the new outdoor kitchen is now located.

Which seems like a good time to apologize for the general craptastic nature of the photos. I've come to the conclusion that a combination of good photos and a rousing night out is difficult to pull off. Bacchanal has much better photos on their website and their Facebook page. Check them out.

Update (9/15): Bacchanal is having some problems because of their live music. There's a good piece here.

Much of what followed is a bit blurry. The three of us walked through the neighborhood, visited her shotgun house, and then two of her local dive bars. In the process we twice passed the bar in which Kermit Ruffins was playing, with a huge crowd spilling outside during a break. Both the bars were called JP's or JJ's. I think. The one we landed in was packed and the music being played was excellent. In New Orleans, the rules about smoking in bars are very different than they are in Portland. As far as I can tell, the rule is: whatever the owner wants is fine. I think people in this bar were required to smoke. Next to the jukebox was something I hadn't seen in years, a cigarette vending machine.

Still more to come after a good night's sleep.

Alex and Jeff's Excellent Adventure, Part III

2011-08-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

Friday it rained

Living in Oregon for years has gulled me into thinking I know something about rain. After all, everyone knows it rains constantly here, day after day. In New Orleans, apparently, they've decided it's more efficient to pack two weeks worth of rain into two hours. Step out in it and you will be soaked to the skin in minutes and scampering from balcony to awning just doesn't cut it. (Note: next time bring an umbrella.)

Since walking around town was a really poor option, we decided to travel north to Abita Springs and visit their brewpub. First stop, though, was the justifiably famous Cafe du Monde in the French Market, where it has resided since 1862. Open 24/7 except for Christmas and days when hurricanes "pass too close to New Orleans." Most of the seating is outdoors, under a roof, and most of what is served is a cup of café au lait (with chicory) and three beignets buried under a cloud of powdered sugar. It's all just as delicious as it looks.

As the rain started in earnest, we drove for about 30 minutes to cross the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the longest continuous bridge over water in the world. Along the way, Alex discovered WWOZ on the radio, a listener-sponsored station playing an amazing blend of New Orleans music and local culture--and it's available streaming on the Internet! All of which made for great entertainment while driving over an endless bridge through pouring rain.

And more pouring rain. All I can say about Abita Springs, other than the rain, is that they have a very nice brewpub and a lot of very pretty houses. And cats. They have at least four (one ran off) trying to find a dry spot to sit outside the pub. None of them looked happy and particularly not about being disturbed.

As the day dried out, we headed back to New Orleans and our date with piggies.

Alex had gotten us early dinner reservations at Cochon, a restaurant specializing in, uh, pork. (And I note that the owner/chef has been awarded the James Beard Award for Best Chef South, 2011.) And thanks to Alex, we received a warm greeting from the lovely Naomi aka Elaine (ask Alex), one of his former co-workers. Most of the menu items were "small plates", which can be a relative term. Oysters the size of my hand. Below that, pork cheeks and something yummy. An amuse-bouche with they called head cheese, which has no resemblance to any thing I've ever seen with that name and was delicious (as was the pickled okra). And finally, the main dish, braised pork with cracklings and peaches. I probably could have had apple fritters with southern pecan sherbet if there I had any room.

The rest of Friday involves drink.

After porking out, we found another bar on Alex's list, which turned out to be a not very exciting hotel bar where I had an indifferent Sazerac (I think). We got excellent advice from the bartender, however, including a warning that we really did not want to walk to the next bar on the list, down a very sketchy street. Instead, he suggested Arnaud's French 75 bar in the French Quarter next to Arnaud's Creole Restaurant, which has been in the location since 1918--a beautiful and elegant bar with a superb and attentive staff. In the spirit of Tales, the bartender had created some new specialties. I think (but can't guarantee) that the new drinks included a specific Amer. I got stuck on their version of a Martinez and never wavered.

Arnaud's was a perfect place to spend the evening, with a lively crowd that included spill-overs from the restaurant (a wedding rehearsal dinner with exceptionally lovely Southern Belles), a friend from Portland, and more people from Portland! And to top it off, it was only a few blocks (stumbling distance) from our hotel.

A little bit more to come, although mostly much quieter, and perhaps some deep thoughts.

Battling the Starlings

2011-05-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

Over the course of a year, I get a lot of visitors to my balcony, drawn in by four different feeders offering options for birds. I added a suet feeder late in 2009 after being briefly visited by a Townsend's Warbler in the snow. The suet feeder gets regular visits from chickadees, bushtits, nuthatches and a flicker. Drop-ins have included warblers and a Downy Woodpecker.

A week ago, the starlings found my suet and proceeded to demolish it. Researching the problem, I ran across a few discussion boards where someone inevitably asked "why all the hate? They're just birds." So, briefly: starlings are a non-native intrusive species that some idiot introduced to this continent years ago. They are large, noisy, and they crap everywhere. They descend in a flock and eat all the suet while chasing off any other birds (except the flicker, who is much too large to be intimidated). Starlings are also persistent and creative, more or less the rats of the sky.

The nice people at the Backyard Bird Shop offered a couple of different solutions to replace my feeder and discourage the starlings. One approach is to use a bottom-only feeder that has the suet cake lying flat with a roof over it; birds have to cling underneath to eat the food. This is no problem for most of my visitors, like bushtits and nuthatches but in theory, starlings can't do that. In theory. Like I said, they're persistent and I read reports of starlings that had learned to cling.

So I went with the cage within a cage. The inner cage holds two suet cakes comfortably and the holes in the outer cage allow little birds simple access as you can see. (I was taking a photo of the feeder with my cell phone, standing about three feet away when the nuthatch showed up.) So I crammed in two cakes and came home to find that the starlings had eaten about half. It turns out that they can easily stand on top and drill down to the suet quite easily. Furthermore, the juvenile starlings can cram their heads in from the side and reach the food.

Back to the shop, where it turns out that my only real problem was putting in all the suet. The trick is to cut one cake in half lengthwise and put the two pieces in side by side. Then the starlings can't reach it from the top and the juveniles haven't been all that successful from the side of the cage. Soon their nasty heads will be too large to fit in. Meanwhile, not only can the little birds get in and out with ease but the flicker is actually having a much easier time hanging on to the feeder and his long neck fits through the outer hole easily.

So yay me. Boo starlings.

A different beverage entirely

2011-05-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

When my friend Ryan and I went to San Francisco the last week of April, we did not limit our drinking solely to wine, cocktails, wine and beer. On occasion, we started the day with coffee, thanks to the good folks at Blue Bottle Coffee (follow that link because it's a very interesting company). As good as many of the Portland and Eugene roasters are, I would instantly shift my loyalty to Blue Bottle should they ever open a roastery here, even though the World's Cutest Barrista works elsewhere.

That's the second-best latte ever, by the way, along with the remains of a Parmesan-fennel-sea salt shortbread cookie. The remains lasted only seconds after the photo.

First stop was at the Mint Plaza cafe, home to the world's first five-light siphon bar.(which is apparently a big deal, besides looking extremely cool). UPDATE: And then I realized that the five-light is off to the far right in this photo. I still have no idea what the Frankenstein-looking thing in the clear box is supposed to be.

The Japanese have apparently gotten very serious about their coffee (Japanese always seem to get very serious about anything interesting), and their approaches to brewing coffee and the equipment designed for their techniques are finding their way to the US.

One adopter — and importer — of Japanese gear was James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee in Oakland, San Francisco and now Brooklyn. Freeman and his wife, the pastry chef Caitlin Williams Freeman, recounted a visit to Chatei Hatou, a Tokyo coffee shop where brewing coffee isn’t exactly a ceremony but is ceremonious. They said beans were weighed, ground, emptied into a filter and preinfused with a little bit of water that let the coffee bloom and release carbon dioxide. Cups and saucers were warmed, a slice of was set in the fridge to firm up. Only then was the coffee brewed, slowly.

“They’re going for a mastery of technique, then a mastery over all the important details of service,” Freeman said. “It adds up to an incredibly elusive experience. It’s hard to manufacture splendidness. It seems as though they have something very difficult figured out.”

And that giant siphon? There's a really beautiful slideshow about it at the NY Times, along with a YouTube video of the thing in operation:

While I was sucking down my latte, Ryan waited patiently for 10 minutes while his siphon coffee was prepared.

Showy, huh? And then the pot comes to the table.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out how the siphon worked, but YouTube came through again.

Was the coffee better? You'll have to ask Ryan, who seemed pleased (which might have been because he finally got his coffee). I stuck to the latte.

The next day, we visited the Ferry Building for the second time, and I had the Greatest Latte Ever at the "secret" coffee bar with the shockingly short line. It didn't take 10 minutes to brew, either.

Spoils of Love

2011-04-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

It does seem like a lot of wine and spirits, doesn't it? Ah, well, it's not every day that I get to root through the liquor stores in California. I was on the hunt for vermouths and aperitifs I can't find around here, and a few other bottles seem to have fallen into the basket.

More to come on those vermouths, both foreign and domestic.

Random Photo of the Day

2011-03-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

JELD-WEN Field, almost ready for first match on April 14. What had most recently been PGE Park has been converted from a baseball-friendly park to a futbol/football field for the Portland Timbers, now a Major League Soccer team. The entire season is effectively sold out already.

Random Photo of the Day

2011-03-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

Night photography needs work. And a charged battery. The moon last night was spectacular.

In search of the perfect glass

2011-03-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

"The perfect glass" being dictated, of course, by what is served in it. I may have gotten obsessive about this when I was becoming somewhat obsessive about beer. I treasure the few bars and pubs that make the effort to serve their beers (especially Belgian or Belgian-style) in the appropriate glass rather than pouring everything into a shaker "pint" designed for mixing cocktails.

Wineglasses are another subject entirely. I completely fail to grasp the need or distinction between a pinot glass, a burgundy glass, an Oregon pinot glass (wtf?) but I'm open to persuasion. I've been sold on the ickiness of a rolled rim, and I do understand the advantage of a glass large enough to really get my snout into. I've got glasses for red wines and different glasses for rosé or riesling, but there are subtleties I'm missing.

Beverages that sparkle, though, those I get. I love bubbles in my drink, be it water or juice or wine. Especially wine. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible to go wrong with a decent sparkling wine and lately I've been churning through all sorts of moderately-priced and delicious sparklers -- cava from Spain, sparkling Riesling (well, not so moderately-priced) from Germany, proseccos and even a delicious wine from Georgia. No, not that Georgia, but Stalin's country. I've confidently poured them all into good flutes, which like the best pilsner glasses, encourage the formation and retention of bubbles. The carbonation not only provides the correct texture, but pushes the aromatics up and out, into my nose. What could be better?

The answer, it turns out, is a tulip.

So is the flute the proper glass for Champagne? Not so, according to winemakers at Chandon, Roederer, and Taittinger. Champagne is, after all, wine. Neither coupe nor flute allows the wine to fully express its aromatic qualities. There are actually two other possibilities, and they were explored together with coupes and flute glasses at a recent Maximilian Riedel tasting at the Manhattan Riedel showroom.

Much more appropriate for a champagne-lover to enjoy the bubbly, especially if it is a “tête de cuvee” or a super-premium bottle, is the tulip glass. The glass is tall, but curves outwards to within a couple inches from the mouth, then curves inwards to the mouth. This design allows a little more space for swirling, and focuses the aromatics more towards the nose. Among the glasses we used for the tasting was the champagne tulip from the new Riedel Vitis line. The glass’ silhouette gracefully maximizes the surface-to-air space, allowing some aeration within the glass and the development of exceptional aromatics.

Clearly I needed tulips or my satisfaction would be shattered. Amazon couldn't deliver the goods, or at least not when I needed them. The Riedel Vitis glass turns out to be available at Macy's. Um, $40 a glass? I'm drinking $10 cava! Maybe there's something in the beer glass collection that will suit. Shuffle shuffle. What's this?

I got married (the first time) in 1983, and two of my favorite people, Sonja and Shannon, sent a wedding gift from Seattle. These two beautiful women sent two beautiful champagne glasses. Over the years, I'd almost never used them, for fear of breaking them, or because other people were not enthusiastic about drinking from someone else's wedding gift, and the glasses were tucked way in the back of the cabinet for safety. Sonja had turned me on to real sparkling wine, Schramsburg, a year or two before the wedding gift. It's only taken me a bit over 25 years to catch up.Because, d'oh, the beautiful glasses were tulips and they are the most perfect glasses for drinking wine with bubbles.

Don't fear the vermouth

2011-02-12T16:19:00.000-08:00

My friend Ryan and I visited The Secret Society Lounge shortly after it opened, an intimate Victorian-era bar specializing in well-crafted classic cocktails. I thought they were shaking too many that should have been stirred, but the effort was appreciated, and the offerings really were classic.

The downside of "intimate" of course is that it's difficult to avoid listening to neighbors' conversations. A new group plopped down next to our table and one of the patrons, barely glancing at the cocktail menu, announced, "I know what I want! I want a dirty martini!". My natural response was to throw her out of the bar, obviously, but I've become tolerant in my old age and realized it wasn't her fault to get it so wrong.

An order for a dirty martini is a cry for help.

It takes some time and effort to develop a taste for booze, which is why young people tend to cover it up with all sorts of nasty sweet concoctions like Jack & Coke. When someone is persuaded to try actual spirits, there's a natural tendency to choose something odorless and flavorless -- vodka. Even someone as smart and funny as Alan Cumming comes to believe that a "martini" is simply an icy glass of nearly-frozen vodka. Shaken, because that's how to get the drink really cold and notice: a sketch of vermouth to rinse the mixing glass and then poured out. The call for a dirty martini is a plea to have something to taste, even if it's only olive brine.

My father's generation is probably to blame for this, or perhaps we can pin it on Winston Churchill, who championed a big nearly-frozen glass of gin, with the bartender glancing at a bottle of dry vermouth before serving. My dad subscribed to a similar view and would make reference to waving an open vermouth bottle near the martini pitcher. Considering the awful slop he passed off as gin, this only makes sense because the vermouth he'd have on hand was even worse. Bought from the bottom shelf and left unrefrigerated (probably for years), his vermouth was something to avoid.

As the SF Chronicle's Paul Clarke writes:

Fear, apparently, is a factor. "Almost 75 percent of my vodka martini drinkers are very, very afraid of vermouth," says Brooke Arthur, bar manager at Range. While many vodka martini fans are seeking a cocktail as flavorless as possible, Arthur says, drinkers enter the world of the contemporary bar with almost no exposure to vermouth.

"They don't even know what it tastes like, but a friend who gave them their first dirty martini didn't use it, so they don't want it in there," Arthur says.

Native to northwest Italy and southern France, vermouth - a wine that has been aromatized with herbs and other botanicals and lightly fortified with unaged brandy - is widely popular in parts of Europe, where it is usually served as an aperitif. But from the approach taken by most American bartenders - who typically dispense vermouth with atomizers, eyedroppers or simply a delicate hand when mixing martinis - vermouth could be considered some sort of bibulous antimatter.

There is, truthfully, a great deal of sub-par vermouth on the market; anyone who tasted the stuff straight would be justified in thinking of it as crap. Dry vermouth is made from a wine base, seasoned with botanicals. In civilized countries, it's treated as an aperitif, consumed before dinner with ice and perhaps an orange peel. That's good vermouth, though, starting with a base of decent wine, not from some ghastly "wine" you'd never allow on your table.

Vermouth was first produced commercially in the late 18th Century, but had been concocted at home for centuries. Paul Clarke again:

Typically made from neutral-character dry white wines that have been flavored with herbs, roots and barks - typically including cardamom, cinnamon, marjoram and chamomile - and then fortified with a neutral grape spirit, vermouth is classically made - and named - for another botanical: wormwood (the plant's name in Old High German is Wermud).

Fortunately, really good vermouth (and aperitifs) are becoming more available, and truly distinctive vermouths are being produced right here in the US, although on a limited scale. The Quady Winery has been producing a dry and a sweet vermouth in California since 1999. Their dry vermouth is very dry indeed. On a base of Orange Muscat wine, they've added a unique blend of botanicals including lavender and various mints. (Also from California is Sutton Cellars dry vermouth, with great word of mouth--not going to taste it until some kind soul from California brings me a bottle. They are also developed a rosé vermouth, which sounds like heaven.)

Here in Oregon, a small company produces Imbue Bittersweet Vermouth, which is bitter indeed. Tasting it on its own, I found the vermouth shocking and demanding, but as a martini ingredient it is exceptionally good: pretty much the polar opposite of a "vodka martini".

The European vermouths included in the photo range from the gentle Dolin "Blanc" on the left (the also make excellent dry and sweet vermouths), Lillet Blanc (technically not vermouth, but filling a similar role in cocktails and on the table) and the very rare Cinzano Orancio, which is too sweet to be a "dry" vermouth, and too delicate to replace sweet vermouth. It plays well with oranges, oddly enough.

Find a bar that stocks good vermouth and ask to try a few on the rocks. A twist of lemon and a spritz of soda help to create a refreshing pre-dinner drink. And then try some serious cocktails. Make a real martini!

Martini the Right Way (or one of the right ways)

2 oz. gin (I like Tanqueray because it's good and it's cheap; there are plenty of other choices, such as Aviation; it's important that it be a robust gin
1 oz. Vya dry vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir vigorously with plenty of ice until well-chilled; pour into an frosty cocktail glass and garnish with lemon peel

Or try Neil Kopplin's Inverted Martini

2 oz. Imbue vermouth
1 oz. gin
add ice and orange peel

UPDATE: More on dry vermouth at this blog.

Seeking food inspiration

2010-09-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

Two months without a blog entry? Have I no sense of shame?

Last week I finally started paying attention to the eruption of food carts here in Portland. One article I read reported that we had more than 200 now, scattered around town in "pods", which appear to share rent in an empty lot, along with utilities and dining areas. The familiar array on the Transit Mall downtown seems to be primarily Indian, Thai, Thai, Indian and Thai. Plus some Indian food. Elsewhere in town the diversity is much greater, and new pods appear constantly, requiring websites solely to track and review them.

Alex and Becky made a timely visit to Portland last week, and we chose the very new pod on Belmont near 43rd for our first exploration. So much to choose from! Mexican, Italian, Korean/Hawaiian, sausages, fresh produce, "comfort food", Thai, Middle Eastern...

Although the Dawg of the Day was tempting, I opted for the pulled pork plate at Namu's Killer Korean BBQ, and the result was even better than expected. Shredded pork, slow-cooked with cabbage was served along with sticky rice and a sauce (I chose creamy horseradish), and traditional Korean cucumber and spinach salads, and kimchee. Absolutely delicious.

Alex and Becky chose the Eurotrash cart and came back with equally delicious options.

Because we were having a late lunch, we almost had the entire site to ourselves. Based on observation at other locations, I'm guessing that the place is jumping during the noon hour and in the evening (almost all of these carts are closed by 10 pm). As pleasant as it was for us, on a cool summer afternoon, I have to wonder how well the carts will do in the Winter when the table umbrellas will offer little shelter. The Hawthorne pod has a big tent for seating, but most of the pods I've seen are highly exposed.

A perfect marriage

2010-07-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

I have been a fan of Four Roses for about a decade, although it has long been a geographically-challenged affection. Up until a short time ago, Four Roses distributed their bourbons in Kentucky and nowhere else in the US; the primary market, in fact, was Japan. Even when I learned that they were reentering the US market, I figured it would be years before any found its way to Oregon. I was ecstatic when the Yellow Label, the Small Batch and the Single Barrel appeared in OLCC stores within the last year.

Four Roses has a unique approach to bourbon production. They maintain five different yeast strains (used to create the "beer" that will then be distilled into whiskey) and two different mashbills, with varying amounts of rye grain.To crib from their website:

All 10 of these recipes are gently aged undisturbed in new white oak barrels in our one-of-a-kind single story rack warehouses. All 10 recipes are expertly married together to create Four Roses Yellow. Four are married for Four Roses Small Batch Bourbon. Only one is hand selected for Four Roses Single Barrel Bourbon. To the thrill of Bourbon connoisseurs and Bourbon collectors, from time to time, our Master Distiller will select an exceptional single barrel, or marry a few exquisite recipes, to create one of our highly acclaimed limited release Four Roses Bourbons.

I had no expectation of ever seeing the Mariage in Oregon, but a helpful bartender steered me to a liquor store with a few bottles in the back room. The 2009 Mariage combines 10 year old and 19 year old OBSK with 10 year old OESO whiskies. (If you want to know what the codes mean, check here.)

When it comes to reviewing beverages, I'm completely useless. My friend Ryan can bang out 200 words on a single wine in minutes, complete with (to me) obscure references to fruits and vegetables, and solid suggestions on how to pair the wine with food. In whiskey reviews, I constantly run across references to leather, pipe smoke, or granite. Or, as D G Compton titled a short story collection: Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Slides of Used Matchboxes, and Something that Might have been Castor Oil. So I will again crib from the Four Roses site, because it's as close as we're going to get to appropriate language:

Nose: Rich fruity aromas of ripened cherry and pipe tobacco, hints of lemon citrus and dried oak.
Palate: Ripe fruit and allspice with creamy layers of caramel and toffee.
Finish: Long and smooth.

See! Pipe tobacco! What did I tell you?

The word I've always used to describe Four Roses bourbon is "soft," although I'm hard-pressed to explain why. The reference to the finish above, "smooth" pretty much defines Four Roses bourbons, all the way from the lowly Yellow Label on up. Any one of these bottlings might offer the perfect introduction to bourbon for people who "don't like whiskey", but I'm in no way implying that they are training-wheels bourbons. Mariage 2009 is warming, rich, and complex.If you can find a bottle, buy it.

Pomegranate YUM

2010-05-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

Working backward: I was craving a Picon Punch and realized that some time back I had thrown out a critical ingredient: grenadine. Not the hideous red glop from Rose's, but real grenadine homemade from pomegranate juice. Digging around for recipes, I discovered that Jeffrey Morgenthaler had posted a recipe that looked considerably simpler and better than what I had used previously. That version began by reducing pomegranate juice by half and then adding sugar. The grenadine tasted OK, certainly much better than the fake stuff, but it was much too thick, especially since I was refrigerating it. Grenadine from that bottle slid directly to the bottom of the glass, looking like an unappealing lava lamp.

Morgenthaler's recipe simply requires dissolving the sugar in the juice, exactly like making simple syrup (or hummingbird nectar, for that matter) but then gives the grenadine an extra punch and richness with the addition of orange flower water and pomegranate molasses. Pome-what? Pomegranate molasses turned out to be easier to find than expected. In fact, Barbur World Foods not only had pomegranate molasses, they had multiple brands to choose from. Obviously, I've been missing something in the world food line or I would have known this. The grenadine was just as advertised: simple, colorful and absolutely delicious. (Shortcut hint: I skipped the "squeeze a pomegranate" and went for the pure juice.)

When I asked Morgenthaler what to do with the 12 ounces remaining in my bottle of molasses, he suggested I just save it for the next batch, but after tasting the stuff I decided he may have missed the boat on this one. This morning's breakfast included bacon, French Toast and pomegranate molasses rather than syrup. Jackpot! Further exclamations of joy and sensation! Not only is the pomegranate flavor a delicious change but the molasses has a delightful tartness to set off the sweetness of the fruit.

Maybe I should have washed breakfast down with a Jack Rose or a Picon Punch, but coffee seemed the wiser choice. Pokey, incidentally, is guarding a bottle of the grenadine.

UPDATE: Doing a little more digging, I found an interesting blog post about pomegranate molasses, with recipes. The barbecue sauce is definitely on my list.

A bit of cooking

2010-04-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite Szechuan dishes is Steamed Pork with Mei Gan Tsai, which I discovered accidentally in an Oakland family-style restaurant. At the time, I lived on a ridge above the restaurant, where the kitchen fans blew up to the apartment in the evening. Needless to say, decisions about what to have for dinner often involved walking around the corner for Chinese food. Having become a loyal customer, I could get good advice and make unfamiliar choices. Moving away could have been traumatic, because it's not a commonly-offered restaurant dish, but Bruce Cost's excellent book on Asian ingredients provided the recipe.

It's a simple dish, with a time-consuming preparation. The first step is to boil a nice chunk of pork belly for about 45 minutes. The meat is drained, patted dry and rubbed with dark soy, then browned in very hot oil. Tonight's meat came from Fubonn market on 82nd Avenue, which has an excellent meat department. This is a particularly nice-looking slab with plenty of meat and fat.

Eight cloves of garlic, about four ounces of pickled mustard greens, dark soy and a half cup of Shao Tsing rice wine is sauteed briefly. The meat is sliced and placed in a bowl, with the greens and seasoning ladled on top. The whole dish then goes into the steamer for a good 2.5 hours, during which time the hard fat of the bacon will break down into soft yumminess and add lots of pork flavor to the greens. The process is essentially the same as the breakdown of fat through slow cooking in the best barbecue.

Pork on the left, Ma Po Bean Curd on the right. And, of course, there is rice.

Chicago with the Snobs, Day 5

2010-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Day Five was primarily a travel day for the remaining Snobs and, naturally, the weather was gorgeous after four days of gray and damp. Most of the group had either left on Sunday or had mid-day flights out on Monday, but Peter, Ryan and I had brunch at Heaven on Seven, a Louisiana-themed restaurant in the Loop. Excellent food, and Peter's introduction to a po'boy, which he handled with grace and style. Ryan and I had a daily special, shrimp and cheese grits with gumbo on the side. Yum.

After seeing Peter off to a few pints and his flight, Ryan and I had one last Chicago task, a visit to the holy shrine of hot dogs: the Vienna Beef factory store. Located in an industrial area not far from De Paul University and its lovely neighborhood, we reached it with a short trip on the Red Line and another short bus ride west. The "store" is also a diner and the company lunchroom, with plenty of other products on sale besides the essential hot dog--all sorts of meat goodness, packages of condiments, t-shirts--the works, as it were. Even though we'd been well fed at Heaven, Ryan got a hot dog at the Source. It seemed a fitting conclusion to all the days of excess in Chicago.

Chicago with the Snobs, Day 4

2010-04-26T06:19:00.001-07:00

Four of the Snobs had invested in tickets to a Sunday ball game (excellent seats!) and had been viewing weather forecasts with some dread. Over a hot dog breakfast in the Loop, we watched the rain pour down, and considered options. We could abandon the idea entirely and find a warm dry nook with food and beer, or we hope for some periods of dryness and at least tour an unfamiliar ball park. For my own case, opportunities to see a Major League game come infrequently, and there was always the possibility that the visiting Mariners would avoid being swept by the White Sox. Not a strong possibility, but hope springs eternal.

Chicago makes baseball easy, at least on the South Side, as the Red Line stops a few hundred yards from the park. We were seated four rows back, on the first base line in right field. The stadium is built so that this meant we were virtually at field level with a great view. It was wet. And cold. Tarps were down over the infield and their removal was greeted with a roar of approval. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad! And just as the game began, it rained. Not for long, though, just enough to give everyone a good soaking in preparation for blasts of really cold air. For the most part, the rain held off for nine innings but the cold and the wind never did. We stuck it out, though, along with the thousands of happy locals whose team won this game, along with the previous two games in the series. Me, not so happy with the result, but very pleased we'd taken our chances.

CTA makes baseball easy after the game as well. Portable fare machines, lots of extra customer service staff directing fans down to the trains, which were frequent and capable of carrying far more people than the light rail trains I'm used to in Portland. Red Line into town, Blue Line up north and a quick bus ride to the Map Room, where we settled in for the evening. For the baseball Snobs, all this meant no beer until 5:30 pm! Clearly, we needed to work hard to make up for the delay. Dinner was take out, delicious Cubano sandwiches from a few blocks away.

I was tucked up snug in bed before midnight. Other Snobs, however, finished up with cheezborgers at the Billy Goat. No, seriously.

Chicago with the Snobs, Day 3

2010-04-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

More food and less beer, more or less. Knowing that there would be a line at Hot Doug's, the plan was to arrive when they opened at 10:30 or as close to that time as possible, given the longish transit ride out to sausage paradise. Since it was The Snobs, naturally, the plan fell short at critical moments and we ended up arriving at about noon. There was a line. We stood and talked in that line for 90 minutes before reaching encased meat heaven. Thanks to the generosity of absent Snob, Charlie Gow, we indulged. Well, others did. I only had a Chicago dog, a corndog and an Uber Garlic Pork Sausage with Roasted Garlic Dijonnaise and Moody Blue Cheese. And duck fat fries. There were other sausages at the table, mostly from the specials section of the menu.

We packed our well-stuffed casings on to the bus and then the El (Chicago understands public transit as well as Chicago understands meat) and landed at Rock Bottom for many pints and many Chicago fans screaming as their hockey team won in overtime on multiple screens. (Chicago also understands sports, as one would expect of a city with two baseball teams, a hockey team and a basketball team.) Additional Snobs drifted in and then out through the afternoon. There was beer.

And then there was pizza. Five of us pushed off through the rain to Gino's East for excellent deep-dish pies, the crunchy polenta crust stuffed with cheese, meat, tomatoes and spices. Both pizzas were considerably better than in a visit seven years ago to a different Gino's, and the service was terrific.

Don't these guys look happy? (From left: me, Ryan, Steve, Andy, Dave.) Most fortunately, our server offered to take the photo before we started to eat. Damage to the food was considerable and certainly not pretty. Nothing to be done after all this but push on through the rain to the Billy Goat for Old Styles. No cheezborgers, though, at least not this night. I hear rumors that cheezborgers were consumed the previous and the following nights, in the wee hours.

Chicago with the Snobs, Day 2

2010-04-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

Day 2, pretty much all about the food. And beer. But mostly food, at least at first.

This started with lunch at Rick Bayless' Frontera Grill, reservations for eight at the 11:30 opening--prompting Brit Peter to cry, "Who eats lunch at 11:30?" as though we were mad. The photo is of my "light entree", Cazuela de Pato:"slow-cooked Gunthorp duck carnitas with ancho chile, lentils, slab bacon and grilled pineapple. Crispy onions." Others at the table had barbacoa goat enchiladas or the daily special of lamb slow-cooked in some incredible sauce, or . . . these being served after the small plates and appetizers, primary among them the "Trio, Trio, Trio: a sampling of Ceviche Fronterizo, Ceviche Yucateco and Coctel de Atun Tropical.

Well-stuffed with incredible food, we pottered off to the El, and a brisk walk (to those not plagued with battered knees) to the Map Room, one of Chicago's best multi-tap taverns. I had remembered the Map Room as dark, smoky and packed but yesterday reflected the non-smoking rules, with lots of light and air and a truly fine selection of beers from around the Midwest. (More photos here.) Eventually, a somewhat rash decision was made to move on for food and a visit to Hopleaf. Certain members of the party elected to skip the food and arrange seating at Hopleaf for the other six. We will speak of this treachery no more.

The half dozen heroes cabbed over to Mr. Beef, which turned out to be closed (apparently not uncommon). Fortunately, Portillo's was close by and we were able to fall on Italian beef sandwiches (hot peppers and crusty rolls) and real Chicago hot dogs.

Another cab ride over to Hopleaf, which was packed, crowded, stuffy and offered primarily Belgian beers we could find anywhere civilized. No place to sit or even stand comfortably and very little I found interesting on offer. Ryan, Steve and I peeled off for what turned out to be a longish bus and train ride to the Clark Street Ale House, where we lucked into a table and a much more appealing list of regional beers. The pub was crowded and loud, but vastly more comfortable. Other Snobs eventually wandered in later, more beer and fun ensued and we got ready to push off to bed. Amazingly enough, most of the group elected to head out to the Billy Goat Tavern for cheezborgers (cue Belushi skit). I tottered back to the hotel on my own, spent entirely too much time waiting on the El platform and just barely made it to my room without embarrassing myself.

Time now to clean up and get ready to stand in line for lunch at Hot Doug's. I believe there is a pizza in my future sometime after that.

Chicago with the Snobs, Day 1

2010-04-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

I am blessed with a group of excellent friends, loosely known as The Snobs who, perhaps unfortunately, are scattered across the US and beyond. For very special occasions we've been able to gather for a few days of in-person visiting, always involving beer. Two of the Snobs were born in 1970, the year of my majority, and we decided it was worth celebrating. Chicago has several advantages, not the least of which is centrality, so there are nine of us here from the West Coast, the East Coast and the UK. The only goals are consumption and badinage, both of which we're quite good at.

Five of us managed to arrive at O'Hare virtually at once, took the El into downtown and our various hotels, then began acquiring more Snobs as we moved from Rock Bottom (loud, crowded and quite decent beer) to Piece, serving non-Chicago pizza and house beers (OK pizza, eh beer). Piece was unbelievably crowded but by great fortune we were able to ooze into a table as acquaintances finished their meal and oozed out--one of whom was actually the Rock Bottom brewer responsible for my excellent pils. From there, we El-d a few stops further north to Revolution, a new brewpub serving exceptionally good beers. At this point, Lew Bryson was to have made a surprise entrance (him being in town for Whiskeyfest), which he screwed up by gabbing about on Facebook. Everyone was pleased, though, to have an Auxiliary Snob (with a very special flask) who is as much fun as Lew. There was some initial concern that Lew's laugh would get us 86'd, but the wait staff at Revolution was tolerant and the place was noisy enough to absorb the volume.

Chicago at night is so different from laid-back Portland that it's difficult to credit. Even well after midnight, the streets were bustling, the bars packed and the El trains well-filled with people. Lots of young people out and about, dealing with the chilly air in everything from skimpy skirts to parkas. A lot of bicycles in what appears to be a very un-bikefriendly town. And Chicago is a lot older than Portland, which is most obvious to me in the tunnels and platforms of the El, amazing constructions of iron and wood with furnishings dating back to the 19th Century. All, I might add, still functioning with surprising efficiency. Two in the morning? No problem, the train back to the Loop will be here in six minutes.

The best part? We just got here and don't leave for days.

The birds vote for Spring

2010-03-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

I crabbed about Daylight Saving Time the other morning, but I have to admit it is nice to have some light in the early evening. It means I can actually see the grill without a flashlight, for one thing, but it also means some opportunity to get a better look at my new visitors.

I now have three feeders on the balcony, with the addition of a thistle feeder, intended to attract finches. To date, I have two regular and greedy Lesser Goldfinches, who visit the feeder over and over during the day and spend a lot of time pulling seed out through the mesh. On rare occasions, they will sing a full-length version of their song but more often it's a single falling note (which is included in the recording). It's not unusual for me to see one of them on the feeder, stopping between bites to call that note, and then I can hear a response somewhere off in the trees from the other bird.

All the sunlight meant getting a better look at my regular visitors: Bushtit and Black-capped Chickadee as well. A few more photos here.

I say it's Spring

2010-03-06T14:58:00.001-08:00

According to the calendar, Spring is weeks off but here in Portland it's well ahead of time. It made for a nice walk today for Ralphie and I, especially along Sellwood Blvd, where I found my dream house (or houses). Not only is this a beautiful old home with a beautiful old cherry tree out front (along with a beautiful not-so-old resident), but it offers what might be the best view in Portland. Sellwood Blvd sits on a ridge overlooking Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and the Willamette River, with a clear view of downtown. Far down below is a walking and biking path, part of the 40-mile Springwater Corridor. The steep wooded hillside between road and path is already packed with songbirds.

I'm just having a little trouble deciding whether the nice lady should give me her house, or if I'd rather have one just down the street, because the other house has a widow's walk and therefore even a better view.

And this house is right next to Sellwood City Park, a real gem tucked away from traffic, while still a short hike to the Bybee-Milwaukie stores and antique row. Maybe the people who live here should give me their house instead.

Ralphie doesn't seem to care, just so long as I shut up and let him walk.

View Larger Map

Random Photo of the Day

2010-02-12T14:25:00.000-08:00

Chickadee comes to visit and very very quickly grab a seed. This is the first time I've had decent light on the balcony when shooting (through the glass) the bird feeder.

Pulling the thread

2010-02-05T16:27:00.001-08:00

One of the great joys of my life has been discovering new music. In the late 60s and early 70s, this usually meant trusting the judgment of reviewers at Rolling Stone, having a friend with similar taste put on an LP, or tracking down musicians as they left one band and joined or formed another. After 40 years or so, I have no memory of how I found the Keef Hartley Band, unless I followed up with him after his stint with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. All I know is I fell in love with the band largely because of the vocal and guitar contributions of Miller Anderson.

Eh, not the greatest video, but finding any good footage from that era is mostly just luck. As he was leaving the Keef Hartley Band, Anderson released his first solo album, Bright City, with a much more jazz and folk orientation than the blues rock the band had produced, except for one very bluesy track. The haunting title song would surface in my memory off and on for years, long after the LP had been stuck away with hundreds of others as I was seduced by the ease of CDs.

When I bought my first CD, I swore I wasn't falling into the trap of replacing albums I already had on LP--an oath that must have lasted a week. Instead, many of the CDs I bought were to replace old favorites that over time had been overwhelmed by the pops and skips of long use. Being able to clap on headphones and listen to something like Paul Butterfield's long East/West instrumental in pristine clarity was impossible to resist. Unfortunately, a lot of the music I'd acquired was simply not being reissued on CD.

Within the last decade or so, the recommendations from friends like Ryan and Charlie included music from "my" era, the late 60s and early 70s (before Ryan was even born) that I'd never heard, from a lot of musicians I'd never heard of. Much of the music came from overseas, primarily from the UK, music that hadn't penetrated our close-knit world of California.

Thanks to the Internet I discovered digital versions of much of it and eventually acquired the equipment needed to digitize my LPs--which is a lot of work. So much easier to track down files online or CDs issued by tiny record labels, many of them from Europe. I recently reacquired the Keef Hartley Band albums, and without much confidence did a search for Miller Anderson. It should probably have been no surprise that he's still working, still touring and still producing exceptionally fine music--with a website that included Bright City as a CD. Webmaster Ada responded to an email to tell me they still had a few copies and, if I wanted, she could have Anderson autograph one (see above). And so she did. I bought that and a copy of Bluesheart, a fine blues album from 2003. (Thanks to the Royal Mail and the USPS, the package took three days from Brighton, England to Portland!) The "exception" I mentioned on Bright City is a solid blues cut that appears to have become a signature for Miller Anderson. A version kicks off Bluesheart and I found a video of him performing the song in Moscow:

Before the CDs had arrived, I'd already picked up another recent album featuring Anderson, a Live from Glasgow recording by a group called The British Blues Quintet, five musicians who had been playing live and in studios, with a constantly shifting group of fellow musicians, since the 60s. The album "features" Maggie Bell, and a casual study made her sound very intriguing, with comparisons to Janis Joplin. In the late 60s, Bell had been the lead singer for Stone the Crows, yet another musical group I'd never listened to. I did have a faint memory that I'd heard of them, but only because of the bizarre death of lead guitarist Les Harvey, who had been electrocuted during a sound check. As far as I can tell, Stone the Crows had never made a dent in the American market and certainly hadn't surfaced on West Coast radio. Harvey's death finished the band, but not until they had produced some brilliant music--how had I missed them?

Listening to Stone the Crows brought me full circle--back to discovering "new" music from the late 60s, music I would have eaten alive back then which became something miraculous in 2010. And I'm pleased to report that Miller Anderson and Maggie Bell are still brilliant. (YouTube also has a three-part live Stone the Crows concert from Paris that runs over 20 minutes and makes the comparisons to Joplin a little more understandable.)

Random Photo of the Day

2010-01-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

There is always a lot of tugboat traffic down on the Willamette. Sometimes we forget that the city began here to use that river as a highway and that it's still very much in use. Most of the time, the tugs I see are pushing big or even huge barges. Today, it looks more like someone has decided to move the house.

We're Bushtits!!!

2010-01-17T11:57:00.000-08:00

On New Year's Eve, I bought two bird feeders from the nice people at the Back Yard Bird Shop on Fremont. I hung the seed and suet feeders on my balcony and waited a long time for any visitors. Now I'm getting two varieties of chickadee, a few sparrows, the occasional nuthatch and a cheery swarm of bushtits. It would be nice if I could get better lighting, but a few of these photos aren't terrible. Updated with more photos, including a nuthatch!

Bushtits in January

Pixar for Grownups

2010-01-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

The animated film, Up, had somehow completely slipped past my radar when it was released in 2009. As much as I now regret missing it on the big screen, it's unlikely I would have made the effort to see it in a theater. I mean, it's just a cartoon, right? Instead, I watched the DVD last night, and it was so good it inspired me to wake my blog up to write about it. As my title suggests, I consider this to be the first Pixar film and one of the rare animated films created for grownups rather than for kids. I don't suggest that previous Pixar films and many other made-for-children animated movies can't be appreciated by adults, just that this may be one movie not particularly appreciated by kids.

The plot synopsis from IMDB is simple enough: By tying thousands of balloon to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Frankly, that didn't inspire me much at all and it doesn't begin to capture the beauty of the story created by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson and Thomas McCarthy. The first 15-20 minutes of the film, beginning in familiar territory with a small boy becoming captivated by a heroic explorer then moves through a montage of Carl's life that stands as a brilliant gem of animation all by itself. Beautiful and emotionally rich, that montage had me so choked up and damp-eyed I took a break from the DVD.

And then Pixar went into completely unfamiliar (forbidden?) territory: the protagonist is an old man! A really old guy, who creaks and groans just getting from bed to front porch, and who needs a walker to get anywhere. And what I love most is that the writers avoided the most obvious cliches to set up the adventure, because Carl is not a cranky, bitter old goat looking back on an empty life devoid of meaning or moment, ripe for redemption and enlightenment, but a 78-year-old man who has lived an emotionally full and joyous life. Well, he is a bit cranky, but I can relate.

The remainder of the film is "just" the usual gorgeous Pixar animation. The tone changes dramatically, with plenty of adventure and humor. You have to have great animals in a film like this, of course, and Up has several, including a (naturally) lovable dog named Dug, and funny bits for people who know dogs. Squirrel!

When recommending the film elsewhere, I wrote something like "While it's not the greatest animated film ever..." which then begs the question, what is the greatest animated film ever? And that turned out not to have a simple answer. When I was a child, I saw Fantasia in the theater and it lodged itself in my consciousness forever. According to Wikipedia, I saw it in SuperScope and stereo. Although it was a money-loser in early releases, Fantasia set the bar for animation pretty high. So had Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio and Dumbo. These movies were beautiful, amazing stories brought to life by thousands of hours of painstaking work. I cannot imagine there is any dispute that they are at or near the top of any list (and here, I have to admit a gaping hole in my own viewing: Japanese animated films).

I struggle with a definition of "great animated films", beyond an obvious OhMyGod factor such as those Disney films possessed. Because of the nature of animation, there is also a HowDidTheyDoThat?! factor, usually the product of a technical breakthrough. If we award "great" based on that factor, we have to include Gertie the Dinosaur, which Windsor McKay reportedly created on a bet, and took on tour in 1914. And Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, which had sound! (I'm old enough to be astonished to learn that you can actually watch both of these films online, from the comfort of your own PC.)

There had been a few examples of mixing live action with animation, but never anything as thorough and as astonishing as 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which not only broke down the wall between toons and humans, but even walls between studios. A piano duet with Daffy and Donald ducks? That's just not possible! Judging from online lists, Roger appears to have fallen from view, but it remains a personal favorite.

Another favorite is Nick Park's brilliant claymation film, The Wrong Trousers, with Wallace and Gromit (and, honestly, other W&G films that followed). Besides being terribly funny, Park's work has always had a huge HowDidTheyDoThat?! factor going for it.

In 1995, Pixar pretty well nailed down the HowDidTheyDoThat?! once and for all with Toy Story. They've done it so consistently since then, in fact, that they may well have removed the wow factor of technology entirely from consideration. There's no more HowDidTheyDoThat?! left; we expect a Pixar film or any film competing with Pixar's product to have incredible graphics, and anything less would be a disappointment.

Which is not to say that great animation cannot be achieved without AmazingTechnology! Very high on my personal list is the 2003 French surrealist film, The Triplets of Belleville, which is an astonishing and original masterpiece of the art.

(That struggle to list the "greatest" animated film has, for the most part, assumed the answer was in feature-length films. Otherwise, mine would be an easy list featuring Chuck Jones, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.)

When all is said and done, does Up make the list? I have no idea, except to say that it's a terrific movie and you should see it. Just be sure the pack your hankies.

Dancing Crow

2009-05-04T13:11:00.001-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I like crows. This crow is dancing for the joy of sunshine at Ecola State Park on the Oregon Coast.

Watching the hummingbirds

2009-04-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

My apartment has a nice balcony and I knew there were plenty of hummingbirds around; I even heard them in the winter. That inspired me to buy a hummingbird feeder and hang it under the overhang on the balcony. The first week was discouraging, as I waited and waited for one of them to show up. It was really exciting the first time I spotted a bird perched out there, sucking up the nectar and now, although it has become commonplace, it's still a treat to watch them.

Taking photos is another story, but I finally got a few that aren't terrible. The most difficult trick is catching one leaving the perch because, without any notice, they just bullet off into the sky. I had given up and was just getting ready to put the tripod away, when I shot a last series and lucked into the shot above.

I still don't know if I'm being visited by a number of different hummers that share a remarkable resemblance, or whether I've got one remarkably piggy little bird that stops by several times per hour.

I have a blog?

2009-04-23T14:36:00.001-07:00

Apparently I do have a blog, but for the last two months or so, I've malingered. I'll try to be better.

The two beautiful hot dogs above are from Wayne's Chicago Red Hots, recently-ish opened on MLK here in Portland. Those dogs are the real thing: Vienna Beef hot dogs with the full complement of authentic Chicago goodies including pickle, tomato, onion, weird green relish, mustard and celery salt, all on the correct poppyseed bun. After several failed attempts to get a certain stepdaughter to bring Vienna Beef dogs back from Chicago, I've finally found a place to eat them.

Wayne's not only does the hot dogs properly, but they have a big screen tv on which to display Cubs' games while stuffing them down. In future visits, I'm going to be scouting for Chicago natives in hopes of learning how to eat the damn things without getting onions all over my shirt. I think there must be some secret for the angle of attack . . .

When love comes to town

2009-03-05T17:29:00.000-08:00

I have been enviously reading reviews and comments about Russell's Reserve Rye for awhile now, hearing only good things and wondering when the OLCC would get off their duffs and order some for the local liquor stores.

According to my friend and goofball writer, Lew Bryson, Jimmy Russell celebrated his 54th anniversary with Wild Turkey last fall. He has been the master distiller there for ages and his son Eddie was promoted to associate distiller a few years ago. Together they created Russell's Reserve 10 year old bourbon, originally produced at Jimmy's signature 101 proof and subsequently reduced to 90 proof. All Wild Turkey whiskies are superb, and the Russell's Reserve is no exception (although I dearly miss the 101 version).

Wild Turkey has produced a spectacular rye for years, during a span of time when it seemed that American drinkers had lost their taste for rye whiskey, and any version could be tough to find. Also bottled at 101 proof, WT Rye is a solid kick in the pants, full of honey and vanilla. It is serious whiskey.

Russell's Reserve Rye, like the bourbon, is bottled at 90 proof after aging six years. It is a remarkably soft and smooth rye whiskey, with the characteristic Wild Turkey honey but far more gentle than the bigger bottling. Of all the ryes I've tasted, it may the most accessible, with no alcoholic burn, none of the spice and hard edge that other ryes might have. It's clearly designed for drinking straight -- no help from water or ice needed, and it is probably not a terrific choice for a cocktail because of its subtlety. "Sipping" whiskey has become a cliché, often undeserved, but I can think of no better way to describe Russell's.

I'm guessing that this whiskey comes from specially-selected barrels of their standard rye, aged a bit longer and bottled at a lower proof so that the flavors need not battle with alcohol. What emerges is a terrific whiskey, and I'm very pleased it's finally made its way to Oregon. Odd, though, that the level in the bottle seems to have dropped considerably since I bought it. There must be a leak.

Orange you glad you asked?

2009-03-04T18:25:00.001-08:00

What a nice coincidence! Trader Tiki's blog had a post about orange juice - and some of the weird and unpleasant options for packaged juice. The question arose about which oranges made the best juice. Most of the time, "oranges" in Portland means navel oranges, navel oranges, and sometimes large navel oranges. I intend no criticism of the navel orange and certainly freshly -squeezed navel orange juice is worlds away from frozen, or pre-packaged juice of any kind. But there are better options.

I have always been partial to Valencia oranges for juice and eagerly await the arrival of Valencias in the local market. So I was very excited to find some today on a routine trip to New Seasons market and then was even more pleased to find another orange, called a Cara Cara - which ironically turned out to be a variant of the navel orange.

The Cara Cara is the orange on the left, the Valencia on the right. The Cara Cara is seedless, but a little more pulpy than the Valencia, yielding a less juice. On the other hand, the flavor of the Cara Cara was very sweet and rich; as much as I like Valencia, the Cara Cara knocked it out of the park--and it has that lovely deep color as well.

Under the circumstances, it seemed important to make a cocktail, if only to use up some of the juice. Or, really, to make a cocktail. I ended up with a Monkey Gland, from the 1920s.

The Monkey Gland

1.5 oz. Tanqueray
1.5 oz. freshly-squeed Cara Cara juice
1 tsp. Herbsaint
1 tsp. real grenadine

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Session saison

2009-03-03T19:47:00.000-08:00

There is a brewery somewhat southwest of Brussels in Belgium that produces several of the beers on the very top of my list of favorites: Brasserie Dupont. It may be subject to argument, but in my opinion their beers define the modern saison. Originally brewed as a refreshment for Wallonian farmworkers, and thus undoubtedly low in alcohol, most of Dupont's beers range from about 6% abv to over 9%.

The flagship beer is Saison Dupont, a coppery effervescent beer that beautifully combines the fruitiness of a Belgian yeast strain with plenty of hop character and a dry, refreshing finish. Another personal favorite is Moinette Blonde, which is even more hoppy than the standard but again, not with a great deal of the bitterness we associate with American "hoppy" beers. And then there is the seasonal Bon Voeux, richer and stronger (9.5% abv) than the Saison, and the beer I most often choose as my "favorite beer."

Most of the Belgian beers that appeal to beer geeks are bottled at a fairly high alcohol content, corked and conditioned in the bottle, which allows them to be cellared if desired. "Singles" or "bieres de table" are difficult to find in a commercial bottling, although it seems the monastic breweries produce them for consumption in house, "at table." Dupont's Avril (which appears to be the same as Biolegere in Belgium) falls within this range, at 3.5% abv. In the UK, ales produced at a similar alcohol content are quite common, and considered "session beers" because it's possible to spend an entire evening at the pub drinking them with less effect than beers in the US (or particularly, Belgian ales). In the US, of course, "3.2" beers have a well-deserved reputation for being watered-down and flavorless.

Avril is a remarkably flavorful beer, recognizably related to Saison Dupont and Moinette, and obviously much less alcoholic. It's also obviously different, lighter and initially bordering on "thin". It seemed to me that much more of the character of the yeast (especially a bubblegum ester) came through in Avril than in the stronger beers. Like the other Dupont ales, it's effervescent and bottled at a higher level of CO2 than American beers, which enhances the aromatic character of the beer.

Customers used to paying for punch will probably be disappointed. I paid about $9 for a 750ml bottle here in Oregon and only slightly more for a bottle of Moinette Brune from the same brewery -- at 8.5% abv. But I was also far more clearheaded after finishing the Avril than I will be after finishing the Brune. Which may be later today, come to think of it.

Suavecito cocktail

2009-02-01T17:22:00.001-08:00

Just in time for Valentine's Day.

Primarily created to find a purpose for rum. The lovely rosy tone derives from the use of Peychaud's bitters. Initially, I tried this with light rum, St. Germain, pineapple juice and peach bitters but it was entirely too floral and, well, gross. Angostura bitters added a nice balance to the sweetness of the St. Germain (as does the tartness of pineapple) and began to add some color. St. Germain's lychee flavor is surprisingly robust and even 1/2 ounce definitely shows up in the finished drink, and I think it marries very nicely with the pineapple juice.

And simple. Simple is good.

2 oz. Cruzan Estate Light Rum
1/2 oz. St. Germain
1/2 oz. pineapple juice
3 dashes Peychaud's Bitters

Shake with ice and pour into a chilled cocktail glass. Background music by Malo.

Dinner is Chili Colorado

2009-01-26T17:05:00.000-08:00

Actually, a very simple meal thanks to the genius of Bruce Aidells & Denis Kelly. The Complete Meat Cookbook gets a lot of use around here, whether it's Chili Colorado, the Lazy Way (see above) or Lisa's Lazy Potroast (hmm, something of a theme), or how to cook a tri-tip or make lamb with preserved lemons or a Cuban pork roast -- whenever the question arises "What am I going to do with this?", the meat book comes down off the shelf.

As in, what do I do with this 4# chuck roast that will utilize what's already in the kitchen (reminder to self: the chile powder is all gone, must visit Penzey's) and will require a minimum of effort (that's the "lazy" bit). This recipe fit the bill. Soak some ancho chiles and then throw them into the food processor with a bunch of onions, garlic, seasonings and beer. Dice the beef and then throw it all into a Dutch oven and bung it at 350°F for a couple of hours. Eat up some canned pinto beans and warm up some tortillas. Open a jar of salsa. Dinner (and probably more dinners until I'm sick of the sight of it, but still . . . ). Now if only I could remember which is chile and which is chili, and why!

Old Grand-dad Review

2009-01-24T14:06:00.001-08:00

Is Old Grand-dad the most underrated bourbon in the world? It seems to me that no one takes it seriously, while heaping praise on a whole swarm of latecomers, many of them costing much more money, and delivering very little more to show for it. It isn't fashionable, it doesn't come in a beautiful bottle, and it has an old-fashioned, unfashionable name. It's been around forever (or at least since the 1880s) and reportedly hasn't changed much since. You'll probably find it on one of the lowest shelves in the liquor store, but it's definitely worth stooping over to pick up a bottle. It's the very definition of bourbon.

We're talking about Old Grand-dad 100 here, the "bonded" version. An 86 proof bottling is available and not really worth the effort. There's also a 114 proof monster that is well worth seeking out, although it's really not for the faint-hearted. The BIB version is the real gem, with a huge backbone of rye for spice coupled with a surprisingly sweet palate and a very long finish. 100 proof is a lot to drink straight and there is definitely an alcoholic burn that mellows with a bit of ice.

The high proof also makes it a natural for cocktails, although I've yet to see it mentioned as an ingredient. As the new generation of bartenders has discovered the versatility of rye in cocktails, especially in drinks like the Manhattan, they may have missed this one entirely. Rittenhouse BIB rye gets frequent mention, but the Old Grand-dad is an equally suitable choice and holds its own with robust vermouths like Antica Formula. For an all-American version of the Manhattan, I paired it with Vya's very rich and dense sweet vermouth, 2 to 1 with a couple of dashes of orange bitters and it made for a spectacular cocktail. (And as it turns out, it makes a killer whiskey sour.)

Some day, Jim Beam might pour this into a fancy bottle, double the price and sell a ton of it. I've seen that happen with other fine and unnoticed bourbons, and I'd be seriously miffed if they followed suit. In the meantime, stoop down and pick up a bottle. Tell me if I'm wrong about this exemplary bourbon.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the OLCC store sells the 86 proof OGD for 50¢ more than the BIB. Huh? Binny's, by contrast, charges $2.00 more for the BIB.

Finally

2009-01-20T10:26:00.001-08:00

There is a change in the White House.

Passed Out - Yur Doin It Rite

2009-01-18T14:00:00.001-08:00

Walkies

2009-01-16T15:57:00.001-08:00

Dogs don't ask for much and almost nothing makes a dog happier than going for a walk. Where? Who cares? Walk around a few blocks, sniff all the other dogs' signatures, leave many signatures of your own, wag your tail and just walk. Who needs fancy things when you're a dog?

First you make a roux

2008-12-25T12:47:00.001-08:00

Theoretically, that's the first line in any Cajun recipe. This is on its way to becoming roux and then it will serve as the basis for a gumbo. Just oil, flour and heat. Oh, and a lot of stirring so the roux doesn't burn. For years I would baby the roux and it would take forever to darken properly, but I eventually learned to keep things pretty hot and rely on stirring to keep it safe. It's working.

The next step is to add the holy trinity: peppers, onions and celery. And then some sausage (very difficult to get real andouille up here in Portland, so I have to settle for something inferior but not necessarily bad).

Cayenne, bay leaves, salt and chicken stock. Now it gets to simmer for a few hours. Then some chicken, some seasoning and more simmering. That's pretty much it.

Then it will be gumbo.

More snow and more snow and . . .

2008-12-22T17:09:00.001-08:00

When I came out of the apartment this morning to slog to work I was shocked by how much snow had fallen through the night. This just does not look like Portland. At work we had to shut down a lot of bus routes and I think the customer response to that is not going to be pretty. A lot of people are going to have (or have had) a really difficult time getting home from work. I just hope a lot more of them decided this morning it wasn't worth the effort to go in in the first place.

That car on the right, where you can see that it's silver? That's mine. It's not going anywhere any time soon.

Please melt!

Better not be a white Christmas!

2008-12-20T16:10:00.000-08:00

It's December 20th at roughly 4 p.m. and it has been snowing since about 8 a.m. There still isn't an enormous accumulation of snow, but for Portland it's pretty impressive and the forecast is for more and worse to come, including sleet or freezing rain. And temperatures are supposed to stay low enough through the week to call for more snow (or snow mixed with rain) right up to and through Christmas Day. Bah. Humbug.

At least it's a weekend, so my demands at work relating to this weather have been reduced. There are a lot of people traveling on public transit today, though, because it's the last shopping weekend before the gifts fly on Thursday. I've been hoping and planning to host a Christmas dinner with my parents (86 and 91 y.o.) and my son Alex. The kid may be the only person to show up.

So, thanks, it's all very pretty but it's also cold and Portland doesn't cope with snow very well. I know there are people out there laughing at us, but they live in regions where snow is a normal part of winter and they're equipped to deal with it. I think the City of Portland has all of three snowplows. 50 miles south of here, from Salem on down, they've got rain and grass. Not a bit of snow. Humph.

Pounding in the kitchen

2008-12-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

File this one in the "learn something new every day" drawer. For years, I've had a mortar and pestle in the kitchen, first a little one and these days a nice big stone device I got for pennies at an Asia grocery. I have dutifully used it many times to mash and mix and I've always thought it was a heck of a lot of work for so little payback.

I have a cookbook by Mai Pham, who apparently has a Vietnamese restaurant in Sacramento. Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table has some great recipes in it, most of them based on her research among street vendors on annual trips to Vietnam. Tonight I stumbled on her description of the mortar and pestle as the "one thing" to buy for a Vietnamese kitchen. And I ran across this: "When using the pestle, pound it freely in an up-and-down motion. Many novices make the mistake of pressing (as opposed to pounding) the pestle into the mortar, which tends to make the job harder and longer." (emphasis added) So, a novice, huh?

Since I was just busily stirring some garlic, bird peppers and sugar in what would certainly prove a pointless exercise, I gave it a try. Amazing. I could easily have gone through the rest of my life ineptly using one of the oldest tools in human culture. Thank you, Mai Pham!

Random Photo of the Day

2008-12-06T08:23:00.001-08:00

Several of my co-workers have bought Smart Cars recently, and I have seen a couple of the cars around town in this particular color scheme. I'm obviously not the only person who was struck by the resemblance to a bumblebee. The license plate has a special joke, though, once you know that the owner is a bus driver.

OK, new rule

2008-12-01T12:49:00.001-08:00

New Rule: no running out of Irish whiskey. More to the point, no running out of Powers Gold Label. There are clearly evenings in which nothing else will do, for sipping quietly after dinner, while watching a movie or reading a book, or when battling a nasty cold. Or all of the above.

Rant all you want about Scotch whisky and the superiority of peat monsters over the gentle Irish version, but there are times when a hairy single malt is just too much work to enjoy. Some times, one might crave "red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme" (thank you, Richard Thompson) but at others only a soft voice and a cool hand on the brow will do.

Powers is subtle, quiet and smooth. In fact, it perfectly defines "smooth" while studiously avoiding "bland." And they practically give the stuff away. Even in Oregon, land of the State monopoly, it's $21 a bottle. So there is no excuse for running out.

And if someone wants to give me a bottle of the 12 Year Old Reserve, I promise not to complain.

No mo' blow!

2008-12-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

There's nothing that could solidify my hatred of leaf blowers more than having one screaming away outside while I'm home sick. The groundskeeper is just cleaning off sidewalks by blasting leaves and needles into the surrounding shrubbery as far as I can tell. This could just as easily be done with a good push broom and some sweat--much more quietly and with none of the unnecessary exhaust filling the air.

The facilities staff at work use these all the time to clear the parking lot and sidewalks, always very politely turning it away when I walk past. Get a broom!

Random Photo of the Day

2008-11-30T15:16:00.001-08:00

Part of the charm of the new apartment, at least to date, is that there are a lot of trees on the grounds, mostly conifers. Since the building dates back to the 1970s, I'm guessing many of the trees do as well, and the height of some of them certainly lends itself to that idea.

We finally have a break (probably brief) from the constant gray skies of a Portland autumn, and this fellow appeared to be enjoying the warmth of the sun as much as I am. I shot this through one of my bedroom windows (a bedroom, I might add, easily three times the size of my old one) after I spotted him dozing on a limb. Even the sound of the blinds going up and the window sliding open wasn't enough to rouse him. I'm mellowing toward squirrels now that I no longer have to worry about an attic under constant attack by the rodents.

I'm not crazy about unpacking, either

2008-11-23T09:33:00.000-08:00

I just put all this stuff in the box and now I have to take it out? Arggggh.

The layout of this apartment is completely different from the old one, with strengths and weaknesses that are quite different. Trying to figure out where to put things in the new configuration is bad enough, but now I've got a big stack of essentially "new" U-Haul boxes that I can't imagine recycling and great wads of crumpled newspaper that need to be schlepped down a flight of stairs and well across a parking lot to be recycled. And I've discovered it's inadvisable to do this in the dark because some moron built a "trip the tenant" obstruction in the pavement right in the middle of the pitch-black enclosure. I'm lucky I didn't end up in the dumpster myself.

Yesterday was dedicated to cleaning, scrubbing, sweeping and mopping the old apartment to assure my deposit is returned in full--and the managers explained during the walk-through that the whole place would be painted, and then cleaners would come in after the painters, but I still had to return the apartment to pristine condition after living in it for 2.5 years.

And I can't find anything!

I still hate packing

2008-11-18T17:56:00.001-08:00

I'm getting down to the last gasps, running out of boxes and long since run out of patience. What is all this crap!??!

Goodwill has gotten significant benefit from this move, believe me. Tons of clothes I'll never wear, glassware, furniture . . . and I found a beautiful dress shirt in the closet that I didn't know I owned. Score one for the closet.

What is freaking me out now, as I write this, is the knowledge that 48 hours from now I'll be ass deep in crumpled newspaper and broken-down cardboard boxes while I unpack everything I've so laboriously wrapped and stuffed and taped and heaved. I don't think I'll be wondering too much about "why the hell did I keep this?" because I've been fairly brutal in winnowing out the unwanted and unneeded. And there should be a lot more room for putting things away--more cupboards, more closet space, and simply more room. I'll be able to walk around my bed and tuck in the sheets on the far side!

It will be worth all the trouble, I know. But from right here and right now it seems like a long way off.

I'll be god damned

2008-11-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything else to say. I am stunned and happier than I have been in many years. I've shied away from any political content to this blog, but this transcends politics. I have hope about the future of the country for the first time since the frothy childish faith I held in the 60s.

Congratulations, America.

I hate packing!

2008-11-01T16:02:00.001-07:00

(The rewards of hard work; see Update 2)

I'm going to be moving in one month, so I've already started boxing things up, sorting things out, throwing junk away and setting aside a lot of donations for Goodwill. I have just spent a good chunk of the day packing the living room books (which are most of the books that will be moving with me), knocking down the bookcases and setting aside books I no longer really want.

The 500 lb. gorilla is downstairs in the storage unit: decades of accumulated books that have rarely seen the light of day since . . . well, maybe never. I've been schlepping them around from basement to basement, adding to them when shelf space got low or a new book obsession displaced the old one and whenever it was time to move I've looked at them with dread. The new apartment is considerably larger than this one but the storage unit is small and those books are just not going with me. The good news is that I've combed through them over the last 2.5 years and have a pretty clear idea not only of what is down there, but how little attachment I have to most of them.

Still, this is going to require work. I've got to dig the book boxes out from under everything else down there (what do I need with an electric chainsaw?) and make a final pass through the books, perhaps ambitiously sorting them by topic, all the better to impress the buyer at Powell's. Fortunately, the basement can be accessed by a ramp around the side of the building, which means I can roll a cart down there, pile on the doomed boxes and them roll them out to the car (and roll them, one hopes, into the Powell's warehouse). I will be doing well if I get out of this with only one box that can't be gotten rid of. Well, two, because I know there is a box of paperback science fiction that I can't lose. And there are picture books from when the kids were little (that was my excuse).

And when everything in the apartment is sorted, packed, boxed (what about the booze bottles?) and the new apartment is ready, I won't have to lift a finger or carry any of the boxes up that flight of stairs to the new place--the wonderful people at Thunder Movers, who moved me into this place in June 2006, will knock down the bed, strap up the tv and the liquor cabinet and woosh! in no time at all I'll be standing in an apartment surrounded by unopened boxes, desperately trying to find the booze and the cocktail glasses.

UPDATE: It appears that my old friend, Mike Horvat, will be taking a lot of these books off my hands, driving up from Stayton, OR after I get through sorting them out. It probably won't completely free me from the book buyer, but one never knows.

UPDATE 2: Maybe it was something about the time change, but I had an ungodly amount of energy this morning and was feeling restless. As a result, I tackled the gorilla, got all of the boxes out of the storage space and sorted through everything. Gack. After a couple of hours, though, I had boxes sorted by category and ran across some treasures I'd forgotten all about. At the top of the page is one of them: the August 9, 1974 6 am final of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Outside of the usual yellowing of newsprint, it's pristine. I should get it framed.

What the . . . ?

2008-11-01T10:49:00.001-07:00

Don't even ask how I stumbled on this, but the story is even funnier than the photo.

A mouse got sweet revenge when a cat who was chasing it got its head stuck in the jam jar the mouse was hiding in.

Confused cat Mindy was seen wandering down a road in Peterborough with the jar on her head - the tiny mouse just millimetres away from her jaws.

A worried motorist took her to a police station where officers unsuccessfully tried to ease the jar off Mindy's neck.

Eventually, the tabby smashed the jar on the floor of the station, releasing herself and the mouse unharmed.

The cat had a microchip and was returned to its family; the mouse amscrayed and is reportedly still somewhere in the police station.

Dog in the house

2008-10-31T18:42:00.001-07:00

Since I'm moving out of this apartment anyway, I figured we could break the rules. NO PETS! NO PET VISITORS! Ralphie is spending the weekend.

He has a nice cedar-filled bed that he loves. Why, then, has he shunned it in favor of my favorite Afghani rug? I may need a stronger vacuum cleaner.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-09-13T10:17:00.001-07:00

Fooling with the digital camera at night. Moon and trees and breeze.

My favorite cocktails, part 3

2008-09-07T11:05:00.000-07:00

(Update below) The missing link: Martinez

The Manhattan is one of the oldest and finest cocktails and one of the first to combine base spirits with vermouth (Italian, or sweet vermouth). It was developed by someone (one of a number of possible bartenders) in a bar (one of a number of suggested locations, including the Manhattan Club) somewhere in New York City (which seems to be definite) sometime in the 1880s (or even the 1870s). The earliest recipes varied a lot, but the consistent components have always been: whiskey, sweet vermouth and bitters.

There appears to be a general consensus that the Martini evolved from the Manhattan, although it may be difficult to see the connection on the surface. The Martini does have vermouth, but it's French (dry) vermouth and it uses gin rather than whiskey. And no bitters (although early recipes for the Martini actually included orange bitters). Without the missing link, it's hard to credit the lineage.

The Martinez is not only the transitional cocktail between the two, but it turns out to be a delicious drink on its own, and I can't understand how cocktail drinkers allowed it to disappear for generations. It substitutes gin for whiskey, adds a dab of sweetness from Maraschino liqueur (unnecessary with the sweetness of rye or bourbon), retains the bitters and adds a twist of lemon for the garnish. Gin and Maraschino make a wonderful pairing, as a lot of early cocktails attest. The Martinez is a beautiful drink, with a lovely amber hue; it's absurdly simple to make and even simpler to drink.

The Martinez (derived from Gary Regan's recipe)

2 oz. gin (Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray 10)
1 oz. sweet vermouth (Antica Formula)
1/4 oz. Maraschino liqueur
1 dash Angostura orange bitters

Stir with ice and serve in a chilled cocktail glass, with a lemon twist for garnish

Update:

Tried the recipe with Vya sweet vermouth replacing the Antica Formula. Vya's version (from California) is a really intriguing take on vermouth, with a rich spicy character that reminds me (in a good way) of fruitcake. The Martinez? It might even be better this way, with a tiny bit more depth. The spice in the Vya is an excellent pairing with the spice in the gin.

My favorite cocktails, part 2

2008-09-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

The Vieux Carré cocktail is one of those rare old drinks with a guaranteed provenance: it was invented in the 1930s by 'Walter Bergeron, the head bartender at the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans, and is named after the French term for what we call "The French Quarter" ... le Vieux Carré ("Old Square")' -- according to the Gumbopages and everyone else.

Like The Last Word, it has a critical component originally developed by a religious order--Benedictine liqueur--but in the Vieux Carré, the liqueur is a tiny addition. It is very much a New Orleans cocktail, combining the French (cognac & Benedictine) with the American (rye whiskey), and the New Orleans specialty: Peychaud's bitters. Unlike a lot of cocktails whose provenance is not so certain, the recipe has been essentially identical no matter where I've found it. The only question that arises is whether to stir or to shake the drink. Ordinarily, I would err on the side of stirring, but shaking the drink does create a nice little foamy cap (the picture above is of a stirred drink).

In either case, the drink is disturbingly easy to lap up, just delicious.

Vieux Carré

1 oz. cognac (Courvoisier VSOP)
1 oz. rye whiskey (Rittenhouse BIB)
1 oz. sweet vermouth (Antica Formula)
1/2 tsp. Benedictine
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Shake it or stir it with ice and pour over ice cubes in an Old Fashioned glass. Garnish with twist of lemon.

My favorite cocktails, part 1

2008-09-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

When I originally "planned" this post, it was going to be "cocktail", singular. In the last few weeks, however, my fascination with one particular drink hasn't ebbed, but the list has grown on me. So the next plan was to write a post about three cocktails. Or maybe four. With a beautiful photograph of each one, naturally, which was where the "part 1" came from.

In order for me to photograph a cocktail, I've obviously got to mix it. And after the photo session, what then? Throw it out? Are you insane?!!

So it's best I break this up and not end up face down on the Afghan rug.

The modern revival of the cocktail has several pieces. In addition to the crucial return to quality ingredients (no mixes, no faux "maraschino cherries", no crappy well liquors) and attention to detail, it has been about rediscovering "lost" cocktails or forgotten details about classic cocktails, and it's about creating delicious ways to combine ingredients in brand-new cocktails--like the mixologists at the recent competition here in Portland. Much of this innovation is chronicled online; in fact, I'd have to guess that the proliferation of New Mixology has been fueled to a great extent by the Internet and the ability to share ideas, recipes and enthusiasm with other professional and amateur mixologists around the planet.

The Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle's Pike Place Market was founded in 1998, at what must have been the beginnings of this movement. (At some point, and soon, I need to make a pilgrimage to visit, preferably with a soft bed and dark curtains somewhere close by.) Drinkboy.com credits the bartenders at the Zig Zag with rediscovering The Last Word from a 1950s' era book, The Jones Barguide. It's an unusual cocktail, combining as it does equal parts of four beverages, two of them extremely full-flavored liqueurs. A common first reaction on seeing the recipe is that it needs a significant adjustment, increasing the percentage of base alcohol and reducing the liqueurs--but it doesn't, and the first taste confirms it. As Drinkboy says: "You could consider it as being a gin drink for people who might not like gin. It's addition of Lime Juice, Maraschino, and Chartreuse to the Gin provide an excellent balance of sweet, sour, and herbals to this very approachable cocktail."

I have yet to see The Last Word on a Portland cocktail list, although Lance Mayhew produced a beauty for my son, Alex, and I at Fifty Plates (and it looks past time to update that website!). Alan Akwai came back from a trip to San Francisco reporting that the drink "was everywhere".

It's an impossible drink to describe. Either make your own or find a bartender who can. A final benefit of The Last Word is that it will be the only cocktail to make a dent in that ridiculously big bottle of Maraschino. Without it, the bottle would hang around the home bar for 20 years.

The Last Word

1 oz. Tanqueray No. 10 gin
1 oz. fresh lime juice
1 oz. Green Chartreuse
1 oz. Luxardo Maraschino

Stir with plenty of ice and pour into a chilled cocktail glass. Following Lance Mayhew's lead, I garnished it with a homemade brandied cherry.

Well, foo!

2008-08-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

I knew it was coming and I had a strong suspicion that the wedding would be the grand finale . . . but today's episode of For Better or For Worse, arguably the best comic strip in print, is Lynn Johnston's last. My mornings are going to have a hole in them for some time to come, because I've been following the stories of Elly & John Patterson, their kids and their dogs for years and years, and Johnston's ability to personalize this family (based on her own) has been a grand adventure in storytelling.

With the greatest respect to Lynn Johnston, I've reproduced the final strip here. If I've violated copyright, I hope she accepts my apologies.

Mixology Competition

2008-08-23T19:24:00.001-07:00

Today marked the second annual Mixology Competition as part of the fourth annual Great American Distillers Festival here in Portland. I was working as the timer in the competition -- each bartender had seven minutes to make the required five cocktails for the judges. The recipes had to include at least one of the alcoholic beverages featured at the festival, and included a lot of homemade ingredients like syrups, bitters and some very odd approaches to the simple (ha!) ice cube. Lighting conditions were awful, particularly since I didn't want to disturb the contestants with a flash. But this one I actually like.

I only managed one clear picture of a competitor, Alyson Dykes from the Teardrop Lounge. That's what I get for being a nice guy and not using a flash.

Even more too much television

2008-08-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Updates Below

It has been a matter of pride with me for years that I scorn "reality tv". Never watched it, never will. No survivals, no machine-made musical "talents", no auctioned brides. I'm a purist and only watch scripted stories.

Except, well, it finally occurred to me that for the third year in a row, I was eagerly looking forward to a season of Last Comic Standing. Which is, um, a reality tv show. I love standup comedy and was hooked the first time I watched the open auditions, held across the country in a number of cities, with long lines of would-be comics waiting for two minutes to convince a pair of judges that they were good enough to compete that evening against other comedians for a chance to end up (that first year) stuck with a dozen other comics in the Queen Mary, busily attempting to eliminate the competition. Part of the entertainment of the open auditions are the complete and utter weirdos that wander up on the stage convinced that their bizarre behavior is "standup". Mercifully, the judges cut them short in a few seconds and most leave the stage in the same confusion they entered. The comics that compete that evening and ultimately move on to the national competition are invariably people who have been working clubs for years and have learned how to write and present their own material.

There are always very talented people left behind at the local level and many of them are comics I find vastly superior to the judges' choices. And it seems that this year's finalists are weaker than last years, which were weaker than the previous year. Some of the finalists are truly bad, and it's difficult to understand how they managed to progress as far as they did. At this point, four of the original dozen have been eliminated, and they were all pretty damn bad.

A few of the remaining comics are very good indeed, and my personal favorite is the single woman to get this far. Iliza Shlesinger is very smart, very funny and leaves nothing behind when she goes onstage. I love how she brings a physical element to her comedy; in a strange fashion she reminds me of Dick Van Dyke's standup, with his cartoonish exaggeration of movement. Shlesinger is also gorgeous, and I think that this has been a factor in the show, as some of the less-secure males have "challenged" her as if she threatened them more than any of the men. There have been two challenges to date, with two comics sent home at the conclusion of each. Schlesinger won both of them. In the first, the audience gave her 68% of the votes. The second time she got 62%.

In the most recent challenge, she whipped on two of the weakest comics, one from England and the other from India. I was very pleased to see them go, because I didn't think either was funny and because they had both commented rudely about my favorite. B'bye! Iliza kicked your ass!

The only other finalist I think is really good is Louis Ramey. Good and varied material and a great delivery.

Update 1, July 24

Last night's episode began with an hour-long "challenge" at the Playboy Mansion, in which the remaining comedians had to compose a bedtime story for the "Girls Next Door", which is apparently a "reality" show involving three of Hef's "girlfriends". Hmmm. A reality show visiting another reality show . . . I'm getting in deep. This segment was fortunately on the TiVo, so I could zip through it to get caught up. Some of the stories were not terrible, although I was disappointed that Iliza passed up the perfect chance to do her "T-rex being hit by a rock" impression. (cue video!)

The usual scenario for the show would have called for a vote among the remaining players to determine who would go into a three-way elimination; this is the segment that Iliza had won twice. The guys had been strategizing the best way to handle Iliza now that she'd become (as one put it) a giant. Fortunately for me and my frustration, the format had been changed (maybe just because of her) and all seven had three minutes on stage and the voting took place as it does in the finals, with the viewers using phones and the Internet to choose their favorites. I got to vote for Iliza ten times! She did entirely new material and it was difficult to tell how it went over. It felt like new material that needed some polishing but she did seem to connect well with the women in the live audience. Louis Ramey's material was great. In fact, I would have chosen his performance over everyone else's, based just on last night. His stuff is cohesive, polished and funny. Most of the other comedians wandered around, jumping from joke to joke without much connection. C'mon, guys, it's only three minutes!

Now I have to wait a whole week to find out the results.

Update 2, August 1

It's looking somewhat chaotic at LCS, and according to this well-informed blogger, the entire show is a scam (which surprises me not at all).

NBC's Last Comic Standing claims on its own website to be a "search for the funniest comedian on the planet". It's not. The auditions are staged, the celebrity judges aren't judges, the footage is doctored to make a favored bad act look good, and talented working comedians are passed over for "characters" with no act and a big personality.

I've been wondering how the show coordinates the "live" performances over a period of many weeks, while maintaining the fiction that the "contestants" are still living in one house in LA. Or is it Vegas? All while maintaining careers that keep them living and working far away from either place. I'm not at all surprised that the "voting" being done by people at home is completely irrelevant to who wins. Didn't stop me from voting 10 times for Iliza, but still . . .

Last night, the eight comedians all performed their "last" acts, regardless of whether they'd (at least in theory) been voted off the show last week. Only after each act was finished did the hosts announce the voting results, and of course, it was scheduled so that the final two acts had one "finalist" spot remaining, and the result wasn't announced until both were done. Or, actually, after another commercial. Predictably, Iliza finished in the top five. Next week, NBC will spend two hours leading up to the announcement of which of the five "won."

This site has some really good critiques of the show and the comics, going back through the weeks (in the July archives). For the most part, I'm in agreement with them, although I like Louis Ramey's act more than they do; maybe it's because an "80s style" doesn't bother me. The earlier entries are really good on the subject of the acts already eliminated, mostly along the lines of "what the hell were they doing here in the first place?" And the critiques come from real stand-up comics, so they're well informed. I was especially fond of this one, in regard to pretty boy Jeff Dye, who I find enormously irritating:

Next, Jeff Dye. Wow, there is so little in this set, it's like watching a teen girl's boyfriend do a set for her friends at a sleepover. If he played the cute card any harder he would have to legally be considered a cast member of High School Musical. It's kind of gaggy to watch, and he did racist-lite jokes, but he's in the finals, and man, maybe it's all teen girls voting out there? Their fingers are small enough to text really fast, so watch out, this could be the biggest upset since Dat Phan.

And this earlier critique:

Jeff Dye. Jeff reminds me of Gary Gulman without all the annoying humor to get in the way. He's tall and fresh-faced, animated, and wears day-glo. But it's pretty much Britney Spears bubble-gum comedy. He did two extended jokes, one about "The Sound of Music" (really? he's half as old as that movie), and then something oddly mean-spirited about the homeless. But, clearly on to the finals. Clearly. It's the kind of vote that drives "real comics" crazy-- What? That guy? This is insane!-- but he's doing what the genre of TV wants from him, and I see him surfing on down the pipe, not a ripple in sight.

But my favorite comment of all was in regard to the then-upcoming visit to the Playboy Mansion:

Next week's comedy challenge just might be sad and poignant-- the show travels to the Playboy mansion where, it appears from the tease, the comics will be asked to entertain what may be three of the dumbest and most humorless people on the planet-- Hef's girlfriends. Anyone who has ever seen The Girls Next Door will sympathize. The worst part? You don't want to make Kendra laugh. That laugh just goes right through you. It's like a rusty chef's knife going right through your solar plexus.

Ah, and thank god for YouTube. Here's the evidence.

It's so annoying, in fact, that there are YouTube videos of young women demonstrating their "Kendra laugh." None of them, sad to say, is in her league.

Update 3, August 9

Iliza won! I can't really say that I'm surprised, but I was certainly relieved that another stupid act didn't win this year. The final "episode" was truly appalling and supremely not funny, but her short bit was well done and the award almost made up for some seriously awful comedy. I have a feeling this is going to fall off the TiVo season pass list for next year; it just wasn't as much fun watching it. Kudos to Iliza and I can only hope that some day she'll do a show here in Portland so I can see her live.

Drinking in the UK, Part Four (the road to Islay)

2008-07-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

Actually, not much drinking in this entry because this was a travel day, driving from Glasgow to Kennacraig for the ferry to Islay. The island is pretty much the most southerly and westerly of the Hebrides, home to eight distilleries, and graced with an amazing and rich history. When I first began planning the Greatest Vacation Ever, months before my trip, I had toyed with the notion of traveling awhile in Germany or Belgium, settled on a trip to Ireland, and finally decided on Scotland. Thinking of Scotland, one (well, me) naturally considers visiting a distillery or two and the opportunity to visit one location that had some of the most distinctive whisky in the world, all concentrated in a smallish island, became the focal point for the trip. After making the decision to travel to Islay, Glasgow followed, because it was the most logical jumping off point for the trip.

I should probably have called this "Driving in the UK, Part One", because this was my introduction to the craziness that is driving among Brits. The nice people at the rental agency, out at Glasgow Airport, offered me a relatively inexpensive upgrade to a Mercedes, which was not only a lovely little car, but had the decided advantage of an automatic transmission. A stick shift is my norm, but with everything else topsy-turvy on the road, I appreciated not having to learn how to shift with the wrong hand.

The early part of the journey was custom-made for a beginner in the UK, starting as it did with what was effectively freeway driving, from the airport into the city. Nothing particularly odd or difficult, other than the decidedly odd experience of being on the wrong side of the road. Traffic wasn't too bad and I could noodle along in the slow (far left!!) lane, while I got the hang of it. I did have to drive through the center (oops, "centre") of town, but only on major roads. Traffic lights were reasonably normal, other than a sort of countdown thing done from a red light--and I love the fact that the Walk sign stops traffic in all directions at an intersection. Markings on the street were different but not unintelligible and, in general, wayfinding signage in the UK proved to be excellent. There was nearly always good notice about which direction I would be taking and I learned to really appreciate roundabouts. I had great opportunity to figure roundabouts and signage out, because immediately outside Glasgow traffic bogged down in a long construction zone. Ordinarily, I would have been chafing at the delay but for a learner, it was a great help.

Outside the construction zone, things changed dramatically. For all the traffic cameras on the highways (marked in advance, to allow drivers a chance to slow down), Brits drive way too fast. Bad enough they're on the wrong side of the road, but everyone seems to be in an incredible hurry, even though it's a wee little island where nothing is very far from anything else. And somewhere along the line, some lunatic British engineer decided that country roads needed curbs (sorry, "kerbs") rather than shoulders. My dad had warned me about this and I had silently snickered at the notion that it would be a problem, but zipping along at 60, with crazy Brit bastards screaming around curves at me from the wrong side, I skidded along more than a few completely unnecessary concrete incursions and was soon fearing a blowout. Thank goodness for German craftsmanship and sturdy tires (sorry, "tyres").

All of this is complicated, of course, by the fact that once you're off the motorway (which is most of the time), there are no straight lines in British roads, especially driving over to and down the Scottish coast. Nothing but twisty, winding roads once I'd gotten past Loch Lomond (remarkably unpicturesque big flat lake surrounded by flat ground--nothing at all like I'd imagined Scotland). After that, the geography changed considerably as I drove through the mountains and over to Loch Fyne. And that's another thing about the Scots. You would think that a country so rich in language could come up with two different words for two completely different bodies of water, effectively a lake and a fjord. Some lochs are salt water and others are fresh but they're just "lochs".

This is a map of my route, up the A82 and then down to Kennacraig on the A83. Kennacraig is too small to show up here, but it's the point along the coast near the lower left, where the dotted blue lines head out into the water--that's the route of the ferry to Islay. Lots of photos of the lochs here. The geology of Loch Fyne and even much of Islay reminded me of nothing more than Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, except there aren't a lot of castles around Puget Sound.

The weather was spectacular, with brilliant sunshine sparkling on the Loch, and lovely little towns--so very very not American-looking--scattered along the route.

Waiting at the ferry terminal at Kennacraig was also remarkably familiar to me, after years of similar waits for the ferry to visit my sister and her family on Lopez Island. There were a lot fewer people waiting for the Isle of Arran than the long lines at the Anacortes ferry terminal and the ferry was very different than the "super ferries" used by Washington State. Oh, and I had a reservation. Much better than the stress of worrying about getting well up in the line or having to wait for the next sailing. Which, in this case, would have been the next day.

That's the Isle of Arran in the top photo. It looks much more like a ship than a ferry, and has to deal with much rougher seas much of the year than those on Puget Sound. As the ship pulled in to the dock, the bow pivoted up out of the way and the loading ramp dropped down. It was a lovely ship, very spruce, with a nice bar (ah, so there was a bit of drinking: one of the Islay Ales on tap). I settled in for the two-hour trip and we finally arrived well after sunset.

Dark. Very very dark. Once I'd followed the rush of locals driving off the ferry into Port Ellen, I find myself virtually alone on the narrow road. Outside of the few towns along the way, there were no lights. No street lights at all and under a thick overcast. All of that wayfinding signage I'd appreciated on the "mainland" was gone and there I was, alone in the pitch dark. For what must have been the first time in my life, I had prepared myself thoroughly before coming to a new place, pouring over maps of the island and devouring Andrew Jefford's superb book, Peat Smoke and Spirit, which is a thorough study of the island's geography, history and, of course, whiskies. I had my route from Port Ellen, through Bowmore and up and around Loch Indall, through Port Charlotte and down to my b&b at Octofad Farm burned into my brain. Fortunately enough, there aren't a lot of roads on Islay so even a tourist completely in the dark would have a difficult time getting lost. There just aren't a lot of options. On the other hand, I hadn't expected the road, once south of Port Charlotte, to turn into a one lane path. With lay-bys, just in case there was traffic coming the other way (there wasn't, not this time) and very few signs. I stopped at one well-lit farm, thinking it might be Octofad and was chased off by a sheep dog. At last, there it was, a warm light in the window and a small car park out front. And a warm welcome from Cathy, my landlady for the next few days. I was finally here, finally on the mythic island of Islay. It wouldn't be until the sun came out the next morning that I discovered that the one lane road ran right along the rocks plunging into the loch. And sheep, lots and lots of sheep, most of whom found the road a handy route from forage to forage.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-07-27T12:13:00.001-07:00

A tough day, apparently. It has been exhausting standing around and it's time for a nap. This is one of my friend Bob's chocolate Labs, although I don't remember if it's the male or the female. Both of them are, uh, "large". Big-boned, no doubt. Bob was celebrating his 60th birthday with a party at home and the dogs had to stay awake longer than during a normal day.

Finally, a Martini I like!

2008-07-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

I have tried, really, but Martinis just haven't done it for me. It's true that I haven't tried all the possible gins in the world, but most I have tried turn the drink into a big juniper bomb, and I'm just not that fond of juniper. It's not that I don't like gin, but I prefer it combined with other flavorful ingredients, so that the juniper and other botanicals enhance those other flavors rather than overpowering the drink.

Tanqueray Rangpur Gin was a revelation for me. It has limes, along with ginger and bay leaves, added with the traditional botanicals during distillation. It's lighter and fruitier than many other gins, especially the standard bottling of Tanqueray. I wanted to mix it with something, but I didn't want to cover it up too much, to get a better notion of the flavor. I figured, what the hell, make a Martini. A "50's" style Martini at that. I'm a big fan of the vermouths coming from the California winery, Vya, because both their dry and sweet vermouth have a lot more character than just about anything else I've tried that didn't come from Carpano. (The sweet vermouth reminds me of Christmas, maybe like a plum pudding, and it makes a killer Manhattan.) And I finally landed a bottle of Angostura Orange Bitters, perfect for the older style of Martini. It's a very simple drink and far too easy to drink.

Rangpur Martini
3 oz. Rangpur gin
.5 oz. Vya dry vermouth
2 dashes of bitters

Stir with ice and serve in a cocktail glass with a twist of lemon.

My favorite baseball player

2008-07-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

Fourth of July was a good baseball day for me. The Mariners actually beat a team that wasn't also terrible, which was a very nice change. After that, I got to watch the Cubs beat the Cardinals in St. Louis and, best of all, Carlos Zambrano was back pitching after having been out with a shoulder injury and was in great form. I love watching Carlos Zambrano play baseball. I've never seen anyone play the game with more passion than this big (6'5") Aztec-looking man from Venezuela. He throws with his entire body and then bounds off the mound, exhulting when he wins and agonizing when he loses. And, unlike a lot of pitchers, he can hit (currently at .360, which is better than just about the entire Mariners team) well enough that he is even used as a pinch hitter.

Mostly, though, I just love watching him loving the game and playing it with a huge heart. Chicago fans are lucky to have him.

I Watch Too Much TV

2008-07-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

Way too much TV. Now that the regular season (such as it was, given the writers' strike) is over, I can't look forward to Lost, Heroes, Supernatural, or Ugly Betty for months. It's time for the true summer season that has just as many new episodes and shows as the old traditional September to May season I grew up on. And, of course, a lot more networks on cable, some of which have a lot more freedom in what they present because they're not going out over the airwaves polluting the minds of little kids. Just mine.

(If this was a normal summer, of course, I'd be spending a lot of evenings watching baseball games but with the way the Mariners are "playing" this season I can't stand to watch most games past the first couple of innings. Once they're down by 10 runs going in the third inning, much of the joy is gone.)

At any rate, I got really excited when the TiVo let me know the new season of Rescue Me was coming up. Denis Leary's drama? comedy? about a firefighter and his dysfunctional life is easily one of my favorite television shows of all time. When the first episode appeared on the "now playing" list on the TiVo I settled down with snacks and a drink and WTF? It's over? Did it record wrong? Maybe it was somehow queued up at the end of the show rather than the beginning and I only caught the last five minutes. Uh, no. It was a six-minute show. The next one is five minutes. Denis Leary is trying to ruin my life. Ooh, very clever. The website for the show calls them "minisodes". I call it sadism. At the end of the latest "minisode" they announced 20 brand-new full-length episodes. Coming in 2009.

So on to the new season.

I can easily imagine someone pitching this show to a producer. "So, there's this cop, and he's kind of like, well, a maverick. He does things his own way and is always bumping up against The Man. And he's got a screwed-up brother who's always getting into trouble. . ." And the producer, who thinks this is a really good and original concept, says, "OK, but instead of a guy, let's make the cop a hot blonde!" And since the cop is now a woman, the brother turns into a sister and we have to throw in a lot of family stuff, 'cause that's what women do. So we've got the flaky sister and let's have a flaky mom. And instead of a cop, she's a federal marshal in Albuquerque, which turns out to be the elephants' graveyard for witness protection, where witnesses and criminals come to die, usually because they've done something really stupid. And she's not only a maverick, she's a misanthrope (true to the cop cliche) except maybe she likes her baseball player boyfriend. And her partner. Kind of.

Honestly, I only watched the pilot because I've been carrying a torch for Mary McCormack since she played Kate Harper, the Pentagon liaison or whatever the hell she was, on West Wing. So far, that's why I've kept watching the show because it's really standard television cop fare. No great insight, no astonishing dialog, no reality. But McCormack does cranky and sarcastic very well and she's big enough that she's convincing when she smacks a bad guy and knocks him down. Without that torch, I'm not sure why anyone would watch the show, but USA network seems to be more willing than most to give a show time to build some momentum. Maybe they'll let McCormack do a full 12-episode season and maybe the writing will pick up. I'm not holding my breath.

And then there's Swingtown, which might have been ABC's attempt to cash in on the critical success of Mad Men. While Mad Men is edgy and dark, pointing some very cruel light on the early 60s, Swingtown is murky and, well, dull. Part of the problem might be that the swinging social life of the suburbs in the early 70s is inherently boring, and not at all helped by the really bad music and hideous clothing styles of the period. It's also more than a little disconcerting, at least for me, that one of the leads is Jack Davenport, last seen hamming it up on the really funny and sexy British show, Coupling, and the very English officer in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. They couldn't find an American actor?

Molly Parker may be the most convincing character (oy! a Canadian!), probably because she got the whole "smoldering sensuality behind the prim façade" thing down pat in Deadwood. The truth, though, is that I've given up on the show after a few episodes because it is booooring. I might have been able to survive the awful soundtrack if I cared at all what happened to all these couples and their kids but the truth is that none of them is either likeable or interesting. Pfft. Cancel the Season Pass on the TiVo. Just freed up an hour each week and allowed for an extra three minutes recording My Boys, which is much more fun.

Fear Itself is a modern version of The Twilight Zone, with a dozen one-hour horror films. Each has its own cast, writers, directors and no connection to the other films except what is clearly a decent budget and some real effort to make the stories interesting and scary. I've only seen the first two episodes so far, but they've been pretty good. They were characterized by decent scripts, decent acting and some truly creepy (and occasionally gross) effects. The first episode was definitely not Rod Serling material (definitely "horror" rather than "terror"), but the second definitely has his touch for cautionary lessons in life. With Supernatural in summer hiatus, Fear Itself will be my best source for the creepies.

So I appear to be batting 1 for 3, with a maybe. Clearly, there will be less distraction from the TV this summer than there has been. Although the Mariners have actually won a few games recently . . .

My Big Project

2008-05-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

I have something like 500 LPs in boxes down in the storage unit, and haven't played any of them for a very long time. I've been dragging those boxes around entirely too long, actually, and I've contemplated hauling them to the record store many times. A lot of those LPs, though, are either unavailable on CD or grotesquely expensive and available only as imports. My taste through the 70s and 80s tended toward obscure and limited, so mostly it's the former. Almost a year ago, I bought the turntable above, which is specifically designed for digitizing vinyl, using a USB cable to connect to my PC. Yesterday, I took it out of the box and installed the open source recording software. Today I've started finally recording LPs.

Although the software ostensibly can clean up noise on the LPs (pops & crackles), I'm starting with the easy stuff, Europadisk Audiophile Pressings of Richard & Linda Thompson I bought in 1983 when Carthage Records released them. (I bought the records based on a Rolling Stone review that gave all the re-releases five stars except for one four-star release. It was my introduction to Richard Thompson.) I played the LPs once, while copying them to cassette tape and they've never been played since then, so their condition is superb. There are a couple of little pops between tracks in the two LPs I've digitized so far, but otherwise the sound is great.

Once the entire LP is recorded, I can use the software to identify the spaces between tracks and (manually) label each track. Eventually, I'll convert the files to a format that can be imported into iTunes and played on my iPod. Since I'm all twenty-first century and all, I'm not going to bother burning CDs, although that is definitely an option.

There is no way I'm recording 500 LPs. The next part of the project will be sorting through all those boxes and determining which of them is worth copying; it's not a quick process, although in theory I can record at 45 rpm and then convert to 33 rpm. Getting one of these LPs completely recorded, cleaned up and converted for the iPod is likely going to take a full hour. I'm not planning on 500 hours of it.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-05-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful time of year in Portland, sunny and mild. Lilacs are blooming, the white dogwoods are blooming, and the pink dogwoods will open completely within the next few days. A wonderful day for a bike ride (or even two!) to get me out of the apartment into the fresh air (and away from watching an awful awful baseball team on television).

Random Photo of the Day

2008-04-27T08:26:00.001-07:00

I've never been completely convinced that Wood Ducks were real birds. There was a small flock of them at the Rhododendron Garden in SE Portland, mixed in with a zillion mallards, Canada Geese, Buffleheads (very shy) and Cinnamon Teal. Those are all unquestionably birds, with their occasional splashes of color all looking their best at this time of the year. Wood Ducks, though, don't have any clear relationship to the rest. They peep, for one thing, rather than quack or squawk, which is suspicious on the face of it. But the main thing is the males, like this one. How could a color scheme like that (with big fake red eyes!) possibly evolve? It seems far more likely to me that there are sweatshops somewhere in Asia cranking out Wood Duck robots and hand painting them in this ridiculous outfit. The peeping is just the product of bad robotic programming and now they're stuck with it. If Wood Ducks began quacking like real ducks, people would be suspicious and might try to eat one. Good luck with that.

Selling books

2008-04-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

In the early 70s, my best friend Andrew and I were stuck in California's armpit, Modesto. We were both obsessed with books: me with science fiction, primarily, and Andrew with anything related to art, drawing and cartoons. This isn't an obsession well-served in Modesto, especially in those days and we made regular pilgrimages to Berkeley, where Telegraph Avenue was a book-lover's Eden. The core of the apple, as it were, was Moe's with other lesser bookstores in orbit around it. Although I live in a city that can boast the largest bookstore in the universe, Powell's, nothing can ever supplant Moe's as the greatest bookstore. Moe's had everything (although compared to Powell's it was pitifully small) and an incredible turnover of used books; one could safely visit on a daily basis (except if one was stuck in Modesto) and find new treasures every time. And, wonder of wonders, Moe's was always open. Always. Which meant (at least in memory) dropping in at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning. Andrew's books were upstairs somewhere, mine scattered throughout the funky old building.

The ritual of the pilgrimage required preparation for days in advance, painfully picking over the existing collection to determine what might be sacrificed to the cruelty of the book buyers, in the expectation of finding something even greater and more astonishing on the shelves at Moe's (and to a lesser extent, Shakespeare & Co. and other little nooks and crannies around town). For the book-obsessed, letting go of a book is painful, but knowing in advance that it could never be a simple trade, but rather an inevitably humilating experience made the sorting process even worse. Ah, yeah that one's kind of a stinker, but that just means no one will want it. And this one is great, but it's too esoteric and no one will want it. Maybe better to keep it . . . Andrew always had a worse time of it than I did, because it was easier for me to let go of a novel once it had been read, but his books were resources, reference material and there was always something in each that needed to be preserved.

The first stop was always Moe's, even though their bookbuyers were the cruelest and most particular of all, because the goal was always the same: credit at Moe's. Credit at other stores was a pale imitation, with their inferior stock (although in any other town they would have been treasures beyond compare). The buyers didn't speak much, just flipped through the pile of books unloaded before them, rapidly assembling two piles. Even after years of this, the sting of rejection and disappointment never softened: the Out stack was always taller than the In stack. Always. And the offer was always presented without argument, take it or leave it. X dollars cash, X+Y dollars for credit and it was never what we knew the books were really worth. And the offer was always accepted, with eagerness, because it was something, and that was always something much more than either of us had in our pockets when we walked in.

Next stage required putting all the Out books back in the box, pocketing the credit slip, and heading off to the next store, where the buyers were a little more open, a little less cruel and somehow a lot more human. And, usually, there was necessarily a third store and on the really bad days, a few books to stick back in the trunk of the Rambler to drag back to Modesto. Then off to Moe's, to prowl and dig for treasure, to always use all the credit acquired and whatever cash wasn't absolutely necessary to eat on for the next few weeks. And we always drove home happy because there always were treasures at Moe's that hadn't been there the last trip.

I faced a Powell's bookbuyer this weekend, with a big paper bag filled with books I knew were worth selling: good novels and interesting nonfiction. And there were two stacks. And the Out stack was bigger than the In stack, and it stung. Buyers are no longer supernatural, though, with the uncanny ability not only to judge the value of the book but whether it could find a place on the shelf unoccupied by another copy of the same book. Books all have barcodes now, and barcodes can be scanned and software can determine whether the book will sell, whether there's room in inventory and how much to pay for it. Powell's, it turns out, has separate inventory at all of its stores, so my books were not just being weighed for inventory-worthiness but inventory-worthiness at that store, chosen because it was close to home. The In stack was really short. I can haul the Out stack to a Powell's warehouse and maybe the barcodes and the scanning and the software will shrink it. Or not. The cruelty of the bookbuyer is immutable.

And afterward I really missed Andrew, who has been dead now for 24 years. He's missed a lot of books, and cartoons, and drawings by checking out early. And I've missed my best friend.

Full Sail Nut Brown Ale

2008-04-19T12:31:00.001-07:00

I tend to shy away from brown ales brewed in the US because so often it seems as if the brewer missed the whole point. So-called "brown ales" are often bland, too sweet, or ruined by a burnt character from too much roasted malt. I took a chance, though, with Full Sail's Nut Brown Ale because they're such good brewers and the Brewmasters Reserve releases are always worth tasting.

While I can't be positive who brewed this, it has John Harris written all over it. There aren't too many other craft brewers I know who can so consistently hit a beer style and the Nut Brown is perfect: creamy, rich, with an intriguing blend of malt and hop flavor and just the right toasty edge without the unwanted roasty or burnt quality. At 6% abv, it's maybe a bitter stronger than one would expect from a brown ale, but the alcohol is thoroughly disguised by the malt. The beer makes a nice change from all the hop killers churned out here in the PNW.

Mixology Monday

2008-04-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Beginning some point last fall, under the pernicious influence of my friend Ryan and Eugene's (Oregon's?) best bartender, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, I picked up the cocktail bug. I was particularly struck by Morgenthaler's enthusiasm for creative interpretations of classics, for innovation, and for an insistence on using only the best ingredients. The pursuit of that last component had even driven him to producing some of his own ingredients. What eventually became obvious was that Morgenthaler, while terrific, isn't unique: there is an entire movement of cocktail enthusiasts, both professional and amateur, on the same path. Unsurprisingly, they're linked together by the Internet, as a glance at Morgenthaler's blog roll will reveal.

Oregon, not so oddly, seems particularly active. The bartenders themselves have formed The Oregon Bartenders Guild, which recently launched an online forum open to professionals and amateurs. And, like the microbrewery movement of the 1980s, Oregon is also bubbling with craft distillers producing distinctive and characterful gin, vodka, whiskey and rum.

All of which is a long-winded introduction to Mixology Monday, a monthly event hosted by a round robin of bloggers, each time with a new "theme" for cocktail submissions. I've been following the event with some amazement, fully convinced I'd never actually participate. But Anna Australia's selection of fruit liqueurs happened to coincidence with some of my own tinkering, so here I am. The April Mixology Monday is here.

Part of my cocktail experimenting has involved getting outside my comfort zone. For some reason (probably due to a bad hangover, as these decisions always seem to derive from), I've been avoiding brandy for years. Much to my astonishment, I fell in love with the Sidecar, which has become (with the Manhattan) pretty much my go-to cocktail. When I ended up with two different bottles of Calvados (hmm, sounds like they were found on the stoop rather than purchased), I wondered if it was feasible to substitute apple brandy for grape brandy and still end up with a Sidecar. Turns out the answer is a resounding "maybe." The results can be good, but (as pointed out by someone in the OBG Forum) it's not a Sidecar. And, in my own opinion, lemon juice doesn't sit as well with Calvados as it does with brandy.

Along with one of those Calvados, I picked up a bottle of Mathilde Orange X.O., a really delightful (and inexpensive) French liqueur with a Cognac base. I tried several variations combining the X.O. with Calvados and ended up substituting freshly-squeezed Valencia orange juice for the lemon juice in the original recipe. Subsequent experiments involved a 50/50 blend of lemon and orange juice or cutting the X.O. in half with Pedro Ximenez. The lemon was all wrong, and my independent panel of tasters (my kids, but they're old enough to drink!) decided the Pedro Ximenez was murky and too "molasses". The final recipe was essentially identical to where I started out. Research after the fact turned up some very similar recipes, including Regan's recipe for a Calvados Cocktail in which he used the lemon juice I threw out.

Normandy Bates Cocktail

2 oz. Calvados
1 oz. Mathilde Orange X.O. liqueur
1 oz. freshly squeezed Valencia orange
2 dashes Fee's orange bitters

Rub the chilled cocktail glass with orange peel. Stir the ingredients with ice, strain into cocktail glass and garnish with orange peel.

I like simple, if only because it's easier to remember.

Ha! Did you see those chickens run?

2008-04-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

Ralphie and I drove out this morning to visit Bob and the chickens at the farm. Ralphie loves places like the farm because there are so many smells that he never sniffs in town. Bob's gigantic chocolate Labs were interested to have company so short and were very polite.

The chickens are all fully-grown now, and the hens have been cranking out an amazing supply of delicious eggs. White eggs, brown eggs, even green eggs, all delicious. There are currently two roosters, but the Alpha rooster has gotten himself in trouble, attacking Bob and his wife, Pattie, and a threat to the grandkids, who love to visit the chickens. The rooster is headed for the stove, which ought to teach somebody something about the perils of aggression. Should be good eating, too.

Meanwhile, the hens are being productive (yes, I know, that's a golf ball). Here are two of the Leghorns in their boxes. The hen on the right startled and took off, and left an egg behind. Bob reports that they're all regularly producing about an egg a day, which is apparently pretty good for beginners. (More chicken photos here.)

Ralphie thought the chickens were worth running after, and the chickens thought the idea sucked. Ha ha, Ralphie. Now you're on the wrong side of the gate. Obviously, lessons about aggression are lost on a dog.

Later, we wandered down to the pasture to get a look at the new calf, born just yesterday. Unfortunately, the mom and calf were well out in the field, too far away for good viewing, but the distance suited Ralphie just fine, because cattle are BIG. The last time Ralphie visited the farm, he was just a tiny puppy, but the cattle are just as big as ever. On this occasion, having a gate there was welcome.

I like crows

2008-03-30T14:27:00.000-07:00

I've been observing crows around town for a few years, in part because they seem to be taking over and crowding out other birds, and in part because they're intriguing creatures. They're much smarter than most birds, and clearly adapt well to an urban environment. I was pleased to learn that some of my "observations" had turned out to be accurate. From what I'd seen, for instance, crows spend most of the day foraging alone or with one or two other crows. Then as dusk approaches, they gather in much larger flocks high in the trees. It's not always the same trees, although they do seem to show preferences for areas where there enough trees to accommodate the whole crowd. When they get together in the evening, it looks (and sounds) as if they're each broadcasting all the details of their entire day, all at once and at top volume.

At times, I've seen these gatherings reach into scores of crows. One time last summer, there was a gathering in the trees outside my home and the volume of noise was so great that I had to go outside to look, and discovered at least one of my neighbors had also been drawn to the front door. Incredible. The group, incidentally, is known as a "murder" and reportedly can include crows in their thousands.

Crows apparently have a very tightly-knit family, in which some members serve as "helpers" to breeding pairs. What I've also noticed about them is an enormous number of calls; it's not unusual to observe what sounds like an actual conversation among several of them. According to one of my bird books, they can live as long as 20 years.

One is the loneliest number

2008-03-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

How pathetic is this? All alone at the dog park? What happened to all those fair-weather dog owners that were around only a week ago. Fooey. Of course, it was cold and gray and wet today and there was a nasty breeze blowing, but we're dogs. What do we care?

Fortunately, Ralphie wasn't alone for too much longer. The park never reached the teaming-horde stage, but eventually there was a quorum of five or six dogs, so we stuck around for an hour. It was a big day for huskies and other furry breeds. Ralphie had a pretty good time after all.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-03-27T16:47:00.001-07:00

We've been having interesting weather. Last week it felt like Spring was in the air, but now Winter has definitely grabbed us by the, er, ankle. I didn't see snow today (although there was a brief hail storm) but there were reports of it this morning all around the region and predictions of more tonight. This was shot at about four p.m. today. Beautiful white cherry blossoms against the dark bark and the equally dramatic clouds building in the background reflect the contrast in the season.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-03-23T09:19:00.001-07:00

Spring has sprung in Portland. This cherry tree is just outside my front door, and all over town the daffodils are being joined by flowering trees. I still haven't seen tulips blooming, but they are almost there. Yesterday was a glorious sunny day (although the morning started out in the low 30s) and today is back to grey and wet. I guess it must be March.

My Aikido teacher

2008-03-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

We hosted an Aikido seminar this weekend at my dojo (pictures to come). K. Chiba Shihan was scheduled to come to Oregon for what may well have been the last time since he's retiring after 50 years of Aikido training. Unfortunately, he was very ill and couldn't travel, but we held the seminar anyway, with a number of excellent senior instructors in attendance. This is Fleshler Sensei, who has been my teacher since he came to Portland in the late 80s. Since I have a nasty cold, I had the opportunity to take photos rather than have my body thrown through the air. Some would say that was a good trade-off, but I chafed at the bit. Still, I did shoot nearly 1,000 pictures during the seminar and one or two of them are pretty good. At some point, I'll post more but I wanted to acknowledge my debt to my teacher as a gesture of thanks.

About those lemons . . .

2008-03-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

Last night I served the lamb tagine that was the target for the preserved lemons. It was a fairly complex (and expensive) dish, done with lots of spices, crookneck squash, Kalamata olives and 16 wedges of the preserved lemon and four pounds of lamb shoulder in big pieces. We had a great dojo potluck the Saturday night of a big Aikido seminar.

The tagine was a hit. In fact, I was lucky to get any myself since it was mostly gone by the time I got into line. Several people asked me later if I'd tasted the lamb dish and then wanted to know how it was done. I love cooking for people when they appreciate what I've done!

Somehow, after spending the entire day photographing the Aikido seminar, I neglected to take a picture of the tagine. Damn.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-03-08T16:59:00.001-08:00

Compared to the Midwest and New England, of course, we never had a real Winter. But it's definitely edging into Spring here in Portland. The flowering trees are beginning to fill up with color, and daffodils have come out of nowhere to bring bright yellows to an otherwise grey day. I'm not entirely sure what this flower is, but it's definitely a harbinger.

Back for pastrami

2008-02-24T12:37:00.000-08:00

My friend Ryan was up from Eugene last evening, so after a tasting of 1993 Jos. Christoffel jr. Riesling - Spätlese I'd been saving to share (wonderful complex wine that kept opening and unfolding rapidly in the glass), we headed down to Kenny & Zuke's for pastrami on rye. Remarkably for a great Portland restaurant, it was about half-full. It may have been the only good place in town where we didn't need to wait 45 minutes to be seated. The pastrami was incredible, just as tasty as the first time I visited but much more tender. Ryan and I were both very pleased.

We were just as lucky at our next stop, the Teardrop Lounge, a short distance away in NW Portland. We arrived to find the place less than half-full and had the opportunity for a short conversation with the bartenders before grabbing the last available four-top. The Teardrop is part of a new wave of bars serving innovative new cocktails and solid interpretations of old favorites, built from the best ingredients, some of which (like the Teardrop's jalapeño orange bitters) are house-made. Ryan and I were joined by his wife, Jenaya, and her mother. Shortly after they arrived, the bar hit its stride and it was soon packed to the rafters.

We tried an array of house cocktails (check the menu on their website), all of which were interesting concoctions. Even though the place was jammed, the waitstaff was very attentive and efficient; the bartenders were extremely fast. I finished with their take on a Sidecar, built from Germain-Robin's excellent brandy (although I'd been given the opportunity to make my own choice).

The Teardrop has high ceilings and a very open feeling, even when it was packed. Our only grievance was the really awful music (bad disco?) pounding through the room. And, well, not a cheap tab but given the location and the attention given to high-quality ingredients, it wasn't at all unreasonable.

My appliances are dying

2008-02-20T17:23:00.000-08:00

(Update below) I have a National rice cooker that I bought some time in 1980. Before I bought it, I was terrified of cooking rice at the same time I was living in Berkeley and deeply invested in learning to cook Asian (mostly Chinese at the time) cuisines. Living in Berkeley, in fact, it was impossible to avoid Asian food even if I'd wanted to. Dining out was the primary social activity among everyone I knew, and delicious and inexpensive Chinese, Thai, Korean and Japanese food was omnipresent. Inspired by what I was eating, I was determined to learn how to prepare it at home and the groceries in Oakland's Chinatown were a short trip away. But rice? Rice sounded incredibly arbitrary and difficult and while I was chopping and prepping dishes for the wok the last thing I could worry about was whether the water had boiled away in the rice, or the heat was too high or too low . . .

Of course, actual Asians had solved this problem years before and invented the electric rice cooker. Throw rice into the bowl, rinse, rinse, rinse, add cold water to the first knuckle, return bowl to cooker, add lid, push button and go back to whatever you were doing. The bimetal switch would detect when all the water had boiled off because the temperature would start to rise, and it would switch off the cooker with an audible snap. Wait 15 minutes for the rice to steam and voila. Or whatever the Cantonese equivalent of voila might be.

Since 1980, I've cooked literally thousands of batches of rice with this thing. I've replaced the power cord and the knob for the lid. The plastic lever for the switch is cracked and the whole thing is remarkably grungy. But it's still cooking rice. The problem is, it's no longer simple to clean. The rice sticks and leftovers don't want to come out. Cleaning the bowl has become a real chore. I just hit the "1-click" at Amazon for a new Panasonic rice cooker which looks to be just as simple and primitive as my National. No "warmer", no vegetable settings (Yoicks! You can spend a lot of money on a "rice cooker"), and it cost less than $25. I've got my fingers crossed that it's pretty much the same unit with a shiny coat (and a nonstick bowl). The old rice cooker is going in the back of the cupboard; there's no way I could actually throw it away.

And the coffee maker died. Well, it didn't exactly die, because it can still brew coffee, but there has been a disconcerting amount of hot water on the counter afterward. Turns out it's leaking out around the power cord, which is more than a little unnerving. A Gevalia brewer, it isn't nearly as old as the rice cooker, but it's been pretty reliable and, best and critical feature, it brews into a thermos carafe. No hot plate burned coffee for me. The new one just arrived: a fancy Japanese unit with a stainless carafe and a timer! I kind of like it. And I didn't have to suffer through a month's supply of Gevalia coffee to get it, which is a bonus.

Update: Both the coffee maker and the rice cooker have arrived and been put to good use. The lid on carafe apparently has to be set in the correct position, or the hot coffee has nowhere to go except down onto the counter, but otherwise the luxury of having it start brewing while I drag myself out of bed is worth the cost. The rice cooker seemed tiny when I first opened the box but it's actually perfect for the one-person batches of rice I need and the glass lid means I can watch the rice cook! Friday nights will never be boring again.

Rocky Butte

2008-02-17T13:32:00.001-08:00

Since it's 50 degrees in the middle of February, and the sun is shining out of a clear blue sky, I thought it was a good idea to get outdoors for a bit. So, after living in Portland for 24 years, I finally got around to actually visiting Rocky Butte State Park, which turned out to be nothing at all like I expected. Well, it was high up and provided a panoramic view of the Columbia River, Mt Hood, and Mt St Helens (and IKEA and a lot of industrial land and two freeways), but I anticipated something wild and more natural. Instead, I drove up a long winding road, through a tunnel, alongside a number of stilt houses eagerly awaiting a good quake, and some of the biggest and ugliest McMansions I've seen in town.

Then, at the very top, I found the Joseph Wood Hill "Park" which was originally the site for a military academy built in the early 20th century. What it looks like, really, is an old stone fortress. Guarded today by the biggest Great Dane I've ever seen. The forest-y portion of the park is downhill and to the east and for all I know there are trails through it. In general, I wasn't overwhelmed.

Time to Howl!

2008-02-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

Another day at the dog park, with lots of canine buddies to play with. Not blistering heat, but still warm enough to bring out the crowds . . . and no rain. A good day to howl.

Hooray for TiVo

2008-02-12T13:16:00.000-08:00

I just found out today at work about some monumental news! Well, maybe not monumental, but thanks to TiVo and the Internet, I've already programmed my DVR to record the Best In Show episode of Westminster Dog Show, since I'm going to be at the dojo. I'll be rooting for the beagle.

Update: Well, so much for time zones. I may even get around to watching the recording of Westminster (I've been watching the Working dogs, lots of sweet faced retrievers), but all the suspense is gone. But, hell, after all that media build up what judge could turn down Uno? "Yeah, blah blah, the beagle is really cute, but the East Siberian Whoomzla is breed-perfect. Gurk! Ack!" As the lynch mob descends on the judges, the cameras pull back to a chaos of dog handlers in truly ghastly dresses beating each other with chew bars . . .

Whew. Fortunately, the BEAGLE WON!

Random Photo of the Day

2008-02-10T11:01:00.001-08:00

Eh. You try shooting a photo with one hand, out an open window in a moving car (while driving it) to get an image in the rearview mirror. This is Ralphie on his way to the dog park again, on what turned out to be a warmish, sunnyish day, a great break from the recent weather. A zillion dogs were there, ranging from miniature kick dogs to a year-old Great Dane the size of a Clydesdale. Lots of Labs, lots of husky-looking dogs, a couple of Bassetts (yay!), a pair of Labradoodles that looked like wolfhounds, pugs and Shepherds. Running, humping, barking and howling (that'd be Ralphie). A nice change from the previous Saturday with all the slush and rain. Much better.

Bob's Lap Dance

2008-02-09T17:46:00.000-08:00

When we last saw the hens, they were in their velociraptor stage. Now they really look like chickens and they've even started laying a few eggs. This, however, is how my friend Bob likes to spend an evening, getting a lap dance from the chicks while they get their dinner. Bob's got his full farmer gear on, from rubber boots to John Deere cap and this is about as happy and content as Bob can get. The girls look pretty happy, too. They love their mom, Bob, and they love to eat. Those Barred Rocks are pretty chickens!

Pastrami!

2008-02-08T15:13:00.001-08:00

Portland food has changed. It wasn't that long ago that "Portland food" meant an extra pile of alfalfa sprouts on the sandwich or, for dinner, a nice piece of salmon (not that there's anything wrong with salmon). What it really did not mean was meat. Well, there was always the Ringside, where a local might enjoy a good steak or prime rib -- in the dark, where no one was likely to spot you, and if they did well, what were they doing in the Ringside? And there was always Sayler's, where people were challenged to eat a 72 oz. top sirloin dinner in one hour. If they could choke down 4.5 pounds of beef, plus all the trimmings (and that's a lot of trimmings), the meal was free. But even at Sayler's, it was acknowledged that this was a grotesque event, chronicled by a wall of photos: gluttons cramming down huge portions of dead cow . . . in Portland, meat was, well, unfortunate.

Maybe it's the influx of immigrants from the East Coast and the Midwest, but things have definitely changed. Chefs are packing them in with marvelous concoctions of the nasty bits, much of which is actually, well, pork. Suddenly, Portland people are willing to gather in public, even in broad daylight, and eat meat. It's weird.

All of which is to say I finally made it to Kenny and Zuke's, a fairly new and thoroughly astonishing (for Portland) deli. There have actually been a few places in town (notably Milo's City Cafe and The County Cork) corning their own beef and grilling incredible Reubens, but K&Z are the first to expand this to a full deli menu, most particularly and deliciously by producing their own pastrami. Real, fatty and smoky pastrami. Mmmmm. Unheard of in Portland since the old deli in the city courthouse went out of business 20 years ago, real pastrami is nothing at all like the "pastrami" sold in local groceries and butchers. To make it perfect, the deli even bakes their own rye bread, the first true Jewish rye to cross my lips in decades.

Kenny & Zuke's sits on one of Portland's hippest city blocks, sharing the sidewalk with Clyde Common (with a lunch crowd scoffing down some of the best burgers in town), the Ace Hotel (with a lobby lounged with hipsters and their Macbooks), and a Stumptown Coffee shop (more hipsters and more Macbooks). The deli was packed and it was fortunate for me that I was on my own and more than happy to eat at a counter. But even with the lox and the chopped liver and the kreplach, and everyone happily noshing and schmoozing, it doesn't look like any deli I've ever seen. It looks like Portland: huge windows and all the light available on a murky February afternoon.

And the pastrami? Well, the pastrami was every bit as good as advertised and after my long long pastrami famine, probably better than advertised. So was the rye bread, with its crunchy crust and soft salty interior. The sandwich? Well, maybe I'm just old, but I think that cutting pastrami in slabs is a mistake. To me, pastrami should be cut super thin and then piled into a grotesque heap on the bread. Like this. The thick slices make it a difficult sandwich to bite into and I made the mistake of asking for mustard, which was slathered on with a heavy hand. Great mustard, but it made the bread soggy and that much more difficult to handle. And my waiter had a difficult time with the drink order, but it was admittedly very noisy and he may just have mis-heard me.

Still, I'll be back (no mustard next time) because it was great meat. And very decent slaw and an exceptionally good pickle. What else can you ask for?

No kimchee?

2008-02-04T18:18:00.001-08:00

Recently, I was celebrating a co-worker's birthday. Since the birthday boy is Vietnamese, we had spring rolls and salad rolls to go with the cake. Mmmmm. Someone mentioned kimchee, which was met with many blank stares. I thought they were joking, but it turned out that a significant chunk of the dozen or so people in the room had never had kimchee or even heard of it. What the . . . ?

Kimchee is the staple food (along with rice) of Korea. It's cheap, it's nutritious and it can be served as a side dish or cooked into other dishes. Most of the kimchee we see in stores is pickled Napa cabbage, cured with salt, ginger and a significant amount of hot pepper, but it can be made from a variety of vegetables and. A friend of mine who had married a Korean woman and lived in Korea told me about a version called "little boy" because it was made from tiny radishes that looked like a baby's penis. I've not seen any of that for sale, but I've had other versions of kimchee, including one his wife whipped up in a few minutes from lettuce and a LOT of pepper.

Thinking about kimchee reminded me I hadn't had any for awhile and that made me think, hmmmm, what goes with kimchee? And so I'm getting ready to eat Dak Jim (garlic chicken), white rice, Shigumchi Namul (sesame spinach salad) and kimchee. I'm lucky.

That's the kimchee and spinach in the picture. Garlic chicken is a simple stew made with lots of garlic (d'oh), green onions, soy sauce and sesame oil and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Lemons and their preservation

2008-02-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

Thinking ahead, for a change. In about six weeks, I want to prepare a Moroccan lamb tagine. To do it right, I need preserved lemons, and they take time to pickle. This is my first attempt at preserved lemons, although I've run across the notion before and execution is apparently simplicity itself. We shall see, because there is a remarkable inconsistency about salt levels and length of time needed for pickling. And my source cookbook, Aidells and Kelly on meat, has already flunked on the question of volume. Eight lemons in a quart jar? Hmmmm. That seemed unlikely to me and has proven to be ridiculous. Either they have very small lemons or a very large quart.

At any rate, last night I washed, dried and sectioned the lemons, removing seeds and salting all the segments with 1 cup of Kosher salt. After taking a second trip to the store to buy a suitable jar (no metal lid!) I tossed the salted lemons and a lot of lemon juice in and have been sloshing it around. This morning I added an upturned plate to help keep the lemons under the surface, since they've been bobbing up no matter how much juice I added. After a week? or three weeks? at room temperature, the jar will be topped off with olive juice and refrigerated. By then, there should have been transformations to the lemons, although I'm still not entirely sure how that will look. Some of the recipes I've read include cinnamon, pepper and other seasonings and I may fiddle with those in the next few days.

If the lemons go through a visual transformation, I'll update with photos. It's a challenge to photograph because the camera likes the surface of the jar and it's very difficult to focus on the lemons rather than the glass.

Weather, bah!

2008-02-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

The weather here has been crap. Up in the hills, they got snow; up in the mountains, they got tons of snow; even south in the valley, they got lots of lovely snow. Here? We've gotten rain in abundance and yesterday we got slush. Charming. Ralphie and I wandered off to the Gabriel Park off-leash area in search of buddies and maybe snow and encountered two or three other dogs in an open field of slush and cold nasty rain. After my shoes and socks were thoroughly soaked, we wandered back toward the car on paths deep in running water, past creeks overflowing with rushing water. This little piece of field was the closest Ralphie got to playing in the snow.

On the positive side, Ralphie did get to exercise his big boy outside voice. A lot. One fellow told me he could hear him baying all the way back to the tennis courts. The tennis courts are by the upper blue point and the winter off-leash area is marked by the other blue point.

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Random Photo of the Day

2008-01-21T15:41:00.001-08:00

Part of the "new" Portland. This was taken near the foot of the Portland Aerial Tram, which takes patients and employees up Marquam Hill to the Oregon Health Sciences University from the new OHSU facility and a ton of new condo development along the South Waterfront area, formerly an industrial wasteland. The streetcar conveniently connects this development with the other great Portland yuppie enclave, the Pearl District. The Pearl, which continues to grow out of what was a thriving industrial neighborhood in NW Portland (also along the Willamette River), is packed with entertainment and shopping opportunities. Trendy restaurants, expensive specialty grocery stores, the ever-critical equipment supply stores like REI (what yuppie can survive without lots of togs and tools for the latest activity?) abound in the Pearl, but South Waterfront is still a wasteland. Those tall, totally-inappropriate condo towers sit surrounded by . . . tall, totally-inappropriate condo towers. I did spot one restaurant, and the OHSU facility has the essential fitness center. Other than that? Pretty grim, and the west-facing condos have a charming view of I-5 rather than a spectacular view of Mt. Hood.

How Could I Sleep In?

2008-01-21T08:15:00.001-08:00

It's the middle of January and most of the foliage is gone from the big hedge outside my bedroom window. For a brief period this winter, the sparrows were pretty quiet (and the window and storm window closed all the time). It seems they're back, though, as you can hear. This, really, is nothing. In the Spring and Summer, when I sleep with the window open, this morning chorus is easily three times as boisterous (with occasional contributions from a neighborhood flicker). Cheerful, sure, but LOUD. I don't really understand when they have time to eat, unless they sneak about at night picking off bugs, because their little beaks are busy busy busy all day just like this:

My one true love returns

2008-01-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Well, actually, I returned to my one true love: Aikido. In 1980, I was struggling to lose a spare tire I'd developed after I quit smoking the previous fall. Swimming at the Berkeley YMCA was getting to be a huge bore when my friend Lizzy, who had taken some time out from aikido herself, convinced me to join her at what was then called Aikido of Berkeley (later, Berkeley Aikikai). What began with two weeks of rolling back and forth on the side of the mat turned into a full-blown obsession. A normal week found me at the dojo 5-6 days, often for two or more classes. Within a few years, we'd moved out of a converted garage into the relatively huge space on San Pablo Avenue where the dojo still resides. Hombu Dojo, world headquarters for Aikido, sent K Chiba to California to supervise teaching in the United States Aikido Federation Western Region and he made monthly visits to Berkeley. Aikido suddenly looked a lot different, and the intensity of training turned up more than a few notches.

In 1984, my teacher, Steve Sasaki, died of a massive heart attack. Within a few months, I'd also lost my job and the Bay Area was losing its appeal for me. I moved back up to Portland, and for the next few years this effectively meant giving up Aikido. In the late 80s, I dabbled briefly (with great frustration) in the Oregon Ki Society, where the approach to Aikido was not only vastly different from what I'd studied before, but where I was constantly told that everything I'd learned was wrong.

Then, in 1989, I was rescued by the appearance of Aki Fleshler, who had moved to Portland expressly to open a dojo under the instruction of the very same K Chiba. Oddly enough, he arrived in the middle of a flurry of Aikido teachers; consideration was given to building one big dojo, but teaching approaches were so different among the instructors that three dojos were started in the same period, and all three are still in existence. Fleshler Sensei, with the help of a small core of students, built Multnomah Aikikai. Our first class was held in January 1991, in a downtown building where we could watch a huge antiwar rally opposed to what became the first Gulf War.

Nearly a decade later, a series of injuries and a chaotic life pulled me away from the dojo for several years. Eventually, I convinced myself that I was too old and too broken to train again, but my dreams continued to be haunted by images from training. In the middle of the night, fighting insomnia, I found the most effective means of relaxing into sleep came from imagining myself on the mat, moving with the grace and certainty I'd once known. Last October, a casual e-mail comment from someone I've never met, a young Argentinian studying Aikido in Mexico, woke me up. I contacted the dojo, had a great talk with Fleshler Sensei and Van Amburgh Sensei (acting chief instructor) about my challenges and my desire to return to Aikido. I was welcomed back with love. It's like coming home.

What has amazed me, as I struggle with being much older and much stiffer and in terrible condition, is how much information my body retained even though I wasn't actively training. All those hours and hours, all those years of training, really did sink deep into my muscles and into my subconscious.

Shoe Fly

2008-01-13T19:51:00.000-08:00

I don't get it. I don't get why people throw shoes up in the air so they hang from phone lines or power lines or whatever those things are up there. I see a lot of them these days, and it seems like I'm seeing them a lot more than I used to. Originally, I thought people were doing it to irritate someone else who owned the shoes, but I'm pretty sure that's not right. And lately, I've seen shoes that didn't even have laces to snare--cowboy boots, high heel pumps--people seem to be going to more trouble to get those shoes up in the sky.

And then there is this nest of shoes on Glisan St. I couldn't even get them all in the shot! Is this some kind of weird yuppie gang initiation? Or what if my initial idea was correct and all these shoes belonged to the same guy? I bet he's really pissed off now.

And what's up with the blue sky, anyway? Portland in January? Who's going to believe that one?

Drinking in the UK, Part Three

2008-01-11T16:33:00.000-08:00

Although it is true I fell desperately in love with Real Ale while drinking on this trip, I can’t pretend that finding it didn’t require some effort (even if it only meant tagging around with the Native Guide) and that Brits in general aren’t capable of drinking awful shite, even when in the presence of beautifully-conditioned ale. Without even referencing those getting their little glass of voddy, or whatever audience justified the presence of Southern Comfort optics in every pub I visited, there were all the people ordering revolting bottled sweet Irish cider (poured over ice in a pint glass) and the profusion of “smooth” beers. Worst of all were the digital displays in the Wetherspoon’s that dynamically advertised the temperature of the beers being pushed out at nearly 0°C. I initially assumed people ordered this swill because it was cheaper than the carefully-handled ales, but in most cases it appeared to be just the opposite; they were paying a premium to drink frozen lager! Criminal.

Peter and I got an early start on my second day, catching a train south across the River Clyde to a neighborhood called Mount Florida, apparently quite close to a famous football stadium (sorry, I have no idea). We found our way on foot to the Clockwork Beer Co., which turned out to be a very pleasant and attractive brewpub. After trying a couple of their house beers, necessarily including their Oregon Ale, I switched over to their admirable guest beers (see photo of taps in Part One), sampling the Kelburn Goldihops and Lia Fail, from Inveralmond Brewery, Perth (excellent beers). I enjoyed the unusual sight of Peter with half pints as he did his best to sample the entire house list. For lunch, I finally had my obligatory haggis, in this case stuffed in a chicken breast. Interesting stuff, haggis, not bad but definitely plenty of organ meats. Peter ordered the “nachos” which struck me, coming from the States, as a weird thing to do in a Scottish pub and he muttered his way through the entire plate of badly-scorched chips. Somewhere near the end of the plate, he wondered whether he shouldn’t have sent the lunch back.

Having stuffed ourselves with food and drink, we grabbed a bus back into the city and once again found ourselves on the Clockwork Orange. Emerging from the subway, I followed Peter along the Dumbarton Road, dodging construction along the sidewalk, with the Native Guide confidently telling me that “it’s just up here”, “must be the next block” until, eventually, he was right. There it was, the Three Judges, and just across the street was a subway stop, which we’d passed up on the outbound trip. This turned out to be a great old boozer, with a very decent list of beers, lots of room and, best of all, great seats by the big windows looking out on Dumbarton and Byres roads. (The photo at the head of Part Two is Peter and his pint by the window.) A wonderful spot to enjoy a great beer and people watch, and plenty of great people to watch (or ogle). No idea what Peter is drinking there, but I had another mild (which I loved), Tring Mansion out of Hertfordshire (although I confess that I couldn't point to Hertfordshire on a map to save my life). American brewers should figure this style out and brew milds! 3.7 abv. I could drink it all afternoon, with pleasure.

The original plan called for a visit to the Aragon, another entry in the GBG up the road on the way to Tennents, but I was footsore and it wasn’t difficult to convince Peter that it made more sense to grab the subway (hey, we’d already paid for all-day tickets) up to the Hillhead Station, and my second visit to Tennents to close out the evening. Peter made an astonishing error, ordering a London beer (Fuller's?), while I had a wonderful Harviestoun Bitter & Twisted, from Alva, Scotland (3.8% and full of wonderful hop flavor).

As it happened, my trip coincided with the 2007 Cricket World Cup, which was being broadcast from the Caribbean to every pub television set in Great Britain. Peter took a good stab at explaining to me a sport that in some faint manner resembles baseball, and in most ways is completely unfathomable to anyone not raised on it. On a visit to Kentucky, I’d learned that the locals were so utterly enslaved to the sport of basketball that an entire network broadcasts nothing else, including high school games. I gather that a similar obsession exists with American football down in Texas. But the Brits appear to be obsessed with the very notion of sport. It doesn’t matter what is being broadcast, they’re glued to the telly (as Peter above). It could be cricket, could be football, it could even be (and was) the soporific boat race between Cambridge and Oxford; they’ll stare fixedly at the screen until the commercials come on and they can sprint to the bar. Having watched this behavior, it’s hard for me to understand how they haven’t simply died out as a race. Surely there must be something else to do after work, no? Something involving the opposite sex, maybe?

That was the close of the day for me, as I faced a series of challenges the following morning. I had to get myself back out to Glasgow Airport and pick up my hire car (which somehow morphed into a Mercedes) and learn to drive on the left while racing for the ferry at Kennacraig that would take me to spend three days on Islay. While there was drinking on Islay (how could there not be, with all the distilleries?), it was such a special place and such a special time that it deserves more attention than I can give it now. I will say that there is no likely a better place on the planet for dinner (fresh seafood or beef), real ale (Black Sheep Best Bitter), whisky (118 malts, every single one from Islay or Jura) and conversation than the bar at the Port Charlotte Hotel. I understand the dining room may have even better food, but getting a seat in there was beyond me, especially on Easter weekend.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-01-09T15:48:00.002-08:00

My paternal grandfather with his 1932 Chevy roadster packed for a camping trip. Both of my grandparents emigrated to the US from England after the Great War. The little guy just visible over my Pop's hand is my dad. This is what my dad has to say about the car:

I'm pretty sure it is a 1932 Chevy roadster, complete with rumble seat. That's Pop at the wheel. He drove us from Nova Scotia to Miami in it. On the trip to Halifax the corduroy dirt roads shook the luggage rack on the rear so badly we had to stop and get it welded. The camping gear was in another rack on the running board. The car had isinglass curtains as needed for weather. I can remember coming home at night snugged down in the closed up rumble seat.

Remember we bought this car during the Depression when few had cars and even fewer had roadsters with spare tires in the fender wells. We didn't have a garage, living in an apartment, but rented one from a toff who was finding it difficult to meet the monthly bills.

My mother managed the finances and how she saved the dough, as Pop paid cash for the Chevy, I'll never know. That Chevy was the most impractical model sold, but Mom knew what put the neighbors off.

In my own time, about 25 years later, my dad would end up packing my mom, sister and I into a 1950 Ford sedan and driving from upstate New York to our new home in Oregon, taking time to visit Mt Rushmore, Yellowstone Park and every other interesting location along the way. Entertainment consisted of punching my sister, playing the alphabet game (I'm sure she cheated most of the way across country) and reading Burma Shave signs. Five years after that, we reversed the trip (in a station wagon, I'm pretty sure) but swung through the Southwest, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee. It's too bad I never tried this stunt with my kids, but I probably would have strangled us all halfway through the trip.

Drinking in the UK, Part Two

2008-01-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

Not enough credit can be given to breakfast and specifically to the UK emphasis on breakfast, especially to a Yank planning on drinking. With the pitiful showing of the US dollar against the pound, travel in the UK is brutally expensive. Having essentially wiped out my savings to take this vacation, I found the bed & breakfast to be the one economic bright spot. Fortified by a "full Scottish (or English) breakfast", I rarely needed a real lunch and was generally well-grounded for an afternoon and evening of beer. At my b&b in Glasgow, a "full Scottish breakfast" consisted of eggs, bacon (not streaky bacon), sausage, freshly cooked mushrooms and tomatoes, odd little "hash browns", juice and tea. (It's apparently the one meal of the day not requiring chips, which is another positive note.) And the Scots have apparently avoided the vile addition of canned baked beans to the plate, yet another reason to applaud them.

On my first morning, well-stuffed with breakfast, I made several false starts along the Byres Road looking for the subway into central Glasgow. Known to locals as the Clockwork Orange, this tiny rail line runs on two concentric ovals between downtown and the westside, providing a cheap and quick service. They're not keen on photographs, though, or at least that seemed to be the gist of the warning I heard over the PA. I should have told them I was in the business and not bent on terrorism; much more interested in the displays of real-time arrivals than blowing things up.

After puttering around for a few hours along Buchanan Street with all its shops and shoppers (kilt and all the basics, starting at £500, thank you very much), I met my trusty native guide at the Central Rail Station (where I had to pay 20P for a pee). In short order we were around the corner at the Horseshoe Bar, billed as possessing the longest bar in the UK, and dating back to 1870. I had my first mild, Moorhouse Black Cat. As a Yank, milds have been the most mysterious of British styles for me and I've yet to meet anyone, including the native guide, who could offer a precise definition of the term. I found my pint quite delicious, by Peter proclaimed the beers "too warm". And then, in true Peter Alexander fashion, we were out the door and off to another pub.

Next on the list was the Pot Still, for a pint of Mordue (damn notes written after the fact fail to mention which, but probably a bitter). I'd been intrigued by the Good Beer Guide reference to the Pot Still's list of whiskies, but we discovered the supply badly depleted. Probably just as well, so that I stuck to ale. Peter and the bartender launched into a discussion about our next destination, a new brewpub, and how best to get there by bus. After about 10 minutes of this, Peter turned to me and grinned, "You probably didn't get any of that, did you?" and, indeed, I was lost entirely as the Glaswegian rolled over me.

We did manage to catch a bus well over to the other side of the city, near Glasgow Green, as seen here. Peter was relying on his instincts, and soon found West Brewing, located in new construction attached to a gorgeous Victorian carpet factory. The pub itself looked like every American brewpub I'd ever visited, complete with exposed ducting and chilly ambiance (some of which can be observed in this previously- unreleased video below). The beers, intended as faithful versions of German styles, were adequate at best. More to the point, they simply weren't Real Ales, which was all I was craving. I had something called a festbier, which was a boring amber lager. Peter tried a couple of other beers and, as I recall, proclaimed the weissbier as reasonable. Still, no point in hanging about here, is there? Off we go then, back to central Glasgow.

Next stop on the tour was my first Wetherspoons, the Counting House, a huge pub in a converted bank just off George Square. At the time, I had no idea what "Wetherspoons" meant, or the sort of emotions the name could generate in the hearts of real ale lovers. We stood up at the bar for some well-served beers, and I had my first Timothy Taylor's Landlord, which the brewery calls a Pale Ale. It was delicious, I remember that. The pub was cavernous and loud, as we were somewhere around the end of the workday. From there, we shuffled off to the State Bar, also listed in the GBG, which was something of a disappointment. Somewhat shabby and dark, but the beer (Kelburn Goldihops?) was in good shape. In search of dinner, we stumbled across the street to another Wetherspoons, which had none of the character or charm of the Counting House. The "special" was a burger and a pint at a reasonable price, with the catch being a limited offering for the pint. Mine was a fairly ghastly Green King Abbot, washed down later with a much more satisfying Caledonia Champions Ale, which was a seasonal offering.

After which, I tottered off to my bed, and Peter off to his mum's for the night.

Drinking in the UK, Part One

2008-01-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

What eventually became The Greatest Vacation Ever started with a wedding announcement. My friend David B., who had been professoring in Holland for several years and lately in Plymouth, England, determined that he would marry an Englishwoman and that he intended doing so in England, located rather inconveniently far from Oregon. This would also be occasion for a gathering of, not eagles so much as beer geeks, scattered across the US and as far east as Germany. I decided that it would be foolish to travel all that way and not visit something beyond Plymouth and that I could stretch the whole trip to a fortnight (already practicing British-isms).

After considering altbiers in Dusseldorf and serious pubcrawling through Belgium, I chose the undeniable pull from Scotland, eventually focusing on Islay, with its concentration of great distilleries. The most logical jumping-off point for Islay is Glasgow, and my friend Peter's offer to travel up from Manchester for a few days in town was the final selling point. Having grown up (to some extent--opinions on the subject will vary) nearby, Peter is practically a native guide, and proved to have an unerring nose for the best pubs and the best ales. He has been heavily (heh) involved with the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) for years; he knows his stuff.

Over the weeks and months before my trip, David and Peter schooled me in the arcana of UK pubs and their surroundings. I would arrive prepared for the correct approach to ordering (up at the bar, none of this lurking about at the table) and the correct approach to paying (no tips, and count your change thoroughly). I learned about black cabs, which ATMs to avoid (those in pubs) and the difference between proper (Northern) and improper (Southern) dispense. No one mentioned, however, that the Scots print their own pound notes and, worse, issue them from three separate Scottish banks. You're sure this is real money? This one's got an engraving of a distillery!

Glasgow turned out to be a lovely city, one that has scraped off most of the industrial soot to reveal huge and beautiful Victorian architecture. My bed & breakfast was on Belhaven Terrace, a neighborhood of winding streets and gorgeous old flats, with high ceilings, huge windows and marvelous clay chimney pots. Arriving there completely knackered after an endless flight through San Francisco and Heathrow (bah), I summoned the strength to make the 10-minute hike down to Tennents, which fulfilled all my fantasies of British pubs. A big u-shaped bar surrounded by lots of floor space and "snugs" all around, serving 8-10 beautifully cellared and conditioned real ales--and a surprise to me, a chalkboard listing each of the ales on tap, along with their alcohol content and price (which varied according to the former).

My first real ale was a Deuchar's (Dooker's Jew-chers) IPA, followed in short order by two pints of Caledonian 80' and dinner: shepherd's pie, served with peas and what I was to learn were the ubiquitous British chips. Meat & gravy covered with mashed potatoes and served with . . . chips. (Chips are inescapable in the UK and most, quite honestly, are not overwhelming goodness. There is, presumably, an enormous surplus of them and pubs and restaurants everywhere are required to offload them whenever possible. The wise traveler learns to tuck them under napkins or onto someone else's plate.) The beer was superb. Over the next few days I developed a real taste for Scottish beer, especially the maltier varieties and continued to marvel at how much flavor could be tucked into beers of what I would consider low-alcohol content, often under 4% a.b.v.

On my walk to the pub and over dinner, I got my first real tastes of something else: Glaswegian, the nearly-incomprehensible language of the locals. This, although a cartoon, is a damn good representation of what I mean. As David had warned me when I rang him on my mobile (UK speak for "cell phone"), "They don't come with subtitles." The friendly young couple that sat next to me during dinner did their best, but the fellow may as well have been speaking Urdu. The young woman made the effort to speak more slowly and was willing to repeat herself so that I could get the gist of it. I'm pretty sure I could live in Glasgow for a decade and never really get it.

Next: the intrepid guide takes me in hand.

Random Photo of the Day

2008-01-01T10:04:00.001-08:00

Experimenting with a macro lens. Depth of field is miniscule and without enough light (and a dog tugging on the leash) it's difficult to tell what's in focus and what isn't. And difficult to know in advance what the camera is going to see that I didn't, like the drops of water in this image. More research is definitely required.

I promise to do better

2007-12-25T09:05:00.000-08:00

It appears I haven't posted a damn thing for a month and not much previous to that. Premature New Years Resolution: post more frequently, and think of something worthwhile to write about.

At any rate, to my thousands upon thousands of loyal readers: Merry Christmas.

The photo is from a wicked storm in January 2005(?): most welcome sight of the day, as a nice warm bus rolls toward me.