David's posterous

February 16, 2009

breakfast

Today I made æbelskiver for breakfast. And you can bet your Danish pastry that we're happy about it.

I had never heard of æbelskiver before, even though I know what it means: 'apple shards'.

This is no more a helpful definition of the dish than the usual menu designation 'hot keys' that I met in Puebla is for flapjacks. Fortunately, Alaina received an æbelskiver pan for her birthday. It came from one of her relatives who really knows about cooking.

So here's how you can make æbelskiver. Note that no apples were shivered in this process:

Take your takoyaki recipe. Subtract octopus. Add vanilla. Triple the spheres' diameter, because your æbelskiver pan has big divots. Adjust amounts accordingly. Replace the little bits of cephalopod and / or leftover shrimp with jam. Alternately, as in our household, use Nutella and Michael Recchiutti's burnt caramel sauce. The cooking technique is identical, down to the bamboo skewers for flipping the spherical cakes. After extracting the cooked cakes, you add the toppings. Instead of shaved bonito, mayonnaise, and sweet worcestershire sauce, you use powdered sugar or syrup.

Sounds bizarre, but it's actually great. Yet another proof that pancakes rule.

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Posted by David Sloo

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February 4, 2009

Tree or bee?

I've been rummaging around for something to help my sore throat. I thought I'd try the old standby of hot water with honey -- something often combined with lemon, but possibly as effective without. However, while choosing the honey, it occurred to me that other sugary syrups might work as well -- perhaps even better.

So I got out the maple syrup (organic, US grade B, which is the darker and fuller of the over-the-counter grades) and a pot of honey from Asturias (stickier than the syrup) and ran the experiment. Because the flavors are so different, I had no way of running it blind or double-blind, even by holding my nose and blindfolding my assistant.

After putting roughly equivalent sweetening-powers of honey and syrup into glasses -- I did this by taste, rather than specific gravity. There's proof that precision in science suffers when you have a cold.

I filled each of the glasses with hot water, about 90° C, agitated them to dissolve most of the honey and to dilute all of the syrup. This is when I did the tasting, and I just kept stirring the honey glass till it seemed as sweet to my tongue as the liquid in the syrup glass.

Then I performed the experiment:

I would have a sip of one decoction. Swallow it. Count to 5. Chew and swallow a blueberry. (Surprisingly, blueberries feel rough on a sore throat.) Wait one minute before repeating with the other decoction.

I ran the test for eight blueberries, reversing the order. That made four trials of each potion, and order-effects should be negligible.

Here's are my conclusions:

- both honey-water and maple-water have a substantial soothing effect on the sore throat

- the effect seems to be cumulative over multiple sips -- by the end of the test, my throat felt less sore than after trial 1

- maple-water has a sharper taste on the tongue

- nonetheless, maple-water seemed to have a modestly but noticeably greater effect at dampening my sore throat

Future research should probably control more precisely for specific gravity. A third variable -- the presence of lemon -- might also be introduced. Other syrups like treacle, simple syrup, and blackstrap might be good to experiment with as well.

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Posted by David Sloo

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January 31, 2009

Fluoride

We finally chose the name Fluoride for the kitten. It was fun to work on this. We liked getting suggestions (including Ash, a brilliant name that resonates for any Pokémon fan) and the campaigning (as for Valentine, which was nicely historical and gender-conscious).

It is notable that she's just getting her grown-up teeth and she is named something that most people associate with their dentifrice.

Yes, she still has a rotten cold, but we're working on it.

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January 30, 2009

Why do you need an "s" to sell food?

I ran across this phrase in one of the newspaper's usual hyper-light articles today:

For those who have never navigated "Fairways," as some longbeards call the original store...

The story is about a supermarket in Manhattan and its inept elevator. The supermarket is called Fairway [Market]. Yes, it's a fun institution. Yes, the elevator is ridiculous. But that's not what struck me.

Why is it that people from the early 20th century -- at least people in the northeast -- put an s at the end of every food market's name? My mother does this. Both my grandmothers and my father did this. It's perplexing, but it's not just perplexing. I think it might also be insidious.

I suspect that the market namers know that this happens and they consciously tack an s on when they can. This is usually easy because it seems grammatical: important local chains where I live include Trader Joe's, Mollie Stone's, Andronico's, Whole Foods, and Draeger's. But these people of the Golden Generations don't stop there -- we also get Luckys and Safeways.

I am pretty sure that the naming extends to restaurants. Forget that the fashion to name a restaurant with a possessive pretty much started and left off with Delmonico's. But I still hear people -- all of a certain age -- talk about "Boulevards", "Gary Danko's", and "Round Tables". Frankly, I suspect a possessive -- spoken English rarely distinguishes between the plural and the singular possessive. But what do you think is going on? (And did the namers of Amici's, with all their wanton flaunting of translingual grammar, just get it perfectly, or what?)

Maybe it's important to us to personalize the purveyors of our food. Sure, we can get a coat rack at Crate and Barrel, but we'd only eat a rack of lamb at Masa's, not at Masa.

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Posted by David Sloo

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January 28, 2009

Help with naming the kitten

We are still working on a name for the new kitten in our house. We even did a simplified card-sort to work through some of the ideas. New ones keep popping up. In fact, an Accomplished Dutch Designer just suggested a really good one. (It is interesting that Dutch designers so consistently grasp what will work in English and what won't.)

Here's our current list. Let us know what you think works and what doesn't:

Luna

Purrball

Valentine

Fluoride

Ash

Cirrus

Smoky

Rocky

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Posted by David Sloo

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January 25, 2009

And the Aymara word for flag-waving is:

I had a snack in the student center at the local community college this week. Around the walls of the atrium is an assortment of flags from different countries -- presumably the homelands of students at the college. There were the usual suspects -- Argentina, South Korea, Canada (or, as we call it here, Cañada), Uruguay. And then there was one that I didn't remember. Six horizontal stripes. And it has purple in it. Purple -- that's a curious color to find in the flag. I really didn't know it.

Fortunately, we no longer need knowledge, since we have Wikipedia. (And we have computers in our pockets.)

It turns out it's the Inca flag, it has its own name wiphala, which in fact refers to a range of flags all based on some old, old Andean designs. Neato.

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January 21, 2009

Nova at SFO

When I got off my plane this evening and walked through the international terminal, there was what appeared to be an astronomical object hovering at the other end of the building. Phosphorous experiments gone amok?I asked myself. Cold fusion discovered in Sephora hand cream?

But, alas, it was just klieg lights. Universal is making a talkie called Funny People, according to the big warning sign that said that by walking to the train station, you were tacitly and irrevocably agreeing to be in a movie without any rights to recompense or even a credit.

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January 21, 2009

Artificial waterfalls

Have you ever seen an artificial waterfall that was genuinely repugnant?

Why is it that many houses, most public buildings, a large number of sculptures, and practically all paintings are forgettable-to-repulsive excretions, but artificial waterfalls manage to range from pleasant- if-flawed all the way to magnificent? Is it something about water? Do other art forms invite mediocrity?

What is it?

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January 19, 2009

Happy King Day

Here in the United States, we have two national holidays for our leaders. The first is today, and it is for our King, who was deposed and murdered - possibly by the secret police - a few years before I was born. My mother once went to see him in a huge procession in Washington, where he addressed his people.

The other holiday is for our Presidents. Sometimes they are murdered, too. Sometimes they are elected.

That holiday is in February, but we also celebrate when a new one ascends to the presidential throne, which we call the Oval Office. And this year, this celebration-of-ascension is tomorrow - the day after King Day.

The new president is getting an especially good celebration, because he replaces a lackluster dullard who was appointed by the High Court, while the new one was elected by votes.

So I hope you will join me in wishing the country well on King Day, the eve of the installation of our new ruler.

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January 13, 2009

two pompous design books worth reading anyway

I've been reading two design books this month. You might be put off by both or either of them, but that's just their flashy clothes. There really is good design meat inside.

The first is the mammoth coffee-table book A day at elBulli: an insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adrià. 528 thick, sparkling pages, almost all of them full of photographs. Have you every wondered exactly how the chefs at (or inspired by) El Bulli make olive spheres, or liquid-nitrogen pine nuts, or melon caviar? You need this book. The recipes are there, and so are the pictures.

Inserted within the picture book is a series of essays, printed on different stock, in smallish type. See picture. The essays have titles like "A guest's path through the restaurant", "Knowledge is essential for judging the products", and "Creative methods II". Refreshingly, you can get through this whole book without having any of the famous-chef-star wannabe-controversy that usually runs through anything about El Bulli. No gossip column shorts, no defensive rebuttals.

The book -- like Adrià's whole being, maybe -- is about designing what I have to call "food experiences". El Bulli's meals are full of foams and suspensions and boxes of scented air and little bombs of malt-sugar film around a shot of pumpkin-seed oil. Adrià, his brother Albert Adrià, and restaurant partner Juli Soler are all credited as authors. They chart everything that is intended, from what goes into a snail escabeche to how they make freeze-dried chocolate essence. The restaurant closes for six months every year so that Adrià and partners can design the next year's dishes and meal.

Many of the techniques are ones that you won't find in Joy of cooking. But the fact is that many of the techniques in Child, Bertolle, and Beck's 1961 Mastering the art of French cooking were new to English-language recipe books, if not to French bakeries and kitchens. Will everyone be designing scent boxes for their suburban dinner guests in 40 years? Will we each have a dewer of liquid nitrogen on hand?

I mentioned that it's a design book, and odd words like LYO (in French, and therefore common restaurant kitchen-speak, lyoliser means 'freeze dry') crop up, but the recipes and the conceptual writing remain lucid. And there are big charts.

The book weighs 3.16 kg. That's more than my cat.

My other design read weighs much less but contains fewer voluptuous food photos.

Working through screens can be had for free at the author's Web site. If the El Bulli book is about how someone famous designs experiences for ordinary people, Working through screens is about how an intelligent designer can apply method to creating products that people actually understand. There are plenty of popular, readable design books about what not to do, but this is a startlingly simple look at 100 patterns that you can apply to product designs, all the way from "Considering workers' attentions" to "Pursuing aesthetic refinement". The third snippet in the pictures above is from the book.

A caution: the writing is not as crisp as iceberg lettuce. It's not unreadable, but you need to concentrate to get through some of the designer-speak and hyperextensions of general phraseologies. I'm finding that it's worth it, because so few design books have most of the bad ideas edited out, and Flashbulb have managed to do so.