Oh yeah...

The first person to claim (and arrange to pick up) a gallon of turkey stock gets it just for the asking. Not enough room in the ice box for all the stock I am making, and I don't feel like doing any insane reductions. If no one claims it, then I will reduce it, but if anyone wants it, call me. It will be ready Wednesday morning, and will be available until either someone claims it or I reduce it this weekend (probably late Friday, as I will really want the room in the icebox back by then). Once it is reduced, it is mine! Mine! My precious glace!

Back, but battling the forces of nature...

I guess dust is a force of nature, but it is driving me crazy. If you collect books, then dust is a constant aspect of your life. The best way to dust books is to use a brush attachment to your vacuum cleaner.

If your vacuum cleaner has some sort of leak, then you dust one shelf only to find the shelf you just dusted full of, well, dust. You ponder tearing your hair out.

We got a beautiful and very fancy turntable as an early Christmas present from Melanie's folks. Dust is the enemy of vinyl records, so when I hooked it up, I figured, shucks, since we'll be playing our vinyl again, I should reduce the dust. And the battle begins.

For non-book surfaces, I highly recommend the Pledge Grab-it cloths.

Anyway, back to dusting. Two steps forward. Three back. Then, if I am still in the mood to clean, the Trackback Pings on this site have gotten out of hand. I think I will disable that feature. I am shooting for Thursday night for more posts. Meanwhile, go learn how to yodel.

Photos of Food!

For the first time ever on the internet you can see pictures of some dishes that I have cooked by going here. I had no idea that they were going to find their way on the web, or I would have done something more with the presentation.

Perhaps I will take some pictures of Christmas (working feverishly on the menu as I write. Tuna melts are the only thing that are absolutely going to be on there. Yes, tuna melts. No, probably not what you are thinking). Part of me wants to move the goose to a salad course (as a confit with greens and dried cherries) and put beef on for the main course. But then I think of how nice roast goose is, and it goes right back on the menu.

I love preparing for the Christmas dinner. I usually start planning it on the 26th of December, with the analysis of the finished dinner. Then, every time I make a trip to a winery or good wine store, I get ideas and change it. Then I rediscover some neglected ingredient, and changes happen again.

Anyway, tomorrow is the third Thursday of November, which is the real Thanksgiving, best celebrated with cassoulet and six day old Burgundy made from the Gamay grape in the Beaujolais district. Serve chilled and quaff copiously.

By the way...and this will make some of you people get all irate and snort and stammer...goose confit in your cassoulet is a waste of goose confit. The long cooking of the cassoulet does nothing for the confit. In Toulouse they do this because they have so much goose meat, but there is no need to go out and make or buy goose confit to make a cassoulet. You already have three types of pork, some lamb (or mutton, if you are lucky), beans, rich brown stock, herbs, etc. You think that the confit will do much more than contribute a general meatiness already there? You're off your rocker.

Instead eat the confit with pommes anna or over good salad greens. Much better use of the stuff.

And, finally, today is the annual cookie judging. If you run into me later today and I can barely move, you will know why. Apparently we have a lot of entries this year. Anyway, this is always a fun event, because it is the only time in the year that I see my colleagues in the food section (including my editor, who I talk to weekly, yet have only met in person once or twice). The rest of the time they keep me locked in a tower, so that I don't scare anyone.

Why, oh why does this appeal to me?

You can take the boy out of the Central Valley, but you can't take the Central Valley out of the boy.

Why do I think that they had me in mind when they released this?

I really do think that this might top my Christmas list.

Pathetic. Really pathetic.

Yes, if you have been wondering, we have been listening to a lot of Buck Owens recently.

And, if you note the url above, you will understand my utter and complete joy that www.heehaw.com exists.

Ah, the old Kornfield!

Why I do it...

Sometimes I think, "why do I keep doing this freelance writing?"

When I am busy I am too busy and when I am not busy, the checks don't flow in. The worst is when I am busy with nickel and dime stuff. Right now is not bad: a mix of stuff, spaced out just enough to not make me completely crazy, and most of it is the sort of writing that pays enough to be worth doing.

However, there are still those moments when the regularity of a workplace sounds mighty nice.

And then...

I am working on a fairly tough political piece, and Amalia is in her bedroom. She comes into the kitchen and asks if I can draw with her, which I can't. "That's OK, Babbo. You can draw with me later, but I want to draw here next to you."

Then she sits down on the floor with a piece of brown paper, draws a cow, sometimes telling me what part of the cow she was working on (or cow's clothing. This one started with a shirt and shorts and ended up in a nightgown), sometimes singing Hank Williams. When the drawing was done, she used scissors to make a Western-style fringe around the edge and gave me the drawing.

That never happened at the office.

Pumpkins, Pumpkins, and more Pumpkins, not to mention the odd Tomato

Just some food notes. Deadlines loom, and musing about food is a good respite from writing about the Democrats for Life, the Republicans, the origin of Berkeley street names, and food already consumed (no, not all for the same story). These are more rough sketches than actual recipes. Ideas and images more than specific road maps to dishes. Feel free to make suggestions, to ask for clarifications, and to pester me for details next week (after I have actually made the dishes).

In addition to painting a lot, I have been on a bit of a pumpkin bender. Roasted pumpkin seeds with butter and Worcester Sauce. Roasted pumpkin chunks with chestnuts. Pumpkin risotto.

On Thursday I am going to make a pumpkin soup, and I am trying to figure out which garniture to use. I am tending towards an avocado cream with a dollop of red pepper coulis and a drizzling of sage oil, but then I think that thyme croutons with crumbled goat cheese might be good. Then the idea comes around to make the soup with fresh Thai coconut and cardomom and to garnish with sprigs of cilantro and basil (If not the coconut goes into cocktails before hand).

The soup itself is going to be the basic French pureed soup: chicken stock, roasted pumpkin chunks, maybe a potato for texture, herbs, salt, pepper, and cream.

Of course one good squash deserves another, so we also picked up a spaghetti squash and a butternut squash. Spaghetti squash gets roasted, then tossed in crisped pancetta and sugo finto (I am pretty sure that I have given recipes for sugo finto before. Heat olive oil, gently fry a couple of peeled cloves of garlic, add diced onion, fry for a minute, add diced celery and carrot, fry for a few minutes, add peeled and seeded tomatoes, simmer briefly, salt and pepper to taste).

The butternut squash will go in a risotto, probably a basic risotto with thyme.

Also, we are still getting some excellent tomatoes, although the season is coming closer and closer to ending. Next week it will be fried green tomatoes, but now we have dry farmed tomatoes as well as the best tomatoes I have ever tasted (from the Monterrey Market in Berkeley - a mix of organic heirloom tomatoes). If I can get more of them today, we will have our final ensalata caprese.

In under two weeks, raw tomatoes will go on hiatus until July. Makes me want to hibernate.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

What? You find that monotonous? Really? At least the food in the autumn is great. If I wanted constant rain I would live in Portland, which is a better city anyway.

If I wanted rain in a crappy city really close to Canada... ah, I won't mention Starbucksstadt. Wouldn't want to offend my Seattle readers. Do I have Seattle readers?

Well, Keilholtz, you used to, before you called our city crappy and mentioned that it was too close to Canada.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Portland, though, comes alive in the rain, or at least in the evening after a rain. The last time I was there they had been going through a dry spell, and then it rained, and that evening everyone really seemed to be happier.

I don't have to do any outside watering. That is good.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

If it weren't for the smells of chicken bones roasting in the oven, it would drive me crazy.

Rain is good for church, though, because the indirect light on the stained glass makes them glow rather than sparkle and shoot out rays of colored light. Rays of colored light and sparkling are all fine and good, but that glow can really bring out the illustration on the window.

And when it really rains, there is nothing to do but pour out a mug of chilled, unfiltered sake and listen to Bach for hours on end.

A Rant...

Often I give someone a recipe and they say, "how do you ever find time to make dishes like this?"

OK. I admit it. I like to make complicated food sometimes, where there are little critters to be cleaned, vegetables to be carefully trimmed and par-boiled and shocked in ice water, with stocks and sauces and all of that yummy stuff. I don't do it every day, but a couple of times a week I like to prepare a meal that would not be out of place in one of the finer restaurants in the area. Part of it is the joy of smells and of getting my hands dirty with ingredients. Part of it is that a good meal is a good keystone for good conversation. Part of it is that I need to be in good form when it comes to evaluating the work of chefs. I need my palate to be sharp, and the best way to do that is to get dirty with the ingredients and techniques of cooking.

However, usually when I am giving someone a recipe it is really quite a simple dish, maybe an hour from prep to table, with ample time to make a salad or some side dishes, to set table, select a wine, etc. And I give the recipe and get "where do you find time?"

How do you answer that, especially when you hear the person say later, "did you see that episode when Jerry blah blah blah?"

Part of me wants to say, "no, I did not see that episode, nor any other episode of that stupid show, because I was busy making good food for my family."

Television is such a part of people's lives that they don't see time wasted with it as time that could be used for anything else.

I am not immune to its siren call. Years ago, before Amalia, there was a time when Melanie and I would come home from work and watch the rerun of Friends that one of the UHF stations ran. It was insidious. They ran three episodes in a row. You would watch one, not find it particularly interesting or funny or any of the characters that engaging, but then you would realize that you were watching the third episode in a row.

"Do you like Friends?"

"Not really."

"Why are we watching it?"

"Good question."

Fortunately that habit did not take for long, but my guess is that many of the time-starved folks who are glued to their television sets (does anyone call them "sets" any more? It used to be a stock feature of the fear of urban crime: some youth running down the street with a television set under his arm. I remember talking to a cop on a rainy day. I asked him if crime went down when the weather was bad. "Sure," said he, "no one is going to go running through the mud with a television set under his arm." Now they are just TV's or televisions. What happened to the set? I guess it got stolen...except that it is still ON! Perhaps they regressed to Games or progressed to Matches. Sitting down with a frozen dinner in front of the Television Match sounds like some Japanese inspired reality craze) don't even like the dreck that they watch incessantly.

Did you see that episode when Erik went completely ballistic and threw his risotto spoon at a television set?

No, I was busy running down the street with my neighbor's television set under my arm.

Oh yeah. I saw that show back in the 70's. Scary. We moved out to the suburbs.

Brown ink is fun...

I was out of brown ink, so I went out to the Art Store (or Blick Art as it is now called) and bought a bottle of Windsor and Newton sepia ink. I don't know exactly why, but using brown ink has always been exciting for me. I love black, but throwing a line around in brown is where the real fun lies.

I also got talked into working with oil pastels again, something I have not done in years. I don't know why I went over almost completely to soft pastels. Sure, it is fun pushing powder around on a richly textured paper, but the oil is a blast, particularly when you underdraw lightly, wash it with mineral spirits, then overdraw and use sgraffito to let the underdrawing come through.

So, yes, I am still making art at a crazy pace, even with all of the other stuff that needs to be done. A visit to the lovely tropical plants at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers has given me a whole bunch of new ideas (and watch out for new ideas. Dangerous). I am also still plugging away (slowwwwwwwly but surely) at getting an art website up, so you will be able to see my work from the comfort of your own cubicle. Now, now, I know, you are not reading this on company time, but, boy does the number of hits go down on the weekends! Ah, chalk it up to Employee Development.

Ten Reasons I Wish I Were Mexican (especially in the fall)

1. Slices of pork loin, battered and deep fried.

2. Banda Sinaloense music

3. Guacamole

4. Pork rinds simmered in Salsa Verde

5. Paletas michoacanas

6. Mexican chocolate

7. Bullfights with picadores

8. Chorizqueso

9. German-style beer with lime

10. Norteno music

In other words, I am completely and utterly overdue for a trip South. At this point even a weekend in Tecate would be good. Probably won't happen until next year, though. Grrr.

Meanwhile I have some chicharrones simmering...