Category: Food and Drink

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Coffee

Coffee DeadOctober 1st is International Coffee Day.  But we are still  in March. So I'm jumping the gun as one might do under the influence.  Herewith, some tunes in anticipatory celebration.  Not that I'm drinking coffee now: it's a morning and afternoon drink.  I am presently partaking of a potent libation consisting of 3/4 Tequila Añejo and 1/4 Aperol with a non-alcoholic St. Pauli Girl as chaser. Delicioso!

Ella Mae Morse, Forty Cups of Coffee

Cream, The Coffee Song

Johnny Cash and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, A Cup of Coffee

 

Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man.  This one goes out to Sally and Jean and Mary in memory of our California road trip nine years ago.   "Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put  a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"

Dave Dudley, Coffee, Coffee, Coffee

Calexico & Roger McGuinn, Another Cup of Coffee.  A good version of this old Dylan tune.

Mississippi John Hurt, Coffee Blues

Patricia Kaas, Black Coffee

Annette Hanshaw, You're the Cream in My Coffee, 1928

Johann Sebastian Bach, Coffee Cantata

What is wrong with people who don't drink or enjoy coffee?  They must not value consciousness and intensity of experience.  Poor devils! Perhaps they're zombies (in the philosophers' sense).

Patrick Kurp  recommends Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues, one hard-driving, adrenalin-enabling number which, in synergy with a serious cup of java will soon have you banging hard on all synaptic 'cylinders.'  

Chicory is a cheat.  It cuts it but doesn't cut it.

"The taste of java is like a volcanic rush/No one is going to stop me from drinking too much . . . ."

Warren Zevon, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

A Hot Sauce Rant from 2013

A hot (sauce rant) or a (hot sauce) rant? Both. Parentheses  matter!  Scope matters. All scope distinctions matter. Mind your p's and q's. Discriminate operators and operands. (Am I sending a coded message?)

Substack latest.

Don't complain about 'old news.' What are you, a Twitterized 'woke' presentist?

There is presentism in the philosophy of time and there is what I will call, for want of a better term, historical presentism. This, roughly, is the conceit that the present alone matters  and that we have little or nothing to learn from the past.  It is not so much a view as an attitude, a 'bad 'tude' if you will, one shared by adolescents of all ages. There is the punk who, ignorant of great literature, installs Bukowski in the literary pantheon. Self-insulation from the past and its achievements is one of the ways wokesters self-enstupidate. 

And there are those who ought to know better, spineless university administrators in the grip of fashionable obsessions, who are thereby rendered incapable of just judgments of past times and individuals. Case in point: the Flannery O'Connor unnaming.

Pasta Puttanesca

Pasta Puttanesca is a good Lenten meal for a Friday night despite its being 'in the style of the whore.' Italian la puttana means whore, harlot, slut. Didn't Jesus suffer all to come unto him, even the ladies of the evening? 

Make it with sardines: 'meatier' than anchovies. Pour some extra virgin olive oil into a pan. Don't ask how much. Eyeball it like a man. Dump some chopped-up garlic onto the  olio d'oliva  lube job.  Set the heat to moderate.  Crack open the can of sardines and dump the contents, oil, water, and all into the pan. Break the formerly-sentient sea critters into small pieces. Add a can of  diced tomatoes. Throw in your Italian spices and fresh-ground pepper.  Chop up some olives and add to the mix. Stir. Simmer.

You knew without my telling you to get a righteous quantity of  water boiling. Dump the pasta into the boiling water. Capellini cooks quickly thus comporting well with the celerity with which this dish is supposed to be thrown together at the end of a long day. Cook the pasta a little shy of al dente. It will cook further when you add it to the sauce. Eat it topped with freshly-grated Parmigiana Reggiano or Pecorino Romano.  Wash it down with a glass or two of Dago Red. Think with compassion of the ladies of the evening. But do not avail yourself of their services.

To the scholarly among you I recommend Benedicta Ward, SLG, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources, Cistercian Publications, 1987. With chapters on Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, Thais, and Maria the Niece of Abraham.

Are You Hungry?

Don't let the thought of the pleasures of the table persuade you to eat if you are not hungry. Eat only at meal times, but never because it is meal time. An exception is breakfast for those quitting their domiciles for a sally-forth into a mean world.  To leave your house without food in your gut is like driving into the desert without gas in your tank. You don't know what awaits you. 

Food: Medicine, Drug, or Fuel?

In an excess of the ascetic, the author of The Confessions in Book Ten, Chapter 31 recommends taking food as medicine. At the opposite extreme we find those for whom it is a soporific, a sedative, an escape from reality, a drug. The wise tread the middle path: food is fuel.  

Eat in quantity and quality precisely that alone which optimally fuels fratre asino so that he may bear up well in this vale where his services are indispensable.   Properly fortified, he will carry your load over many a pons asinorum.

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

So what can we teach the Muslim world?  How to be gluttons?

Another sign of decline is the proliferation of food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them.  A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything.  As something of a trencherman back in the day, I understand the lure of the table.  But I am repelled by the spiritual vacuity of those who wax ecstatic over some greasy piece of crud  they have just eaten, or speak of some edible item as 'to die for.'

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Pasta

Originally posted in April 2005 at my first blog, and then reposted in October 2009 on this site.  Time for a repost! Pasta matters! All 'races' thereof: capellini, vermicelli, spaghetti, linguine, fettucine, bucatini, rigatoni, mostaccioli . . . .

……………………………

The following are the Seven Deadly Sins pertaining to the cooking and eating of pasta. Infractions may incur a visit from my New Jersey cousin Vinnie and his pals Smith and Wesson.

1. Using too small of a pot. A capacious pot is essential for the proper cooking of pasta. For most purposes I use an 8 quart pot. When I make my famous lasagne, however, out comes the monster 16 quart job.

2. Insufficient water. Be sure the pot is filled three-quarters full. With a big pot, there is little chance of a boil-over. But in case of the latter, a little olive oil added to the water will quell any uprising.

3. Adding the pasta before the water is boiling. Wifey once broke this rule. I instructed her to add the pasta when the water boiled. She claims she did, and that led to a discussion of the meaning of ‘boiling.’ I hereby lay it down that water is not boiling unless it is ROILING and JUMPING. To put it a bit more scientifically, pure water at sea-level is not boiling until it is at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Since our tap water is pretty good, I use it, not wanting to burden my reverse osmosis purification system.

4. Breaking the pasta before putting it in the pot. This criminal act is particularly repellent to the true connoisseur, and a sure sign of a pasta greenhorn. It defeats the whole purpose of the eating of (long) pasta, a tactile experience that requires the twirling of the strands around the fork, and, therefore, unbroken strands. Deadly sin #4 usually follows upon sin # 1, as drinking upon gambling.

5. Overcooking the pasta. Pasta must never be overcooked. It is to be prepared al dente. That’s Italian for to the tooth, meaning that the pasta should put up a bit of resistance to the tooth that bites into it. It should be cooked just beyond crunchy. The pleasure of pasta consumption is largely tactile: the stuff by its lonesome does not have much taste.

6. Failing to properly drain the pasta before the addition of sauce. The result of this is a disgusting dilution of the sauce. Proper drainage requires the proper tool, the colander. Invest in a good one made of stainless steel. Plastic is for wimps. And if you try to drain pasta using the pot top, then you mark yourself as a bonehead of the first magnitude and may scald yourself in the process.

7. Chopping pasta on the plate. When I see people do this, I am tempted to make like al-Zarqawi and engage in an Islamo-fascist act. Let’s say you are eating capellini, ‘angel hair.’ (This is the quickest cooking of the long pastas.) There it is on the large white plate, richly sauced, anointed with a bit of extra virgin olive oil — why buy any other kind? — besprinkled with fresh hand-grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiana Reggiano, (not something out of a cardboard cylinder), artistically set off with a small amount of finely chopped parsley, and awaiting your attention. It is a thing of beauty. So what does a bonehead do? He starts chopping it up.

Learn how to do it right. Take some strands in the fork tines, twirl, and you should end up with a ball of pasta at the end of your fork. Practice makes perfect. Now enjoy the tactile delight along with a glass of Dago red.

The Body: Temple or Amusement Park?

Bourdain body not a temple

As I noted earlier, the celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, hanged himself in his hotel room recently.  I speculated that the man was spiritually adrift. "If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?"

When I wrote that I was unaware of the above quotation.

Now I know the man was spiritually adrift. The view he gives vent to is utter nihilism. 

Perhaps later I will expand on the thought.

The Club Sandwich: Choice of White Supremacists

Nothing is so stupid that some liberal won't maintain it:

This week, the [Boston] Globe carried a letter alleging that the club sandwich is ‘rooted in white male privilege’, and that Furst’s encomium proved ‘the power of the patriarchal establishment in the United States’. The author, Anastasia Nicolaou, holds a master of liberal arts in gastronomy from Boston University, with a side order of Professional Certification in Cheese Studies. You can’t argue with an expert.

Quatschkopf!