J. and I took a trip to Asheville, NC over Memorial Day weekend. We went there for the first time two years ago. It was under far less than ideal circumstances, but we managed to have a good time even then, and have been wanting to go back ever since.
Asheville is a curious place. Though known primarily as the location of the Biltmore Estate, which we visited on our first trip, it is far more than that -- an artsy, politically and socially liberal college town in the middle of remote and desperately poor rural Appalachia. It is surrounded by breathtaking country and offers world-class hiking, whitewater rafting and mountain biking, making it a great place to visit for outdoorsy types, but the influx of tourists and a concomitant increase in the variety of shops and restaurants downtown makes it a welcoming place for urbanites. It is the best of both worlds, creating a colorful if occasionally uneasy mix of college kids, aging hippies and affluent boutique shoppers. The single image that encapsulates Asheville for me dates from our first visit two years ago: a girl on the street corner, no older than twenty, punked-out to the n-th degree with purple dreadlocks and at least half dozen ear and nose rings, her skimpy tank top revealing a chest, neck and arms completely covered with tattoos, playing the most amazing bluegrass fiddle I have ever heard.
I frequently have trouble figuring out where to stay when we travel. Lodging is expensive, and short of camping, which we do occasionally, anything that seems cheap usually comes with the kind of character you don't necessarily want. Chain hotels are ugly, sterile and still expensive, and everything else being equal, I would rather spend my money at an independent local place, but those are few and far between nowadays. A historic downtown hotel, something form the golden age of railroads maybe, would be ideal, but those are truly rare, and the only one in Asheville – the Princess Anne – was all booked up. That leaves Bed and Breakfasts, which would seem perfect at first blush and can be a surprisingly good value for the money. The problem is that neither J. nor I really care for the idea. We stayed at one only once, many years ago, but I remember being uncomfortable with the unspoken expectation to socialize with other guests at breakfast. J. and I are both fairly asocial, especially J., and especially when traveling. We are terrible at making small talk, wary of strangers, and in any case, a vacation, however short, is an opportunity to catch up on quality time with each other. Plus, we go into overdrive when we travel, packing as much activity into every day as we can, so we never really spend any time at the place we're staying. This time, however, J. wanted to give B&Bs another chance, and with nothing more attractive available in the center of town anyway, after a little research we settled on the Carolina Bed & Breakfast in the Montford Historic District just North of downtown.
We left home Friday morning, and after a long and uneventful drive pulled up to the front of the Carolina around 4:00 p.m. The place was an imposing house build in 1900 by Richard Sharp Smith who worked for Richard Hunt, the chief architect of the Biltmore, and was the supervising architect during Biltmore's construction. It showed some patina, but generally seemed to be well-preserved. We were meet by the innkeeper, a friendly, robust, round-faced transplanted midwesterner named Sue who showed us around the building and our room. The room was spacious and the décor not particularly frilly.
Showered and changed, we settled on the giant front porch to take advantage of the Carolina's complimentary glass of wine and wait for dinner plans to gel. There, we met Sue's elfin-looking husband David and some of the guests – a middle-aged couple from California exploring the Carolinas for two weeks and another, slightly younger couple. They apparently had already met earlier and were chatting like old friends while they sipped their wine.
J. has some family in the Asheville area (Hendersonville, to be precise) – her cousin D. and an elderly aunt, and it is the cousin we had plans to have dinner with Friday night. D. has been living in the area for over twenty years and is a trained chef, so although there was a bunch of restaurants we had been wanting to try, we willingly took his recommendation. He chose a place called Pomodoro and said they served both Italian and Greek food. Red flag number one – more than one ethnic cuisine in the same restaurant is never a good idea, with a possible exception of Korean places that also make sushi, and one with a name that could not be more clichéd is even more dangerous. He gave us directions, bad ones as it turned out, but we found it after stopping to ask. Even Asheville has a sterile layer of chain restaurants and faceless strip malls between its colorful core and the surrounding countryside, and that is precisely where we found ourselves. Red flag number two.
My fears proved to be mostly unjustified, however, and I was pleasantly surprised by the food. I opted for the goat cheese ravioli, which were respectable. The pasta was quality and cooked to a proper degree of doneness. The filling showed no trace of the roasted peppers the menu promised, but the cheese tasted fresh and flavorful, though it could have used more goaty tang. Our waiter was a serious-looking guy in early middle age, and seemed trustworthy, so on his recommendation I chose the pesto-cream sauce over the tomato. I don’t really understand the idea of a pesto-cream sauce. The whole point of pesto is not to be creamy. But Pomodoro came close to pulling it off. It could have been less rich and could have definitely benefited from an extra spike or two of garlic. But for a generic suburban place, it acquitted itself reasonably well. It pays to have low expectations sometimes.
The conversation with D. was something of an experience, too. He brims with energy and talks non-stop at a hundred miles an hour. He loves to lecture and has an opinion about absolutely everything. Sometimes it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise. On Friday, for some bizarre reason, the conversation turned to classic rock bands. D. turned out to be a huge fan of early Genesis, the lineup that had Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett, and he had recently seen them in concert. Apparently they have been touring, without Gabriel but with Hackett. It was amusing though somewhat sad to hear a man in his mid-forties talk about Genesis and their long-standing defiance of commercial expectations in the seventies like a starry-eyed adolescent. I attempted to express my views on the sad spectacle of geezer band reunions, but he was not listening. I mumbled something about having seen Gabriel on Austin City Limits a couple of years ago, and that he looked too fat and old to be doing his unicycle and his shiny suit thing. “Ah, but you see, Genesis would never even be seen on Austin City Limits,” D. said with the earnestness of a geeky college freshman discovering the wonders of progressive rock for the first time. No amount of irony or snide comments on my part got through, not even my trademark assault on sixty-year-old Mick Jagger in a belly shirt and tight jeans. Periodically, I attempted to steer the conversation away from D. and music and towards his girlfriend whom we hadn’t met before, stunningly beautiful and as far I could tell exceptionally nice, but quiet and resigned under D.’s overpowering performance. Most of the time I failed, and we found out little beyond the fact that she was native to the Asheville area and is an accountant by profession.
Exhausted both by the drive and by the dinner conversation, we drove back to the inn and collapsed into bed, hoping to get as much rest as possible for the hike we had planned for Saturday.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Lawrence Osbourne
Finished Lawrence Osbourne's The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey through the Wine World over the weekend. It was so-so.
It is not a book about wine. In fact, it is not entirely clear what the book is about. If anything, it is about winemakers, their personalities, and their relationship to the idiosyncrasies of the global market. That's not at all what Osbourne makes you think at the beginning, however. He starts out by postulating that he knows nothing about wine and therefore has no taste, and he proceeds to travel through several wine-producing regions, ostensibly in an attempt to acquire one. He does a miserable job pretending to be a bumbling amateur. From the first few pages, it is abundantly clear that he has been drinking wine for decades, likes it, and knows far more about it than he lets on. His attempts to speak the “wine language” (really, the wine critics' language) at every winery in a manner that would betray his ignorance are contrived in the extreme. There is a silver lining to this, I suppose – he ends up demonstrating how inane and useless such language is, and maybe that's his intent here, but that's not exactly news.
So the book is not about taste and how to acquire it. What it ends up being instead is a series of sketches of a number of winemakers in California, Loire and Rhône in France and Piedmont, Tuscany and Puglia in Italy. This is potentially interesting – Osbourne's portrait of Robert Mondavi (sadly timely) is quite good. It really did give me a good feel for the plucky Italian immigrant who worked his butt off most of his life to make a fortune in classic American fashion and then used it to make an even bigger one by taking advantage of, and eventually even shaping and encouraging, the Americans' unrelenting consumerism.
After a while, however, the profiles of the winemakers and their wines all start to sound more or less the same. The stories are predictable to the extreme: the Californians either embrace the commercialism and the marketability of clean, generic-tasting “new world” style wines, or, more rarely than I expected, lament the disappearance of the Napa Valley of the old, pre-commercial days. Europeans invariably complain of the American market's juggernaut that forces them to make smooth wines with no sense of terroir.
The question of terroir actually gets a fair amount of ink. This is an interesting question, one of the great mysteries of wine, but Osbourne is inconclusive. I got a sense that he wanted to suggest that the whole idea is bunk, but he wanted his winemakers to make the point for him, and many of them did not cooperate.
Osbourne also does not do himself any favors. He seems to spend vast amounts of time drinking copious quantities of wine alone, driving drunk, and living the fairy-tale life of a wine journalist on a publisher-financed junket through places most of us plebeian wine drinkers will never see except by spending tons of our own money, and even then will not come anywhere near casually tasting a '99 Beaucastel in a private cellar in France. He does have a knack for a good turn of phrase now and then, and he does manage to paint a surprisingly distasteful picture of Italy, full of foreigners eviscerating the native culture until there is nothing left, but those things alone are not worth the effort. Skip this one.
It is not a book about wine. In fact, it is not entirely clear what the book is about. If anything, it is about winemakers, their personalities, and their relationship to the idiosyncrasies of the global market. That's not at all what Osbourne makes you think at the beginning, however. He starts out by postulating that he knows nothing about wine and therefore has no taste, and he proceeds to travel through several wine-producing regions, ostensibly in an attempt to acquire one. He does a miserable job pretending to be a bumbling amateur. From the first few pages, it is abundantly clear that he has been drinking wine for decades, likes it, and knows far more about it than he lets on. His attempts to speak the “wine language” (really, the wine critics' language) at every winery in a manner that would betray his ignorance are contrived in the extreme. There is a silver lining to this, I suppose – he ends up demonstrating how inane and useless such language is, and maybe that's his intent here, but that's not exactly news.
So the book is not about taste and how to acquire it. What it ends up being instead is a series of sketches of a number of winemakers in California, Loire and Rhône in France and Piedmont, Tuscany and Puglia in Italy. This is potentially interesting – Osbourne's portrait of Robert Mondavi (sadly timely) is quite good. It really did give me a good feel for the plucky Italian immigrant who worked his butt off most of his life to make a fortune in classic American fashion and then used it to make an even bigger one by taking advantage of, and eventually even shaping and encouraging, the Americans' unrelenting consumerism.
After a while, however, the profiles of the winemakers and their wines all start to sound more or less the same. The stories are predictable to the extreme: the Californians either embrace the commercialism and the marketability of clean, generic-tasting “new world” style wines, or, more rarely than I expected, lament the disappearance of the Napa Valley of the old, pre-commercial days. Europeans invariably complain of the American market's juggernaut that forces them to make smooth wines with no sense of terroir.
The question of terroir actually gets a fair amount of ink. This is an interesting question, one of the great mysteries of wine, but Osbourne is inconclusive. I got a sense that he wanted to suggest that the whole idea is bunk, but he wanted his winemakers to make the point for him, and many of them did not cooperate.
Osbourne also does not do himself any favors. He seems to spend vast amounts of time drinking copious quantities of wine alone, driving drunk, and living the fairy-tale life of a wine journalist on a publisher-financed junket through places most of us plebeian wine drinkers will never see except by spending tons of our own money, and even then will not come anywhere near casually tasting a '99 Beaucastel in a private cellar in France. He does have a knack for a good turn of phrase now and then, and he does manage to paint a surprisingly distasteful picture of Italy, full of foreigners eviscerating the native culture until there is nothing left, but those things alone are not worth the effort. Skip this one.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Savor
Last Friday, C.S., his friend D.G. whom I also know, and I attended Savor: An American Craft Beer and Food Experience, held at the Mellon Auditorium on Constitution Ave. It had its merits, but in the end I must say I was disappointed.
Like any grassroots and largely artisanal undertaking that is fortunate enough to achieve some commercial success, the US microbreweries are displaying telltale signs of not being sure how to manage being a little too big for their britches. The first of these is calling itself an industry. A few short years ago, it was still the simply the “beer scene,” but now it is a Craft Brewing Industry. The second is attempting to muscle in on markets traditionally occupied by other products, hence the recent drive to market complex, distinctive beers as alternatives to wine, to be consumed with gourmet meals. And closely related to this is the increased reliance on the professional marketing circus to find new and impressive ways to hawk their wares. Hence this was no mere tasting, but an Experience. I suppose we have Jimi Hendrix to thank for rendering the word incapable of carrying any actual meaning.
There is also an obvious desire to go upmarket, to sell to consumers who in the past might have regarded your product as beneath them on a socioeconomic level, and the concomitant increase in price. I don't normally object to this as long as I feel like I am still getting my money's worth, but on Friday that was the biggest problem – the tickets, at $85, were simply too expensive for what we ended up getting. To be sure, it didn't seem so initially. C.S. did an excellent sales job on me, but I certainly was a willing buyer, too. It sure looked like that we were going to get our money's worth. Here were those marketing shenanigans again.
The idea behind the event was to demonstrate how well craft beers pair with food. Fifty or so breweries brought two beers each, every beer paired with a complementary small plate. In addition, there were optional sit-down tastings where you could focus on a few pairings in greater depth in a more intimate setting.
The evening was off to a decent start: we attended one of these optional tastings that was hosted by Garrett Oliver and focused on pairing beer and cheese. Oliver is the founder of Brooklyn Brewery, the author of The Brewmaster's Table, and the self-appointed elder statesman of beer and food pairing. He is a decent speaker – a little lectury and overanalyzing at times, he could also be engaging and funny. The beers and cheeses were all excellent. The highlights for me were a washed rind cheese called Hooligan from Cato Corner in Connecticut paired with Two Brothers' Domaine Dupage (a French Farmhouse-style ale; I had no idea such a thing existed) and the legendary Brillat-Savarin triple-cream paired with Oliver's own Local One. He talked up his serendipitous discovery of the pairing of stilton and a chocolate stout, but I was less impressed. Definitely a pairing of contrast rather than harmony.
A few minutes after 8:00, we emerged onto the main floor and discovered the problem. The so-called small plates were indeed small. Tiny, in fact, more like amuse-bouches than real food. Think crackers or mini-toasts with bits of things on them. Many beers were paired with chocolates. Delicious no doubt, but not real food. The beer samples, on the other hand, were quite generous, and though many brewers brought their least-interesting, most mainstream offerings (why would you go to a tasting to drink Sierra Nevada Pale Ale when you can get a pint at your neighborhood watering hole?), there were enough doubles, triples, strong ales and barley wines to keep beer geeks happy. Even the hardiest of drinkers, however, can absorb only so much of this bounty of malt and hops before they need some solid sustenance. A lot of solid sustenance. Much more than the event's organizers envisioned. Most of it consumed – you guessed it – during the hour my friends and I were sequestered in the back room tasting cheese with Oliver. People were double-, triple- and quadruple-dipping until there was nothing left.
By the time we left around 10:00, having tasted a dozen or so beers apiece, we were quite buzzed and ravenously hungry. Ridiculous as it sounds, we walked the few blocks to Harry's and had a late dinner of surprisingly decent burgers.
Bottom line: Beer: 4/5; Food: 1/5. Value for the money: 1/5.
Some highlights:
Russian River Pliny the Elder. Enormous double-IPA with a fragrant, wonderfully floral hops aroma along the lines of Clipper City's Loose Canon.
Flying Dog Kerberos Triple, a deep, rich Belgian-style triple that might unseat the Victory Golden Monkey, my current reference for American triples.
Deschutes Obsidian Stout. Chocolatey and dry at the same time, delicious all around.
Pelican Doryman's Dark Ale and Le Pelican Brun: both were well-crafted and drier than the standard for their style, from a small brewery in Oregon I had not heard of before.
Pizza Port Brewing Veritas 003. A skull-splitting blend of a several of their Belgian-style ales, all made with brettanomyces and aged in oak barrels. Not for the faint of heart.
Dud of the evening: 21st Amendment Watermelon Wheat. Sold in cans, it tasted like the bad idea it was.
Like any grassroots and largely artisanal undertaking that is fortunate enough to achieve some commercial success, the US microbreweries are displaying telltale signs of not being sure how to manage being a little too big for their britches. The first of these is calling itself an industry. A few short years ago, it was still the simply the “beer scene,” but now it is a Craft Brewing Industry. The second is attempting to muscle in on markets traditionally occupied by other products, hence the recent drive to market complex, distinctive beers as alternatives to wine, to be consumed with gourmet meals. And closely related to this is the increased reliance on the professional marketing circus to find new and impressive ways to hawk their wares. Hence this was no mere tasting, but an Experience. I suppose we have Jimi Hendrix to thank for rendering the word incapable of carrying any actual meaning.
There is also an obvious desire to go upmarket, to sell to consumers who in the past might have regarded your product as beneath them on a socioeconomic level, and the concomitant increase in price. I don't normally object to this as long as I feel like I am still getting my money's worth, but on Friday that was the biggest problem – the tickets, at $85, were simply too expensive for what we ended up getting. To be sure, it didn't seem so initially. C.S. did an excellent sales job on me, but I certainly was a willing buyer, too. It sure looked like that we were going to get our money's worth. Here were those marketing shenanigans again.
The idea behind the event was to demonstrate how well craft beers pair with food. Fifty or so breweries brought two beers each, every beer paired with a complementary small plate. In addition, there were optional sit-down tastings where you could focus on a few pairings in greater depth in a more intimate setting.
The evening was off to a decent start: we attended one of these optional tastings that was hosted by Garrett Oliver and focused on pairing beer and cheese. Oliver is the founder of Brooklyn Brewery, the author of The Brewmaster's Table, and the self-appointed elder statesman of beer and food pairing. He is a decent speaker – a little lectury and overanalyzing at times, he could also be engaging and funny. The beers and cheeses were all excellent. The highlights for me were a washed rind cheese called Hooligan from Cato Corner in Connecticut paired with Two Brothers' Domaine Dupage (a French Farmhouse-style ale; I had no idea such a thing existed) and the legendary Brillat-Savarin triple-cream paired with Oliver's own Local One. He talked up his serendipitous discovery of the pairing of stilton and a chocolate stout, but I was less impressed. Definitely a pairing of contrast rather than harmony.
A few minutes after 8:00, we emerged onto the main floor and discovered the problem. The so-called small plates were indeed small. Tiny, in fact, more like amuse-bouches than real food. Think crackers or mini-toasts with bits of things on them. Many beers were paired with chocolates. Delicious no doubt, but not real food. The beer samples, on the other hand, were quite generous, and though many brewers brought their least-interesting, most mainstream offerings (why would you go to a tasting to drink Sierra Nevada Pale Ale when you can get a pint at your neighborhood watering hole?), there were enough doubles, triples, strong ales and barley wines to keep beer geeks happy. Even the hardiest of drinkers, however, can absorb only so much of this bounty of malt and hops before they need some solid sustenance. A lot of solid sustenance. Much more than the event's organizers envisioned. Most of it consumed – you guessed it – during the hour my friends and I were sequestered in the back room tasting cheese with Oliver. People were double-, triple- and quadruple-dipping until there was nothing left.
By the time we left around 10:00, having tasted a dozen or so beers apiece, we were quite buzzed and ravenously hungry. Ridiculous as it sounds, we walked the few blocks to Harry's and had a late dinner of surprisingly decent burgers.
Bottom line: Beer: 4/5; Food: 1/5. Value for the money: 1/5.
Some highlights:
Russian River Pliny the Elder. Enormous double-IPA with a fragrant, wonderfully floral hops aroma along the lines of Clipper City's Loose Canon.
Flying Dog Kerberos Triple, a deep, rich Belgian-style triple that might unseat the Victory Golden Monkey, my current reference for American triples.
Deschutes Obsidian Stout. Chocolatey and dry at the same time, delicious all around.
Pelican Doryman's Dark Ale and Le Pelican Brun: both were well-crafted and drier than the standard for their style, from a small brewery in Oregon I had not heard of before.
Pizza Port Brewing Veritas 003. A skull-splitting blend of a several of their Belgian-style ales, all made with brettanomyces and aged in oak barrels. Not for the faint of heart.
Dud of the evening: 21st Amendment Watermelon Wheat. Sold in cans, it tasted like the bad idea it was.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Rant: Gifts
J. went to a baby shower for a friend last weekend. There was a gift registry, of course – seems like there needs to be a registry for everything these days. The main purpose of a gift registry is obvious – it is designed to get other people to pay for stuff you want. But gift certificates or cards would accomplish the same thing. A gift registry, it occurred to me, also does something more subtly exploitative – it gets others to do your shopping for you.
When we printed the registry out, it was enormous – pages and pages long. “They are expecting quite a crowd,” we thought. Little did we know that the expectation was for each guest to buy not one but several items each. Many items each, it turned out. J. felt very self-conscious when her gift turned out to be the smallest and most modest of anyone at the party. Our friends are very nice people, and I realize, of course, that if asked, they would show nothing but graciousness and gratitude, but I can't help wondering what they, and the rest of the guests, were really thinking.
So is that the way of the world nowadays? Lavish, extravagant gifts are de rigeur? And if one expensive item is not an option, you make up by getting many less expensive ones so it still “adds up?” Another example comes to mind. A friend and colleague of J.'s recently got her husband a pistol for his collection. And it was a “regular” birthday – not a jubilee year or a factor-of-ten wedding anniversary. I know nothing of personal firearms, but they cannot be cheap. And these are not wealthy people – J.'s colleague has the same job J. does.
J. and I always operated on the principle that it was the thought that counted, but should we start feeling guilty about not getting expensive presents, for each other or the rest of our friends? The most extravagant thing I've ever bought for her was a pearl necklace for her 30th birthday – just a single pearl on a chain of white gold, not even a string. Her standard gift to me most often is a bottle of single-malt Scotch. I couldn't be happier, and she has shown no sign of being disappointed with her presents, and yes, ultimately if she and I are both happy, who cares, right? But are we coming across as ridiculously cheap to the rest of the world?
When we printed the registry out, it was enormous – pages and pages long. “They are expecting quite a crowd,” we thought. Little did we know that the expectation was for each guest to buy not one but several items each. Many items each, it turned out. J. felt very self-conscious when her gift turned out to be the smallest and most modest of anyone at the party. Our friends are very nice people, and I realize, of course, that if asked, they would show nothing but graciousness and gratitude, but I can't help wondering what they, and the rest of the guests, were really thinking.
So is that the way of the world nowadays? Lavish, extravagant gifts are de rigeur? And if one expensive item is not an option, you make up by getting many less expensive ones so it still “adds up?” Another example comes to mind. A friend and colleague of J.'s recently got her husband a pistol for his collection. And it was a “regular” birthday – not a jubilee year or a factor-of-ten wedding anniversary. I know nothing of personal firearms, but they cannot be cheap. And these are not wealthy people – J.'s colleague has the same job J. does.
J. and I always operated on the principle that it was the thought that counted, but should we start feeling guilty about not getting expensive presents, for each other or the rest of our friends? The most extravagant thing I've ever bought for her was a pearl necklace for her 30th birthday – just a single pearl on a chain of white gold, not even a string. Her standard gift to me most often is a bottle of single-malt Scotch. I couldn't be happier, and she has shown no sign of being disappointed with her presents, and yes, ultimately if she and I are both happy, who cares, right? But are we coming across as ridiculously cheap to the rest of the world?
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Vernaccia
A couple of weeks ago, I came across a wine I didn't remember ever seeing before -- Vernaccia di San Gimignano -- at my local Whole Foods. They had a bottle open for tasting. I liked what I tasted, and got a bottle since it was only about $11. J. and I opened it last Saturday with some pasta and salmon I made.
Vernaccia is the varietal, and though I had not heard of it before, it is apparently one of the most important white grapes of Tuscany, grown, as the name indicates, near the town of San Gimignano, and controlled by DOC laws. The wine was quite good -- enormous, flowery, fruity, sweet, almost candyish on the nose, easily the equal of the most extroverted New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc -- but surprisingly balanced on the palate. Medium body, good acid in true Italian tradition, very pleasant. It held its own against the rich pasta sauce, but would not have been overwhelming on its own. I must find some more soon.
Vernaccia is the varietal, and though I had not heard of it before, it is apparently one of the most important white grapes of Tuscany, grown, as the name indicates, near the town of San Gimignano, and controlled by DOC laws. The wine was quite good -- enormous, flowery, fruity, sweet, almost candyish on the nose, easily the equal of the most extroverted New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc -- but surprisingly balanced on the palate. Medium body, good acid in true Italian tradition, very pleasant. It held its own against the rich pasta sauce, but would not have been overwhelming on its own. I must find some more soon.
Pasta with Salmon in Tomato-Cream Sauce
Haven't posted a recipe in a while. I made this last Saturday, largely improvising.
Wine: Vernaccia di San Gimignano, if you can find it. Otherwise, any white with good acidity to cut through the cream and stand up to the tomatoes.
Pasta with Salmon in Tomato-Cream Sauce
- 7-8 oz. boneless salmon fillets, preferably with skin
- 3 tbsp. olive oil, plus more for cooking the salmon
- 2 large garlic cloves, chopped
- 1/2 medium red bell pepper, diced
- About 3 oz. cremini mushrooms, sliced
- 1/4 cup white wine
- 1 15-oz. can tomatoes, pureed (buy whole or diced and puree them yourself in a food processor or blender)
- Two generous handfuls of fresh Italian parsley, chopped
- Dash of cayenne (optional)
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Up to 1/3 cup fresh heavy cream
- 8 oz. short pasta, such as penne or tagliatelle
- Season the salmon with salt and pepper and grill or saute it to desired doneness. You may want to undercook it a little since it will get cooked some more in the sauce. If the salmon has its skin, make sure it gets browned and fairly crispy. Set aside to cool. When cool enough to handle, peel off the skin and munch on it while preparing the rest of the ingredients. Break up the salmon into bite-size pieces.
- Heat the oil in a saute pan on medium heat, add the bell pepper and mushrooms and saute, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms are starting to brown.
- Add the garlic and saute until the garlic is just starting to change color. Add one of the parsley handfuls.
- Pour in the wine, bring to a boil and let about half of it boil off.
- Add the tomatoes, bring to a boil again, and turn the heat down as low as it'll go.
- Season with salt and pepper, add the cayenne if using, cover, and simmer 15 min., stirring occasionally.
- Meanwhile, cook the pasta in salted boiling water until al-dente.
- Uncover the pan, turn the heat up slightly so it keeps bubbling, and start adding the cream, one tablespoon at a time, and stirring continuously, until you have the color and consistency you like. I usually end up using about two tablespoons.
- Add the salmon pieces, stir thoroughly and let it heat through for a minute or two.
- Drain the pasta, add it to the pan, and stir, gently but thoroughly, until the pasta starts to take on the sauce.
- Serve sprinkled with the remaining parsley.
Wine: Vernaccia di San Gimignano, if you can find it. Otherwise, any white with good acidity to cut through the cream and stand up to the tomatoes.
Monday, May 12, 2008
George Kennan
I finished George Kennan's Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin a while ago. The book started out as a series of lectures, delivered at Oxford and Harvard in the late 1950s, and has since become a classic of analysis of the West's relationship to early Soviet Union. The book is excellent, and I cannot recommend it enough to every thinking American (heck, every thinking person anywhere).
First of all, it offers succinct but comprehensive coverage of the events in Europe and Russia from the end of WWI to the end of WWII focusing, obviously, on what was happening in Russia and how European governments reacted to it. Some of this history was a welcome review for me, but I am not an historian, so a lot of it provided many details of events that I was only aware of in very general terms. Finally, a few things were completely new to me , and rather shocking at that. Poland, fresh from being granted independence by the Versailles Treaty, invaded Russia in 1919 and sacked Kiev?!?! I had no idea.
Second, Kennan leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the evils perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. He is a perfect diplomat, and in a lot of ways a perfect gentleman, never descending into accusations or vitriol, but no duplicity, no assassination, and no show trial goes unrecorded and uncondemned. His chapter on Stalin's rise to power is very useful. For anyone who is not ready to take up a full biography (and I would argue that everyone, at some point in their life, must; the same goes for Hitler and perhaps two or three others), Kennan's is an excellent primer. I, while hyper-aware, of course, of what Stalin did, and, in pargamtic terms, why he did it, have not stopped very often to think about what drove him to do it initially; about the deeper, inner "why" that motivated him. Kennan helped.
Finally, as with his memoirs (this book is much better written, by the way), I enjoyed seeing some general observations about the behavior of individuals and societies that are just as relevant today as they were at the end of the first decade of the Cold War. I realize there is no shortage of historical examples that demonstrate the myriad ways in which our current war in Iraq is such a mess, and how it got to be that way. Still, it was nice (if that's the right word) to see Kennan state in the late 1950s exactly what the US government has been ignoring since 2001:
Here he is again, discussing the West's failure to engage Russia constructively immediately after WWI:
The last bit I want to quote here is for me probably the most significant, because it is most often ignored today. The war in Iraq rages on, so we are bound to be reminded of its moral and political implications regularly. The Cold War, technically, is almost two decades behind us, and since historical memory is shockingly short (see above), we would do well to pay attention to Kennan's assessment of the Comintern (the arm of the Russian Communist party that was responsible for subversive activity outside of Russia):
First of all, it offers succinct but comprehensive coverage of the events in Europe and Russia from the end of WWI to the end of WWII focusing, obviously, on what was happening in Russia and how European governments reacted to it. Some of this history was a welcome review for me, but I am not an historian, so a lot of it provided many details of events that I was only aware of in very general terms. Finally, a few things were completely new to me , and rather shocking at that. Poland, fresh from being granted independence by the Versailles Treaty, invaded Russia in 1919 and sacked Kiev?!?! I had no idea.
Second, Kennan leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the evils perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. He is a perfect diplomat, and in a lot of ways a perfect gentleman, never descending into accusations or vitriol, but no duplicity, no assassination, and no show trial goes unrecorded and uncondemned. His chapter on Stalin's rise to power is very useful. For anyone who is not ready to take up a full biography (and I would argue that everyone, at some point in their life, must; the same goes for Hitler and perhaps two or three others), Kennan's is an excellent primer. I, while hyper-aware, of course, of what Stalin did, and, in pargamtic terms, why he did it, have not stopped very often to think about what drove him to do it initially; about the deeper, inner "why" that motivated him. Kennan helped.
Finally, as with his memoirs (this book is much better written, by the way), I enjoyed seeing some general observations about the behavior of individuals and societies that are just as relevant today as they were at the end of the first decade of the Cold War. I realize there is no shortage of historical examples that demonstrate the myriad ways in which our current war in Iraq is such a mess, and how it got to be that way. Still, it was nice (if that's the right word) to see Kennan state in the late 1950s exactly what the US government has been ignoring since 2001:
...we cannot divide our external environment neatly and completely into friends and enemies -- that there must be a certain relativism about enmity, as I suppose there must be about friendship -- that we must learn to recognize a certain duality in our relationship to all the rest of mankind, even those who hate us most. (p. 65)Clearly a passage that anyone who subscribed to the "you are either for us or against us" rallying cry soundly ignored.
Here he is again, discussing the West's failure to engage Russia constructively immediately after WWI:
Th[e] inadequacy of information was not just one of knowledge but also one of understanding. It was not just a matter of day-to-day factual information; it was a matter of being able to envisage and apprehend the spirit of another society. (p. 142)Another lesson, that neither we nor most other societies in the world, have learned sufficiently.
The last bit I want to quote here is for me probably the most significant, because it is most often ignored today. The war in Iraq rages on, so we are bound to be reminded of its moral and political implications regularly. The Cold War, technically, is almost two decades behind us, and since historical memory is shockingly short (see above), we would do well to pay attention to Kennan's assessment of the Comintern (the arm of the Russian Communist party that was responsible for subversive activity outside of Russia):
The Comintern was a highly disciplined and extremely serious organization, partly political, partly military... It meant business; and it meant it in as serious and ruthless a way as any conspiratorial organization has ever done. It played for mortal stakes (my emphasis). (p. 178)I am not quoting this as a commentary on any aspect of current US policy. Rather, I am trying to suggest that anyone who had ever had the mifsortune of having been taken in by any flavor of antihistorical Marxist ideology would do well to read Kennan and compare his sentiments about the Comintern to those we have about current threats to free societies, and to draw their own conclusions.
Friday, May 9, 2008
V-Day, Russian style
No need to be fluent in French to get the gist of this photo gallery (the WaPo has the info, too, but without the photos). The important thing is that this is the first time the Russians have done this since 1991, and it is not in the least surprising that they are doing it now and, in all likelihood, will continue. What I -- even I -- was surprised to see, was Photo #5. Could it be that Le Monde's editors let their vigilance down long enough to let a vintage photo through? Or did the Russians just need some extra banners at the last minute, so they got some out of storage? I wish...
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Kenny Barron
Last Saturday, J. and I went to hear Kenny Barron play at the Kennedy Center. Great show. Though Barron's name pops up regularly, I was not all that familiar with his playing. The only record I own is Night and the City – a live set of duets with Charlie Haden recorded a little over ten years ago – plus a couple of tunes he did with Stan Getz early in his career (and late in Getz's – Barron played piano on his last album). The Haden duets, with their leisurely tempos, lots of extra space introduced by the lack of a drummer, and Haden's understated, deliberate bass style, pushed Barron in a certain direction on that CD, a direction that ended up being almost the complete opposite of what we heard on Saturday.
Barron was playing with his current trio – Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Francisco Mela on drums. I have not heard of either before. Both are energetic and thoroughly modern players, and they pushed the pianist into a decidedly boppy territory. His soloing was solid, but actually not that distinctive – he mostly noodled in the middle register, and played fast and with precision but frequently sounded somewhat automatic. It was the rhythm section, and the way the whole trio played together that made the show.
Mela is out of the Tony Williams school of playing – incredible drive, swing to spare, and enormous power, but he deployed it, for the most part, with taste. Kitagawa was the revelation of the evening – a bassist with an actual distinct style. He used the entire instrument, both when soloing and comping, and while his technique was monstrous, he obviously cared more about playing something interesting than flashy. Perusing the program afterwards revealed that he has quite a resume – Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Heath and Mulgrew Miller, among many others.
The material was mostly excellent. They played two originals from their upcoming record – "And Then Again" was forgettable second-rate bop, but "Beijo" – a lovely bossa-nova – was sublime, and they played it with a relaxed confidence and just the right feel. The rest was standards – "Beautiful Love," which I know from Bill Evans's versions, was a particularly pleasant surprise. Barron did it full justice. Another highlight was an Ellington medley he did by himself. The lack of a rhythm section seemed to relax him a bit.
The space is worth mentioning. The concert was held in the KC's Family Theatre, which I had not been to before. Up until several years ago, that space used to be occupied by AFI before they got their own theatre in Silver Spring, and I that's the last time I've seen it. It's unrecognizable now, and looks lovely. We had first-row seats (unintentionally), so I can't comment on the acoustics.
Excellent show all in all – it's been a long time since we heard straight-ahead jazz played at this high a level.
Barron was playing with his current trio – Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Francisco Mela on drums. I have not heard of either before. Both are energetic and thoroughly modern players, and they pushed the pianist into a decidedly boppy territory. His soloing was solid, but actually not that distinctive – he mostly noodled in the middle register, and played fast and with precision but frequently sounded somewhat automatic. It was the rhythm section, and the way the whole trio played together that made the show.
Mela is out of the Tony Williams school of playing – incredible drive, swing to spare, and enormous power, but he deployed it, for the most part, with taste. Kitagawa was the revelation of the evening – a bassist with an actual distinct style. He used the entire instrument, both when soloing and comping, and while his technique was monstrous, he obviously cared more about playing something interesting than flashy. Perusing the program afterwards revealed that he has quite a resume – Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Heath and Mulgrew Miller, among many others.
The material was mostly excellent. They played two originals from their upcoming record – "And Then Again" was forgettable second-rate bop, but "Beijo" – a lovely bossa-nova – was sublime, and they played it with a relaxed confidence and just the right feel. The rest was standards – "Beautiful Love," which I know from Bill Evans's versions, was a particularly pleasant surprise. Barron did it full justice. Another highlight was an Ellington medley he did by himself. The lack of a rhythm section seemed to relax him a bit.
The space is worth mentioning. The concert was held in the KC's Family Theatre, which I had not been to before. Up until several years ago, that space used to be occupied by AFI before they got their own theatre in Silver Spring, and I that's the last time I've seen it. It's unrecognizable now, and looks lovely. We had first-row seats (unintentionally), so I can't comment on the acoustics.
Excellent show all in all – it's been a long time since we heard straight-ahead jazz played at this high a level.
Deux cheveaux
For anyone wondering what that weird little red and white thing in my avatar is, here's a decent primer that I stumbled upon recently. No, unfortunately I have never owned, or even driven, one. If anyone wants the gory details, e-mail me and I'll let you borrow the book.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Abkhazia
Anne Appelbaum's latest is both worrisome and sad. And to think that I've been to most of those places as a child...
The Plague
Friday night, J. and I went to see a stage adaptation of Camus' The Plague at the Warehouse. J. got some last-minute discounted tickets. The Warehouse, or, more precisely, the Scena Theatre Company that usually performs there, is a local treasure. In DC's cultural climate that stubbornly rejects most art that is in any way unconventional, they can always be counted upon to produce both classics and obscurities by absurdist playwrights like Beckett and Pinter and other modernist fare. The Plague would seem like a natural choice for a company like that, but unfortunately it was a disappointment.
I had never seen a stage adaptation of a novel before, but have always been a bit skeptical. A good novel relies on so much more than just dialogue to make its impact. Scenery, for example -- even if you build a set that reflects a novel's setting, you're still left with the challenge of capturing a great writer's language using physical objects, lighting and sound effects. I had read The Plague many years ago and frankly, didn't remember much of it -- just the general outline of the story. If Scena's adaptation is in any way representative, the book is actually especially ill-suited for the stage, for there is a lot of narration, and not that much dialogue in the grand scheme of things. So the actors were sort of declaiming into the audience most of the time, making speeches almost, instead of talking to each other. This made it feel more like a staged reading than a play. Then, for some reason, the director insisted on having the actors mime out doing things instead of using props, so you had, for example, a secretary character moving her fingers in empty air in front of her accompanied by recorded sound of a typewriter on the sound system. The decision to do this had to have been artistic -- with all the movement and stuff already on the stage, surely they could have come up with a typewriter, a syringe, and a few newspapers and coffee cups -- but it ended up looking tacky to my eye.
The biggest problem, though, was that the overall feel of the work was forced and, for lack of a better word, kind of cheesy. The actors did not sound at all natural in their speech. They were pronouncing grand things into the audience, with great gravitas, or artificial non-chalance, or manufactured slyness, but never the way normal people would talk. I readily admit that acting in a play is not the same as talking like normal people, but therein lies one of the secrets of great stage acting -- you talk like a normal person while at the same time keeping your audience interested in what you're saying and how you're saying it. The folks at Scena fell woefully short of this ideal on Friday. Regen Wilson's Rambert was probably the most convincing.
To give credit where it is due, some of the sets were interesting. There were several large glass cases with casters on the stage, each one big enough to accommodate a person, and the various characters would move them around at certain points, occasionally getting into them. Sounds pretentious when described, I know, and you can read whatever you want into them, but from a purely visual perspective, they made for a good spectacle -- an essential component of even the most intellectual and message-ridden play.
I had never seen a stage adaptation of a novel before, but have always been a bit skeptical. A good novel relies on so much more than just dialogue to make its impact. Scenery, for example -- even if you build a set that reflects a novel's setting, you're still left with the challenge of capturing a great writer's language using physical objects, lighting and sound effects. I had read The Plague many years ago and frankly, didn't remember much of it -- just the general outline of the story. If Scena's adaptation is in any way representative, the book is actually especially ill-suited for the stage, for there is a lot of narration, and not that much dialogue in the grand scheme of things. So the actors were sort of declaiming into the audience most of the time, making speeches almost, instead of talking to each other. This made it feel more like a staged reading than a play. Then, for some reason, the director insisted on having the actors mime out doing things instead of using props, so you had, for example, a secretary character moving her fingers in empty air in front of her accompanied by recorded sound of a typewriter on the sound system. The decision to do this had to have been artistic -- with all the movement and stuff already on the stage, surely they could have come up with a typewriter, a syringe, and a few newspapers and coffee cups -- but it ended up looking tacky to my eye.
The biggest problem, though, was that the overall feel of the work was forced and, for lack of a better word, kind of cheesy. The actors did not sound at all natural in their speech. They were pronouncing grand things into the audience, with great gravitas, or artificial non-chalance, or manufactured slyness, but never the way normal people would talk. I readily admit that acting in a play is not the same as talking like normal people, but therein lies one of the secrets of great stage acting -- you talk like a normal person while at the same time keeping your audience interested in what you're saying and how you're saying it. The folks at Scena fell woefully short of this ideal on Friday. Regen Wilson's Rambert was probably the most convincing.
To give credit where it is due, some of the sets were interesting. There were several large glass cases with casters on the stage, each one big enough to accommodate a person, and the various characters would move them around at certain points, occasionally getting into them. Sounds pretentious when described, I know, and you can read whatever you want into them, but from a purely visual perspective, they made for a good spectacle -- an essential component of even the most intellectual and message-ridden play.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Norman Mailer
Swamped at work, and the Spanish class is starting to demand some real study time, so not much time to blog. I did finish Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead last weekend, however. I've been reading it since last August. If I had to give a one-sentence assessment, I would have to say that it's worth the considerable effort. It's definitely somewhat of a slog -- the plot unfolds extremely slowly, and Mailer gets into the tiniest particulars of every character's inner life, their rexternal circumstances, and their history, and there are a lot of characters. This is appropriate, however. One of Mailer's main goals with this novel, as far as I could tell, is to communicate, as vividly as possible, just how much of a slog and a grind the daily business of fighting a war is, how little of significance happens during the vast majority of time, and how small a portion of the total actual fighting is. In this, he succeeds spectacularly, in no small measure because the very experience of reading the book shares these characteristics with what the book describes. Don't get me wrong -- it's not all a slog. The engagement factor of the plot follows an almost hyperbolic curve -- the closer you are to the end, the more exciting it becomes. On the last 150 pages, I couldn't put it down.
Most of the characters are excellent. All struggle, both with the externals of the war-fighting experience, and with the internal stuff --their emotions, histories, events of their life before call-up. If I had to pick a favorite, I would have to say General Cummings, probably because most of his struggle is intellectual. Plus, the existential implications of the plot twist that has his subordinate officer essentially blunder into victory on the one day Cummings had to be away after Cummings spent months planning the minutiae of the campaign are priceless. All that said, one of the reasons The Naked... is my kind of book is because I didn't fully sympathise with any of the characters. None are truly likable, with a possible exception of Goldstein (is that Mailer's autobiographical character?), and for one reason or another, that sort of nihilistic tilt always appealed to me. Much more can be said about the book -- it's a product of its time (and reflects it very well), the machismo Mailer is supposedly known for is already in evidence (this was his first full-length novel), but it's more subtle and multidimensional than I expected, did Croft really shoot Hearn?, etc. etc., and no doubt all that has been written about to death already. I should ask N. if she ever had to do anything on Mailer in general, and on this book in particular, as part of her work for Gale. What I did wonder as I was reading was what today's soldiers would think of it. How similar is their experience to that of Mailer's characters. Has the experience of war fighting change fundamentally since WWII, physically, emotionally or both?
Suffice it to say that I recommend the book. It's a major commitment for sure, but one that will bear fruit if you're patient enough to stick with it.
Most of the characters are excellent. All struggle, both with the externals of the war-fighting experience, and with the internal stuff --their emotions, histories, events of their life before call-up. If I had to pick a favorite, I would have to say General Cummings, probably because most of his struggle is intellectual. Plus, the existential implications of the plot twist that has his subordinate officer essentially blunder into victory on the one day Cummings had to be away after Cummings spent months planning the minutiae of the campaign are priceless. All that said, one of the reasons The Naked... is my kind of book is because I didn't fully sympathise with any of the characters. None are truly likable, with a possible exception of Goldstein (is that Mailer's autobiographical character?), and for one reason or another, that sort of nihilistic tilt always appealed to me. Much more can be said about the book -- it's a product of its time (and reflects it very well), the machismo Mailer is supposedly known for is already in evidence (this was his first full-length novel), but it's more subtle and multidimensional than I expected, did Croft really shoot Hearn?, etc. etc., and no doubt all that has been written about to death already. I should ask N. if she ever had to do anything on Mailer in general, and on this book in particular, as part of her work for Gale. What I did wonder as I was reading was what today's soldiers would think of it. How similar is their experience to that of Mailer's characters. Has the experience of war fighting change fundamentally since WWII, physically, emotionally or both?
Suffice it to say that I recommend the book. It's a major commitment for sure, but one that will bear fruit if you're patient enough to stick with it.
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