Jason's Journal

Apple and Bacon Stuffed Pork Chops

2012-02-09T16:52:47Z

C’mon, do I really even need to explain that these were good? Read that post title again: pork chops, stuffed with apple and bacon. That’s all you need to know. I made them last night for dinner and I’m still wallowing in their deliciousness.

Aside from some confusion when I asked the guys at Paisanos Meat Market to “pocket my chops” (it culminated in me making several unintentionally semi-obscene hand gestures, which was probably what they’d been aiming to get me to do all along), the process was flawless.

I halved the recipe and my version is listed below; the full original is at Paleo Parents. Fortuitously, three chops fit perfectly in my Lodge 12-inch cast-iron skillet. Me and lard make a dangerous combination, so I substituted Crisco. Other than that, I followed the recipe straight through.

This is a great cornerstone dish for a fancy and simple but hearty dinner. Next time, I would round out the meal with some boiled or sauteed dark, bitter greens; broccoli rabe would have been perfect.

Bacon and Apple Stuffed Pork Chops

3 1" thick pork chops, pocketed
1 Tablespoon lard or shortening
1 medium baking apple (such as Gala), peeled, cored and diced
5 strips of bacon, diced
1 small red onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 fresh sage leaves, finely chopped
1/8 teaspoon paprika
1.5 teaspoons lemon juice
salt and pepper

In a large cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat, melt the lard or shortening.
Cook apples, bacon and onion until onion is softened and bacon is crispy, about 8 minutes.
Add garlic, sage, paprika and lemon juice and toss for 2 minutes.
Remove stuffing from heat, transfer to a bowl and set aside.
Salt and pepper pork chops on both sides and cram them with as much stuffing as fits. Use a toothpick to close each pocket. About half of the stuffing will be left over.
Reheat the pan to medium-high and add the chops. Sear each side of the chops for 5 minutes.
Put the uncovered pan in a 350° oven and bake for 35 minutes.
Serve with remaining stuffing warmed and spooned on top chops.

(recipe link via Zawodny’s linkblog)

Glacial Cocktail-Ice

2012-02-02T21:35:32Z

Designer ice for cocktails: Let’s review. Kold-Draft cubes? Old hat. Custom shapes hand-carved from “microwave-oven-size blocks”? Eh. Stealing more than 5 tons of glacial ice to resell as “designer ice cubes”? Now we’re talking.

(link via @adam_orbit)

“just be glad that people are reading”

2012-02-01T17:00:15Z

At NPR.org, author Jonathan Segura lays into Jonathan Franzen’s (and others’) contention that e-books “can never have the magic of the printed page” (as The Telegraph puts it):

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It’s not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of “responsible self-government.” We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.

(link via Library Journal)

Every NYC-Based Viral Video Ever is Probably a Marketing Stunt

2012-01-31T23:06:06Z

John Metcalfe at The Atlantic Cities bemoans that “It’s rare for New Yorkers to bite into a snazzy public-art project that isn’t hiding a marketing hook.” He refers to a marketing stunt that involved a video of radio-controlled aircraft shaped like people that flew and swooped over the East River. On one hand, it was gently mesmerizing and like something from a waking dream. On the other, the video repeated so often in my RSS feed aggregator that I grew blasé and suspicious.

Metcalfe adds that that year-in-a-life of a New York City bicycle video was also a marketing stunt. I got suckered by that one; I posted a link to the video on my Google+ steam.

How I sigh and pine for those simple days before YouTube blew up, when a mysterious maple syrup-scented cloud could embrace and enchant New York City and have nothing to do with selling something.

(link lead via #GammaCounter)

Evelyn Waugh

2012-01-31T16:54:27Z

This morning Kottke.org linked to a YouTube channel that purports to pronounce tough words correctly but doesn’t, for hilarious results. I tried but I didn’t find these funny, probably because I’m more amused by the stupid but correct pronounciations that occur naturally in English.

It also reminded me of two things:

That episode of 30 Rock which reveals that Jack’s voice unwittingly has been made the default voice for a pronunciation website, pronouncify.com. (“Part of my Princeton scholarship included work for the linguistics department. They wanted me to record every word of the dictionary to preserve the perfect American accent in case of nuclear war.”)
A personal meme from Spring 2010 (which lasts to this day) involving Forvo user mgeyer’s pronunciaion of Evelyn Waugh. (It’s currently the second of the two pronunciations listed at the link in the previous sentence; yes, oddly I find the American rendition funnier than the British one.) We couldn’t stop listening to and mimicking that gravelly sample (“evil in WAUH!”), which sounds sort of like a low-rent LaFontaine on an equally cheap microphone. And, uh-oh: now I see that mgeyer’s odd roster of 18 pronunciations includes “endoplasmic reticulum,” “muon” and “gravimetric.” I’m turning these into ringtones, dammit.

The Big Business of Angostura Bitters

2012-01-28T17:35:46Z

Clayton Hartley at The New Sheridan Club reports that the UK is considering repealing the long-held excise duty exemption on Angostura bitters, which would raise the retail price of a bottle there by £2 to £3, or between 35% and 50%. This could be a big deal for bars and aficionados of cocktails for which Angostura are crucial, namely the Old Fashioned and Manhattan.

An undated press release from HM Revenue & Customs confirms April Fool’s Day 2013 as the tentative date for the proposed price hike and attempts to forestall any bitterness¹ by claiming, “There will be a small negative impact on individuals and households who consume Angostura Bitters[.] [T]he product is typically consumed as a ‘dash’ (a few drops only) at a time.”

Likely the largest negative impact will be reserved for the product’s manufacturer, Angostura Limited, and the economy of Trinidad and Tobago, the binary island country where it’s headquartered. The most intriguing statistic Hartley gives related to this, a statistic also floating around, unattributed, on Twitter this morning, is that Angostura “represents 3% of Trinidad and Tobago’s entire non-petrochemical manufacturing GDP.” Three percent! That seems like a staggering portion for one branded product to command.

¹ Yes: pun intended. [back]

Income Has Little to Do With Literacy

2012-01-27T15:24:22Z

Liz Dwyer at Good notes that the most literate cities in America aren’t the weathiest. Citing the annual America’s Most Literate Cities study, which defines literacy as a combination of six indicators—“newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and internet resources”—in big cities.

This year, income figures were added to the data and it turns out that “wealthier cites are no more likely to rank highly in literacy than poorer cities.”

Take Cleveland—though the hard-hit city has the second lowest median family income of all cities in the survey, its library system is one of the best in the country. Cleveland also boasts the sixth highest newspaper readership and ranks fifth in magazine circulations. Despite its economic troubles, the city ranked 13th in literacy overall. [...] In comparison, Anchorage has the fifth-highest median family income, but ranks 61st in literacy.

“What did New York look like before we arrived?”

2012-01-26T16:30:41Z

Add this to a growing list of exhibits I must check out: Mannahatta, a map of Manhattan as it likely looked in 1609, when Henry Hudson arrived, is on display at the newly reopened South Street Seaport Museum. It was assembled from a blend of historic maps, including one from the Revolutionary War and another of farms from the early 19th century. (There’s still one farmhouse left in Manhattan!)

I missed this map’s original showcase at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009. And even further back, in 2007, I remember reading Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker article about the map. The abstract of that article notes that as late as 1782, “Manhattan had over seventy miles of streams and at least twenty-one ponds. The longest stream was the Saw Kill, which flowed from present-day Central Park to the 71st Street exit off the F.D.R. Drive.”

(link and photo via kateopolis via The New York Times)

The Bronx Baron of Pop-Tarts

2012-01-25T20:40:03Z

For its recent “Workplace Confidential” series, New York magazine anonymously interviewed a Bronx high-school teacher ¹ who told a tale of an enterprising student:

The kids sell Pop-Tarts in school like they’re drug dealers. This one kid would go to Costco and buy in bulk and then sell Pop-Tarts in the morning. He actually made enough money selling Pop-Tarts to buy a car. So one day he got busted by security with a huge bag full of Pop-Tarts, and they asked him, “What is this?” He said: “They’re my snack.” And they were like, “No, they aren’t.” So he sat down and ate them all.

I wish I would have thought of this markup scheme when I was in high school! And those who doubt the popularity of Pop-Tarts for breakfast are forgetting what it’s like to be young and able to eat anything; as a high-school freshman and sophomore, I distinctly recall breakfasting on miniature powdered donuts washed down with a fountain Mountain Dew.

¹ Who’s white, mentions the racism at his school, and suggests such racism is endemic in New York City, yet comes across as generally racist himself. [back]

Tortoises Can Live a Long Time

2012-01-25T20:13:33Z

Last night on my way home from work, I read William Finnegan’s New Yorker article (available online only as an excerpt) on the plowshare, one of the rarest and most-threatened tortoises in the world. I enjoyed these facts¹:

Chelonians actually predate many dinosaurs. They have been lumbering around for more than two hundred million years, and have changed very little in all that time. Nobody knows how long individual plowshares live. Captain James Cook took away a radiated tortoise, the plowshare’s closest relative, and gave it to the King of Tonga, in 1777. It died in 1966.

¹ Cursory Googling reveals variations to the Tonga-tortoise anecdote and outright challenges to its veracity but given The New Yorker’s historic dedication to fact-checking, I’m going to go ahead and believe it as such. (James Thurber recalled that if a New Yorker article mentioned the Empire State Building, founding editor Harold Ross “isn’t satisfied it’s still there until we call up and verify it.”) [back]

Kaufmann’s Posographe

2012-01-25T18:58:27Z

What a beautiful computer! What poetic specificity in its settings! Self-proclaimed veteran geek Nathan Zeldes explains (and translates) this camera-setting calculator from the 1920s:

Kaufmann’s Posographe is nothing less than an analog mechanical computer for calculating six-variable functions. Specifically, it computes the exposure time (Temps de Pose) for taking photographs indoors or out (depending on which side you use). The input variables are set up on the six small pointers; the large pointer then gives you the correct time. The variables are very detailed, yet endearingly colloquial. For outdoors, they include the setting — with values like “Snowy scene”, “Greenery with expanse of water”, or “Very narrow old street”; the state of the sky — including “Cloudy and somber”, “Blue with white clouds”, or “Purest blue”; The month of the year and hour of the day; the illumination of the subject; and of course the aperture (f-number).

(link and photo via bughouse)

United Service Punch

2012-01-25T16:49:12Z

Last winter, I tried making two punches using Batavia arrack, a funky high-proof liquor from Indonesia that’s similar to rum. I didn’t like either punch much, so I tried another this past weekend, United Service Punch, and it’s a keeper.

It appeared originally in Jerry Thomas’ Bar-Tenders Guide of 1862. I followed the adaptation by David Wondrich in Punch, which hews to the original almost exactly. (The recipe below is his, in my words.) Wondrich accurately describes the recipe as extremely conservative yet “fundamentally sound,” which reminded me that my previous pair of arrack-based punches were too alcoholly; I like more flavor diversity. The best punches blend the fundamental tastes of sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and, of course, booziness. This one delivers in all four departments with that precise number of ingredients, which I assume is the conservativeness of which Wondrich speaks: the bitter tea, sour lemon, sweet sugar and slap-bass arrack. Sure, it’s not complex but each element shines through and the end-product is a lip-smacker.

I actually screwed up this one by using the juice of only six lemons instead of eight. I though eight would make it too sour because, at the time, I’d been reading some weird, nerdy discourse about the size of Nineteenth Century lemons relative to the same today. With only six lemons (which yielded one cup of juice), the punch is too sweet. Not cloyingly so, but close; I’ve been thinning each Old Fashioned glassful I serve with about an ounce of water. Next time, I’ll follow the recipe below exactly or I’ll do that but also ratchet back the sugar by either 1/2 cup or 1/4 cup, under the reasoning that it’s easy to add more sugar to a finished punch, less so to remove it.

Also worth pointing out: mainly on account of the black tea and a lack of other colorful liquids, this punch isn’t visually arresting. If I needed to describe its color in terms of poetry or marketing, I’d go with “burnt orange” or “tan sierra.” In fact, the actual hue is closer to “rusty.” Like, if you saw a liquid this color emerge from your kitchen tap, you would let it run for a full minute before deciding whether to boil it. Also, this one gets a touch of sediment on top after it’s been bottled and racked for a day; a final strain through cheesecloth may be in order.

United Service Punch

eight lemons
1.5 cups Florida Crystals sugar
5 cups plain black tea, hot
2.5 cups Batavia arrack

Muddle the peels of four lemons with the sugar and let it sit an hour in a warm place so the sugar leaches more oil from the peels. Brew the tea using five teabags or five teaspoons loose tea for no more than five minutes. Add the hot tea to the sugar-peel mixture and stir until the sugar dissolves. Skim or strain out the peels and discard them. Juice the four peeled lemons plus four more. Blend the tea-mixture, the lemon juice and the Batavia arrack. Chill and serve on ice. Yield 9 cups.

Gougères

2012-01-13T18:09:42Z

Last night, I made gougères using the 101 Cookbooks recipe on account of its simplicity and, well, beer. Delicious! I can’t pronounce “gougères” so I’m stealing a name and calling them Cheesy Poofs. They remind me of miniature popovers, only more savory and with creamier interiors. My mom has a Christmas pastry recipe that I believe uses a similar choux technique for the dough. You just wanna pop these things by the handful like they’re salted nuts. They’re a great cold-weather snack that would go great with drinks, or as an appetizer.

Biographical Fluff

2012-01-12T23:06:23Z

On and off, I’ve been reasearching some of the guys in my great-great grandfather’s political circle. He was a small-town councilman, but a salesman by trade, and the lives of his buddies are mostly to match: doctor, carpenter, grocer, butcher. But even some of the little guys get coverage in the big biographical compilations of their era. I’ve been reading them, some online but most at the Millstein, dusty back-breakers like Joseph F. Folsom’s four-volume The Municipalities of Essex County, New Jersey: 1666-1924 (1925) and William Starr Myers’ five-volume The Story of New Jersey (1945). They were the political Who’s Who of their day.

In a past life, I had to write about a dozen bios from scratch every year as part of a fraternal organization’s hall-of-fame induction ceremony and it wasn’t the condensing and the avoidance of formula and cliché that vexed me. It was the challenge of whipping air into the duller individuals who, frankly, hadn’t lived thoroughly enough to meet my word count in facts. I could have taken a tip then from the unnamed author of one of the bios I came across in my research, this one from 1898. I’ve stopped the quote at the point at which the actual biography begins.

Ceaselessly to and fro flies the deft shuttle which weaves the web of human destiny, and into the vast mosaic fabric enter the individuality, the effort, the accomplishment of each man, be his station that most lowly, or one of majesty, pomp and power. Within the textile folds may be traced the line of each individuality, and while all are merged into the great aggregate, yet the essense of each is never lost, be the angle of influence wide spreading and grateful, or narrow and baneful. He who essays biography finds much of profit and satisfaction in following out the tracings of a life history, determining the keynote of each respective personality and conning the lessons of life, “line upon line and precept upon precept.” The subject of this review is one who has wrought to goodly ends and has attained that well-earned success which entitles him to withdraw largely from the activities of business life and to enjoy the fruits of his labors in his beautiful home ... where he is known and honored as a representative citizen.

With a preamble like this, you’d think the rising curtain would reveal a maestro, but no. He was a politician from the village of South Orange, New Jersey. Well played, you mystery verbose scribe of yesteryear.

“a loud and unlimited library”

2012-01-11T16:01:57Z

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on “how the internet gets inside us”:

The digital world is new, and the real gains and losses of the Internet era are to be found not in altered neurons or empathy tests but in the small changes in mood, life, manners, feelings it creates—in the texture of the age. There is, for instance, a simple, spooky sense in which the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live—as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities. There is the sociology section, the science section, old sheet music and menus, and you can go to the periodicals room anytime and read old issues of the New Statesman. (And you can whisper loudly to a friend in the next carrel to get the hockey scores.) To see that that is so is at least to drain some of the melodrama from the subject. It is odd and new to be living in the library; but there isn’t anything odd and new about the library.

(link via Library Journal)