→ June 14, 2015
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The Graveyard Book.

Neil Gaiman won his first Hugo Award for Best Novel for his modern epic American Gods, a masterful blend of pagan mythology and magical realism that breathes some life into the generally-overused Chosen One plot structure, thanks in large part to Gaiman’s prodigious imagination. After withdrawing the related book Anansi Boys from consideration for the same honor in 2006, he won the prize a second time for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book, which brings his same charming prose style and clever world-building mind to a gentler story without most of the violence or sex that populate those two earlier works.

There’s an exception to that last bit, and it’s at the start of the book, perhaps the most overused trope in all of young-adult literature (and not a few Disney movies): The orphaned child protagonist. The toddler to soon be known as Nobody “Bod” Owens wakes in a house where his parents and sister have just been knifed to death in their sleep, escaping only due to happenstance and his own wanderlust, ending up in the local disused graveyard where the deceased denizens protect him from the killer. Bod grows up in the graveyard, raised by the Owens (dead for a few hundred years), watched by the not-quite-dead guardian Silas, forbidden to leave the cemetery grounds for fear it will expose him to his would-be murderer, Jack.

Of course, you know the story has to end with Bod facing Jack one final time, and since this is a children’s book, Bod’s going to come out all right, so the onus is on Gaiman to create tension within each of the episodes leading up to the 80-page chapter where the final confrontation occurs. Gaiman infuses Bod with the curiosity of most children, only partly sated by the attempts of the graveyard’s dwellers to educate him, leading him to various excursions outside of and underneath the cemetery itself, setting up the series of events or points of interest that will all come into play in the last battle.

The core story is straightforward, as you’d expect in a self-contained, 300-page young adult novel, but Gaiman has populated his necropolis with a small cast of eccentrics – I suppose expecting the shades to be simply drawn was unreasonable – that bring to mind everyone from Robert Altman to Jasper Fforde. They’re not weirdos, just dead and a little outdated, and have much to teach Bod (and the young reader) about the value of life and living it with just as much (or little) fear as is necessary.

But the book is just as much for the parent reading with or alongside the child; this is very much a book about rearing a son or daughter and learning to let go the older the child gets. Bod’s search for independence and agency is far from unusual; all things considered, he’s a rather compliant child, curious but only occasionally reckless, bailed out a couple of times by Silas or one of the other spirits who’ve been raising him. He touches something hot (metaphorically speaking), gets burned, and learns not to do it again; no matter how many times you say “don’t touch that,” you know the child won’t really believe you until s/he tests your admonition out in the flesh. And when Bod has to fight the final battle without Silas’ protecting, albeit with lots of help from his noncorporeal family, he comes of age right before us in a satisfying but far from entirely happy ending.

My daughter just turned nine, but I think the traumatic introduction where Bod’s family is killed offscreen might upset her a little too much; she was fine with Lily and James Potter dying, but that occurred before page 1 and it’s a lot less real to read of someone dying via spell than dying via blade. I’ll keep the book and leave it to her own judgment to decide when she wants to tackle it.

Next up: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

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→ June 13, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 6/13/15.

For Insiders, my recaps of the drafts for all 15 NL teams and all 15 AL teams are up, as well as my round one reactions and a post-draft Klawchat.

I don’t have another place for this, but I read Michael Ruhlman’s short autobiographical Kindle Single The Main Dish ($1.99) this week, right after the draft ended, and enjoyed it tremendously. I love Ruhlman’s writing in general, but the insight into how he became a writer – he even uses “accidental” the way I often call myself an accidental sportswriter – seems like it would be very valuable for anyone considering a career in prose.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • Bill and Melinda Gates have given away over $29 billion, and Warren Buffett is dedicating another $70 billion of his fortune to their Foundation. Buried within this piece: There hasn’t been a new case of polio in Africa in nine months, a remarkable change given the continued violence perpetrated by Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria. Polio is now only endemic in the undergoverned region that joins Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • The House of Representatives voted to repeal the Country of Origin Labeling Act that required packaged meat indicate where the animals came from, because it conflicts with WTO rules. I’m of two minds on this: I favor more labeling that tells consumers about what they’re buying, but I also believe in free trade and don’t like the idea of us flouting our trade agreements when we rely on them for fair access to other markets. That said, there’s nothing that says meat vendors can’t tell you where the meat is from … and if you buy local meat, you’re covered.
  • In some local schools in England, teachers are confiscating Scotch eggs from lunchboxes as well as other foods deemed unhealthful. This strikes me as an outrageous overreach, and one likely based on very bad science that holds that dietary fat is bad for us.
  • Comedy writer Ben Schwartz wrote a fantastic essay on comedy and the “PC” response, although much of what he says applies to our culture as a whole.
  • Two great examples of people being misled by statistics, both stories from NPR: One on bluefin tuna selling cheaply in San Diego, because fishermen say it’s plentiful when in reality it’s not; and a possible link between some heartburn medications and heart disease, but from a study that doesn’t explain causation while ignoring potential confounding variables.
  • OK, one more great NPR link: How fad diets are merely pseudoscience wrapped in a veneer of ancient religious memes. I love the fake fad diet piece at the end.
  • Downton Abbey is filming its final season and Maggie Smith is glad it’s coming to an end.
  • I believe I linked to the New Yorker story from last year about Kalief Browder, a man held in Rikers for three years without ever being convicted of a crime. He was eventually freed, but took his own life last week. Browder was 22 years old.
  • I don’t remember the original Chip’s Challenge game, but this story on the arduous process of getting a sequel released was still fascinating.
  • This excellent New York Times profile of Gawker and its founder Nick Denton also discusses the important First Amendment ramifications of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company for posting a clip of him having sex with his friend’s wife.
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→ June 12, 2015
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No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

For Insiders, my recaps of the drafts for all 15 NL teams and all 15 AL teams are up, as well as my round one reactions and a post-draft Klawchat.

David Hadley Chase was a prolific British author of American crime fiction, writing numerous novels (under this pseudonym) that were, for the time, controversial for their graphic violence and implied sexual content. His first novel, the grim No Orchids for Miss Blandish, remains his best-known work, and it’s just $1.29 for the Kindle through that link (or just £4.99 in the UK). It’s gripping despite an almost nihilistic view of its characters, the rare story where the venal criminals are more compelling characters than the hard-boiled detective attempting to find them. George Orwell was a fan of the writing, but Raymond Chandler was not, calling it “half-cent pulp writing at its worst” in a letter to Cleve Adams. (Chandler later won a lawsuit against Chase, accusing the latter of plagiarizing a section of a later book.)

Miss Blandish is the heiress at the center of a theft and ransom kidnapping plot that involves two different groups of crooks, the latter, the notorious Grissom Gang (reminiscent in many ways of the Australian Pettingill family), run by a sociopathic matriarch and her mentally challenged, ultra-violent son Slim. Their plan is to steal her new diamond necklace, collect a ransom for her from her wealthy father, and then dispose of her rather than risk her identifying them … but then Slim takes a fancy to her, complicating their plans even after they get their money and try to use it to run a slightly more legitimate business.

Miss Blandish’s father hires reporter-turned-private detective Dave Fenner to try to track his daughter down several months after he’s paid the ransom without any word on her whereabouts or even whether she’s alive, and Fenner – about as cliched a detective character as you’ll ever find – uses his knowledge of the town’s underworld to find the one lead police didn’t uncover. Chase spends most of his energy and the bulk of the verbiage on the interactions between Slim Grissom, his mother, and the other dissolute members of their gang, including how they respond once it becomes clear that their faĉade of respectability in their new venture has been cracked.

The violence in the book is par for the course for the era, although No Orchids was apparently one of the first to raise the violence to this level; I don’t enjoy violence for its own sake, but to paint the picture of the Grissom gang as unrepentant and likely sociopathic killers, the violence serves a literary purpose. Less necessary and much harder to stomach is the largely off-screen rape of Miss Blandish by Slim, repeated over a period of months. When Fenner finally finds her near the end of the book, however, all of the dialogue seems to indicate that there is no recovery from this sort of trauma, both from the extent of the crimes committed and from the shame of being a victim of kidnap and a presumed rape. It’s true to its era, but fortunately we live in an era that is both more enlightened and better equipped to help trauma victims recover from their ordeals, which gave the novel’s resolution a very antiquated and somewhat misogynistic flavor. A female author would never have written this ending – or at least I’d like to think one wouldn’t. (For the record, I don’t agree with either of Orwell’s interpretations of the ending; I think he’s ignored or dismissed a third possibility, that the motive was shame.) However, for fans of noir fiction, No Orchids offers a swift, exceptionally dark take on the genre, one where the payoff is less important than the way there.

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→ June 11, 2015
→ By

Proofiness.

Whew! I’m glad that’s over. For Insiders, my recaps of the drafts for all 15 NL teams and all 15 AL teams are up, as well as my round one reactions and a post-draft Klawchat.

Charles Seife’s Proofiness: How You’re Being Fooled by the Numbers is a beautiful polemic straight from the headquarters of the Statistical Abuse Department. Seife, whose Zero is an enjoyable, accessible story of the development and controversy of that number and concept, aims both barrels at journalists, politicians, and demagogues who misinterpret or misuse statistics, knowing that if you attach a number to something, people are more inclined to believe it.

Seife opens with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s famous claim about knowing the names of “205 … members of the Communist Party” who were at that moment working in the State Department. It was bullshit; the number kept changing, up and down, every time he gave a version of the speech, but by putting a specific number on it, the audience assumed he had those specific names. It’s a basic logical error: if he has the list of names, he must have the number, but that doesn’t mean the converse is true. He rips through a series of similarly well-known examples of public abuse of statistics, from the miscounting of the Million Man March to stories about blondes becoming extinct to Al Gore cherrypicking data in An Inconvenient Truth, to illustrate some of the different ways people with agendas can and will manipulate you with stats.

One of the best passages, and probably most relevant to us as the Presidential election cycle is beginning, is on polls – particularly on how they’re reported. Seife argues, with some evidence, that many reporters don’t understand what the margin of error means. (This subject also got some time in Ian Ayers’ Super Crunchers, a somewhat dated look at the rise of Big Data in decision-making that has since been lapped by the very topic it attempted to cover.) If done correctly, the margin of error should equal two standard deviations, but many journalists and pundits treat it as some ambiguous measure of the confidence in the reported means. When Smith is leading Jones 51% to 49% with a margin of error of ±3%, that’s not a “statistical dead heat;” that’s telling you that the poll, if run properly, says there’s a 95% chance that Smith’s actual support is between 48% and 54% and a 95% that Jones’ support is between 46% and 52%, with each distribution centered on the means (51% and 49%) that were the actual results of the poll. That’s far from a dead heat, as long as the poll itself didn’t suffer from any systemic bias, as in the famous Literary Digest poll for the 1936 Presidential election.

Seife shifts gears in the second half of the book from journalists to politicians and jurists who either misuse stats for propaganda purposes or who misuse them when crafting bad laws or making bad rulings. He explains gerrymandering, pointing out that this is an easy problem to solve with modern technology if politicians had any actual interest in solving it, and breaks down the 2000 Presidential vote in Florida and the 2008 Minnesota Senate race to show that the inevitable lack of precision even in popular votes and census-taking mean both races were, in fact, dead heats. (Specifically, he says that it is impossible to say with any confidence that either candidate was the winner.) Seife shows how bad data have skewed major court decisions, and how McCleskey v. Kemp ignored compelling data on the skewed implementation of capital punishment. (Antonin Scalia voted with the majority, part of a long pattern of ignoring data that don’t support his views, according to Seife.) This statistical abuse cuts both ways, as he gives examples of both prosecutors and defense attorneys playing dirty with numbers to claim that a defendant is guilty or innocent.

For my purposes, it’s a good reminder that numbers can be illustrative but also misleading, especially since the line between giving stats for descriptive reasons can bleed into the appearance of a predictive argument. I pointed out the other day on Twitter that both Michael Conforto and Kyle Schwarber were on short but impressive power streaks; neither run meant anything given how short they were, but I thought they were fun to see and spoke to how both players are elite offensive prospects. (By the way, Dominic Smith is hitting .353/.390/.569 in his last 29 games, and has reached base in 21 straight games!) But I’d recommend this book to anyone working in the media, especially in the political arena, as a manual for how not to use statistics or to believe the ones that are handed to you. It’s also a great guide for how to be a more educated voter, consumer, and reader, so when climate change deniers claim the earth hasn’t warmed for sixteen years, you’ll be ready to spot and ignore it.

Next up: I’m way behind on reviews, but right now I’m halfway through Adam Rogers’ Proof: The Science of Booze.

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→ June 6, 2015
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Saturday five, 6/6/15.

My third first-round mock for Monday’s draft went up on Thursday for Insiders. I’ll do one more on Monday morning. My final ranking of the top 100 prospects in the draft class is also up.

My latest boardgame review for Paste is on the D&D-themed miniatures and tile-laying game Temple of Elemental Evil.

Fewer links than normal this week because I’ve got this other thing going on… saturdayfive

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→ June 3, 2015
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Incompleteness.

My final top 100 draft prospect ranking for 2015 is up for Insiders, and my latest review for Paste covers the Temple of Elemental Evil boardgame.

Rebecca Goldstein’s Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, part of the same “Great Discoveries” series that includes David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, takes the abstruse topic of Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems and folds it into a readable, compelling biography of both the man and his ideas. Using the logician’s friendship with Albert Einstein as a hook, Goldstein gives us about as intimate a portrait of the intensely private Gödel as we can get, while also laying the groundwork so the non-metamathematicians among us can understand the why and how of Gödel’s theorems.

There’s very little actual math involved in Incompleteness, because the two theorems in question revolve around the nature of mathematics, notably arithmetic, as an axiomatic system that mathematicians and philosophers of the early 1900s were trying to use as a basis to describe arithmetic as a formal system – that is, one that can be fully described via a system of symbols and syntax, used to construct well-formed formulas (wffs, not to be confused with wtfs), some of which are the axioms that define the whole system. If such axioms can describe the entire system in a way that an algorithm (which is probably easiest to conceive as a computer program) can use those axioms and only those axioms to prove all truths or assertions about the natural numbers, then arithmetic would be considered a complete system, something Gödel proved was impossible in his first theorem. His second theorem went even further, showing that such a system of arithmetic also could not be consistent within itself by demonstrating that a statement of the system’s consistency would generate an internal contradiction.

Gödel imself was an incomplete figure, a hypochondriac who degenerated into outright paranoia later in life, and a socially awkward man who would likely have been diagnosed in today’s world of psychiatry and medicine as a depressive or even somewhere on the autism spectrum. He formed few lasting friendships, feared that no one could understand him (and given the meandering paths of his mind, I don’t doubt this was true), and was often shockingly aloof to what was happening around him. He fled his native Austria before World War II, even though he wasn’t Jewish, because his association with the secular Jewish scholars of the Vienna Circle (most of whom were logical Positivists, arguing that anything that could not be empirically proven could not be considered true) cost him his university position. Yet he remained unaware of the state of affairs in his native country, once (according to Goldstein) asking a Jewish emigré who had fled Nazi persecution for the United States, “What brings you to America?”

Goldstein does a superb job setting the scene for Gödel’s emergence as a logician/metamathematician and as a figure of adulation and controversy. The Vienna Circle was, in Goldstein’s depiction, somewhat insular in its unwavering acceptance of Positivism, and as such certain that Hilbert’s second problem, asking for a proof that arithmetic is internally consistent, would be proven true. Gödel’s second theorem showed this was not the case, leading to his own intellectual isolation from thinkers who were heavily invested in the Positivist view of mathematics, a bad outcome for a man who was already prone to introversion and diffidence. G&omul;del found it difficult to express himself without the use of logic, and while his station at Princeton’s illustrious Institute for Advanced Study – a sort of magnet think tank that became a home for great scholars in math and the sciences – put him in contact with Albert Einstein, it also deepened his solitude by limiting his orbit … although that may have been inevitable given his late-life delusions of persecution. Goldstein did encounter Gödel once at a garden party at Princeton, only to see him at his most gregarious, holding court with a small group of awestruck graduate students, only to disappear without a trace when his spell of socializing was over. He was, in her description, a phantom presence around campus, especially once his daily walks with Einstein ended with the latter’s death in 1955.

While giving a basic description of Gödel’s theorems and proofs, focusing more on their implications than on the underlying math, Goldstein does send readers to the 1958 Gödel’s Proof, a 160-page book that attempts to give readers a more thorough understanding of the two theorems even if those readers lack any background in higher math. Incompleteness focuses instead on the man as much as it does on his work, producing a true narrative in a story that wouldn’t otherwise have had one, making it a book that I could recommend to anyone who can stand Goldstein’s occasional use of a $2 word (“veridical”) when a ten-cent one (“truthful”) would have done.

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→ June 1, 2015
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May 2015 music update.

I think this is my longest music update yet, 21 songs and 73 minutes total. Also, my final ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft will be up tomorrow for Insiders.

The Chemical Brothers – Go. Ten years after their first collaboration on “Galvanize,” the Chemical Brothers reunite with Q-Tip for this new track, with better lyrics this time from the brother Abstract and an equally catchy bit of electronic music that has Rowlands and Simons seeming in an almost poppy mood.

Metric – The Shade. I’ve never been a big Metric fan, finding their lyrics superficial yet pretentious, as if they felt like they had Really Big Themes to discuss but didn’t have the creative chops to do it. (It’s odd, since the lead singer’s father is a noted poet.) Here the Canadian quartet downshift slightly in their topic, and the song’s imagery, while predictable, works with the whinging chorus to create a deep sense of yearning and an emotional connection I haven’t heard from them before.

The Wombats – This Is Not A Party. The British act’s third album Glitterbug is one of my favorite spins of the year, and this is the third track from that record I’ve put on a playlist in the last four months. Matthew Murphy is a modern-day Morrissey with his wry humor and latent cynicism, but everything’s couched in these infectious musical packages that make this their best work yet.

Cayucas – Moony Eyed Walrus. It’s not quite “High School Lover,” their modest hit from 2013, but the Yudin brothers’ new single has some silly lyrics and a surfer/low-fi pop vibe.

Tame Impala – Disciples. I’m just stunned Kevin Parker could put out a song this short – it clocks in at under two minutes. It’s admirable restraint.

Torres – Cowboy Guilt. I’m not a big Torres fan (although I understand the boardgame is pretty good), but this song is an exception with the lilting riff that backs up the initial verses leading up to a heavier, denser chorus. I can’t quite explain what happens at the two-minute mark, though.

Django Django – 4000 Years. My second-favorite track from their latest album, Born Under Saturn, which is solid all the way through but doesn’t have the huge breakout hits that their debut had in “Default” and “Hail Bop.”

White Reaper – I Don’t Think She Cares. Punk-pop with a little hint of early Vines.

Desaparecidos – Backsell. The first album from this side project of Conor Oberst (leader of Bright Eyes) since 2002 features this song, originally released in 2012 (along with “MariKKKopa,” about Arizona tyrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio). I’ve seen them described as emo and punk, but it’s really just loud alternative, not that dissimilar in style from the Foo Fighters but a good bit smarter.

Tei Shi – Bassically. A recommendation from reader Courtney, who accurately pegs this as something fans of Grimes would enjoy. The video is a fashion nightmare – is she wearing a giant red diaper? – with some highly stoned dance moves.

Joy Williams – Until the Levee. Williams, formerly half of the country duo The Civil Wars, keeps dropping new singles from her upcoming album Venus, each of which shows off her powerful voice in a different motif.

Tanlines – Slipping Away. I miss the darker note from their 2012 song “All of Me,” but this has the sort of effortless sunny tone of a summer hit.

Horsebeach – Disappear. Mancunian, ethereal, jangly indie-pop that sounds like an Inspiral Carpets song covered by Wild Nothing.

The Vaccines – Minimal Affection. I have no idea what to make of the Vaccines at this point; their punk-pop hit “Teenage Icon” was one of my favorite tunes of 2012, while their latest album, English Graffiti, is moodier and draws just as heavily on British new wave and two-tone ska revivalist music as on the punk and post-punk movements that informed their earlier work. Maybe the Vaccines are coming of age an album later than promised.

Total Babes – Blurred Time. I keep reading how these guys are a spinoff or offshoot of Cloud Nothings, but the only direction connection is a shared drummer, and even that is tenuous since Cloud Nothings is really a one-man project. Regardless of their relationship to that other Cleveland act, Total Babes put out music that’s somewhat similar to Dylan Baldi’s output but more focused and less overproduced, noisy punk-pop with a sunnier overtone.

Mourn – Gertrudis, Get Through This! A quartet of teens, three of them girls, from Barcelona, Mourn put out a debut album last fall and just followed it up with a three-song EP, boasting a more melodic but still rough-edged rock sound. There’s definitely a familiar note here that reminded me of Hinds (ex-Deers), another female-led rock act from Spain, but Mourn’s music is far more advanced and they probably deserve some of Hinds’ hype.

Destroyer – Dream Lover. Destroyer is Dan Bejar of New Pornographers fame, and if you liked his “War on the East Coast” on Brill Bruisers you’ll like “Dream Lover” as well.

Neon Indian – Annie. Alan Palomo’s first full-length album since 2011 is due later this year, and this first single reminds me of St. Lucia’s debut record, but where the latter’s Jean-Philippe Grobler brings his South African roots to his music, Palomo’s instrumentation (especially the percussion) here sounds more Mexican or Native American.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Can’t Keep Checking My Phone. This song is all about Riley Geare’s percussion lines, which sound like they were lifted from a salsa record and used to create this psychedelic soul-tinged track instead.

Seoul – The Line. Another song that reminds me of Wild Nothing – a band I discovered through a few reader suggestions in 2012 – in its dreampop stylings and hard-to-make-out vocals.

Creepoid – American Smile. The first single from this Philadelphia quartet’s latest album, Cemetery Highrise Slum, calls to mind Titus Andronicus, Mudhoney, and early Nirvana, with a sludgy guitar line and the general feeling of slowly tumbling down the side of a mountain.

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→ May 30, 2015
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Saturday five, 5/30/15.

This week I posted an updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors and my second mock draft for 2015. I also held yet another Klawchat this week, still focusing on the draft.

And now, this week’s links… saturdayfive

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→ May 29, 2015
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Birmingham eats, 2015 edition.

I had to get up at 5 am and connect through Orlando to get to Birmingham for the Vanderbilt-Alabama game on Saturday, so once I got to my rental car I headed straight for Octane Coffee in the Homewood neighborhood, the best coffee place I’ve found in Birmingham. It’s not on par with my favorite small roasters – Intelligentsia, Four Barrel, Counter Culture, Cartel, etc. – but it’s a lighter roast of higher-quality beans than your mass-market chains offer. I hung out for a while to write a few things, including starting the mock draft post for Tuesday, and ended up chatting about SSRIs with a few med school students sitting at my table, then chatting boardgames with a young couple playing Rivals for Catan (who also suggested a newish game called The Duke to me).

I was there long enough that I ended up going next door to the Mexican/BBQ place Little Donkey for lunch. Their midday menu offers plates for $8.75 with two tacos of your choosing, most of which contain large piles of smoked meats, and one of their sides. (You can also get a burrito, a salad, or tamales instead of tacos.) I also added a grilled corn on the cob for $2, and the total was more food than I could consume because the tacos were so much larger than I expected. The pork al pastor was the better option, although I did like the smoked brisket too; the latter probably just had too much meat relative to its toppings. The chipotle slaw was perfectly flavored, with the egg in the dressing cutting some of the sharpness of the pepper, and the elote (corn) was solid-average other than (I’m nitpicking) a very uneven distribution of the paprika on the outside. They make their tortillas by hand, and it was evident as they were worth the trip all by themselves. Reader Aaron, who lives nearby, says dinner isn’t quite such good value, but I thought it was very reasonable for the size and quantity of the lunch.

While I was sitting in Octane, Alton Brown sent out a tweet to his favorite road eats from the southern portion of his national tour, and on it was Steel City Pops, which is located right next door to Octane. Serving large paletas in fruit and dairy options for $3 a pop from five (soon to be seven) area locations, Steel City has a great assortment of straightforward and clever flavor combinations that change from time to time. I went with guava, which tasted like … guava. It was good, though. I wanted to try the caramel or the coffee, but didn’t think I could handle that on top of lunch.

My last meal was a substantial disappointment, due to what I think was a process breakdown in the kitchen. Hot & Hot Fish Club is one of the top-rated restaurants in the city, winning a James Beard Award in 2012, offering a menu full of farm-to-table that reflects seasonal produce as well as any I’ve come across. The menu on Saturday was loaded with spring vegetables across the starters and mains, and I was quite optimistic after seeing the salad, with young lettuce leaves still on the head along with English peas, shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and a tart dressing that might have contained anchovies (although the menu didn’t say so, and that would be an odd omission). Even the breads to start the meal, served with fresh butter and their own green salt with dried herbs, were superb, especially the soft white bread, with the crust of a sponge bread but the tender crumb of a highly enriched loaf.

Then I waited. It was somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes before my entree arrived, and that only because I finally asked my server (the bartender) for an ETA on it. He later explained that when he asked the kitchen to fire the dish, they hadn’t done so, and when it did arrive less than five minutes after he made the second request, it wasn’t right – edible, certainly, not worth sending back, but not right, either. The dish was duck breast with “crispy” duck confit served with creamy grits, a blueberry gastrique, grilled peaches, and pecans. The duck breast was almost too tough to chew or even cut; the confit thigh wasn’t crispy in any way and its meat didn’t want to come off the bone. The gastrique was absent, although there were maybe a dozen cooked blueberries in two pockets on the plate. I dislike sending food that is edible back to the kitchen; something has to be unsafe to eat or cooked beyond palatability for me to take that step. This wasn’t at that level; it was just done wrong. The bartender had the kitchen send out a small cup of their spring pea soup, pureed with fresh mint and creme fraiche, but that was – and I don’t use this word often or lightly – terrible. The peas tasted both raw and underripe, so the soup was grassy and very bitter. We grow English peas in our backyard every spring, and when ripe they are juicy and sweet and perfect right out of the pod. Sometimes we pick a pod that isn’t ready, and that was the flavor in the soup. The kitchen just had an off night.

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→ May 28, 2015
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Chicken cutlets (The grade 20 cook, part one).

My latest mock draft is up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat this afternoon to discuss it. I also appeared on the Dbacks Insider podcast (direct link to mp3) with my friend and former colleague Steve Berthiaume to talk about the Dbacks’ options at the first pick.

A friend of mine confessed to me recently that he’s completely incompetent in the kitchen – a “(grade) 20 cook,” in his terms, and asked me for a suggestion on a book or even a few go-to recipes for someone with kids who wants to learn how to cook. I made a few suggestions from my cookbook recommendations post, but was thinking about the most basic, extensible meal I make that most kids would like. The answer kind of came from my own childhood, even though I’ve modified the recipe from the way my mom made them: chicken cutlets. Here’s my recipe, written and explained for someone who has as much experience as a cook as Craig Counsell and Dan Jennings had as managers.

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are derided by most chefs, for good reason – they have no taste of their own (unless you’re buying heirloom or pasture-raised birds), and because the meat is so lean, it dries out very quickly. Most cooking methods do more damage than good, as the protection provided by the skin and bone is lost. You can marinate it in something strong (citrus works well, like orange-garlic-soy) and grill it, but you almost have to undercook it and let carryover finish. But chicken breast meat fries beautifully, especially if you break the breasts down into a more amenable shape.

Chicken cutlets are thinly sliced pieces of breast meat, ideally pounded slightly to give them even thickness. I season them, dip them in beaten egg, and then press them into panko bread crumbs before pan-frying them. They require no particular skill and no specialized equipment. You don’t even have to measure anything.

Most good supermarkets sell chicken breasts already sliced into cutlets, and any butcher should do that for you on request. If you have a good chef’s knife and a steady hand, you can buy boneless skinless breasts and cut them into cutlets yourself; it’s a horizontal cut, parallel to the cutting board, and therefore more dangerous than most knife cuts you’ll undertake. I typically get three cutlets from a half breast, two the length of the breast half and one smaller one sliced off the top. However you get your cutlets, you want to pound any thicker parts out so that each cutlet is as close as possible to a uniform thickness. I have a metal mallet for this, but a ceramic custard cup or even flat-bottomed mug or glass will work too (cover the meat with plastic wrap before pounding). If you buy whole breasts, however, make sure you pull off the tenderloins, the narrow pieces on the underside of the breasts. You can cook them as you would the cutlets, but you have to do it separately.

Season each cutlet liberally with salt (preferably coarse) and pepper. You can add other seasonings if you’d like; paprika works well, including smoked Spanish paprika, as does cumin. Michael Ruhlman has a similar recipe in his book Egg where he coats the cutlets with Dijon mustard before they hit the egg wash, but I haven’t tried this yet. Any dried spice will work well here because it will get to bloom when hitting the hot oil.

Now set up your assembly line. In a wide-bottomed bowl, beat two eggs until well combined, as if you were going to scramble them, adding a pinch of salt before you beat them. Take a dinner plate and spread a layer of panko bread crumbs over it – you can use other bread crumbs but panko gives a superior texture.

For the cooking vessel, I use a 12-inch cast-iron skillet; both iron and oil are poor conductors of heat but excellent insulators, so once hot, they’ll hold their heat well. You can use any skillet or saute pan that is deep enough to keep the oil from splashing or spilling over the sides. Pour about ½ inch of oil into the skillet – olive oil is the best for flavor, but anything would work, even shortening or duck fat or beef tallow if that’s how you roll although I admit I’ve never tried the last two – and heat it over medium to medium-high heat until you can see the surface of the oil shimmering and perhaps even catch a wisp of smoke. (It’s about 350 degrees F.)

Once the oil is at temperature, you’ll need to work quickly, so you want all of that setup ready before you turn on the stove. Take each cutlet, dip it in the egg wash, hold it up for a few seconds to let the excess drip back into the bowl, then press each side into the bread crumbs. Lay it gently in the pan – don’t let it drop unless you enjoy getting hot oil all over you. You should hear sizzling immediately; if you don’t, the oil isn’t hot enough. Fit no more than three cutlets in the pan at once, often stopping at two, because each cutlet you add drops the oil temperature, and crowding the pan will result in the chicken steaming rather than frying. If the oil is at the right temperature, the cutlets will require about two minutes per side; at 90 seconds, check by lifting up a corner with tongs or a spatula, flipping them (gently!) if the bread crumbs are a deep golden brown.

Tongs are ideal, but if you use a spatula, the safe way to flip anything in a saute pan or skillet is to use a fork or second spatula on the other (raw) side to hold it up against the first spatula. Just don’t confuse the utensils: Once something has touched raw chicken, it can’t touch anything that’s cooked.

When you remove the cooked cutlets from the skillet, you have two options. If you’re serving them immediately, move each cutlet to a plate lined with paper towels to drain off some of the excess oil, then serve. You can also hold them in a warm (200 F) oven on a sheet pan if you need to wait a half-hour or so before serving. They keep well as leftovers; reheat them in a 350 degree oven rather than the microwave to restore the crispness of the exterior. One serving suggestion of many: Top them with fresh mozzarella, basil leaves, and some crushed red pepper and serve them on a crusty baguette.

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