keith — Page 231

→ November 25, 2011
→ By keith

Ruhlman’s Twenty.

(Edit, 5/9/12: Ruhlman’s Twenty just won the James Beard Award for Best Cookbook, General Cooking. Not that it needed the validation.)

I’ve mentioned Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto a few times already, having talked to the author on the November 11th podcast, but held off on a full review until I’d had a chance to cook a few things from the book. I’ve tried five recipes so far, all hits, and given how informative and readable the surrounding text is, this has quickly become one of the most essential cookbooks I own.

The “Twenty” of the book’s title refers to twenty chapters, each revolving around a core cooking technique or, in a few cases, a critical ingredient such as salt, eggs, or onions, mastery of which is critical for success in the kitchen. I can’t think of anything a home cook would need to know that’s not covered somewhere in this book, and he runs from basic steps to advanced home-cooking techniques such as building egg white foams, mounting sauces with butter, and making confit with duck or lemons. But what has always set Ruhlman apart, aside from his conversational writing style, is that he drills down to the fundamentals behind a recipe. Each section has several pages of explanation, peppered with anecdotes or even quotes from chefs Ruhlman has worked with, and each recipe has more commentary. The one stir-frying recipe explains why restaurant stir-fries are different than anything you can produce at home, then gives six key tips for producing the best stir-fried dishes possible on your consumer-grade stove.

For Thanksgiving, I used two of the book’s three recipes involving duck, one in the chapter on acid (seared duck breasts with cranberry gastrique), the other in the chapter on braising (braised duck legs), and both were straightforward with excellent results. The legs couldn’t be easier – salt them the night before, sweat some aromatics in a pot, add the duck, white wine, thyme, and water just to cover, and braise in a 300 degree oven for three hours; I managed to keep one leg together for the photograph but the other was so tender that the meat fell off the bone when I tried to extract it from the pot. I brined the breasts overnight to keep them moist, since I tend to prefer duck breast closer to medium than the recommended medium-rare (it gets dry and tough when overcooked, and the brining at least slows down the drying-out); Ruhlman’s recipes should hammer home how easy it is to make duck at home, because searing the breasts requires nothing more complicated than cross cuts on the skin and heating up a single heavy skillet. Even the sauce was simple and produced a bright-red result with the sweet/sour profile that pairs extremely well with the lean, dark breast meat. (Mistral in Boston also serves a cranberry gastrique with its signature duck dish, although they roast a half-bird rather than braising the legs separately.) Using both recipes also allowed me to render about ¾ cup of fat from the two dishes, which I’ll deploy today or tomorrow on some Yukon Golds. The only hitch was that the sauce made by reducing the braising liquid from the legs, boosted with sherry vinegar and fish sauce (for umami), didn’t do much for me – and the leg meat didn’t need any help anyway.

I joked with Ruhlman that cooking scrambled eggs over simmering water, instead of directly over the heat source, was “crazy talk,” but the science behind it is pretty sound – it’s the same way you melt chocolate on the stovetop or make zabaglione (a thick custard of eggs and sweet marsala, beaten while sitting over simmering water). This method heats the food gently and slowly, preventing overcooking or scorching, and in the case of the eggs keeping the finished product soft. You have more time to develop curds, and unless you walk away or crank up the heat on the water, you’ll end up with a pile of soft, custardy eggs with a built-in sauce that is incredibly rich, with the texture of a dessert dish in a normally pedestrian breakfast food.

Ruhlman’s pan-roasted pork tenderloin uses one of my favorite techniques, what I learned as the “sear-roast” – sear it on the stovetop, finish in the oven – but boosts it through aggressive seasoning and frequent basting with a butter-garlic-thyme sauce that builds in the pan as you cook the meat. Pork tenderloin has become more popular (and more expensive) in recent years because, as the name implies, it’s naturally tender, since the muscle does virtually no work while the animal is still oinking. The downside is that it’s lean and dries out easily, so boosting it with butter as Ruhlman does makes perfect sense, while the sear-roast technique gives you substantial flavor from the Maillard reaction while allowing you to slow the cooking of the interior in the oven. One thing worth mentioning about the book that appears in this recipe is that Ruhlman assumes some basic familiarity with many ingredients – for example, he explains here that you might want to deal with the tapered end of the tenderloin to prevent overcooking, but doesn’t discuss trimming the tough and extremely annoying silverskin, which can cause the meat to curl during cooking. I don’t see that as an oversight, but it might make Ruhlman’s Twenty a bit intimidating as a first cookbook.

The flip side of that assumption is that Ruhlman also assumes some intelligence and aspirations on the part of the reader. The recipes work if you follow them step-by-step, but when you read the text around them and at the head of each chapter, you build your understanding of the twenty techniques to the point where the recipes become guidelines; in that respect, this book has more in common with his slim but essential volume Ratio, which distilled numerous recipes for baked goods, stocks, and sauces to ratios of core ingredients to allow for endless improvisations.

One great example of that is the two-step pan sauce for roasted chicken, which starts with a basic “rustic” sauce using just white wine, onion, and carrot (the last two are “aromatics”), then adds a second step if you want a “refined” sauce that uses butter, shallot, and herbs, finishing with the optional lemon juice and/or mustard. You can build almost any pan sauce from that framework; the only essential ingredient is the butter, and perhaps the shallot, but you can substitute or add aromatics or herbs, or use a different deglazing liquid. I did it straight, just switching around some herbs based on what I had in the house, and it was among the best pan sauces I’ve ever made, in part because Ruhlman has you deglaze and reduce multiple times to intensify the flavors in the aromatics. Do it his way once (and read the surrounding text) and you’ll understand the reasons behind each step, making you the master of the recipe the second time around.

I should also mention that the photography in Ruhlman’s Twenty is off the charts – these are photographs that will make you want to head for the kitchen, right from the first recipe, sage-garlic-brined pork chops (breaded, pan-fried, and finished with a butter-caper sauce, with the rest of the recipe on page 315). The braised lamb shank photo is beautiful enough that I thought briefly about eating lamb again – and that recipe includes eighteen clear photos to take you through the recipe step by step.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cookbooks, Cooking, highly recommended, ruhlman

→ November 23, 2011
→ By keith

The Wire, season two.

The Wire: The Complete Series is on sale again on amazon for almost 60% off, at $85.49 – perfect timing for me, as many of you have asked for my thoughts on season two, which I just finished watching on Friday.

I get why so many of you warned me that season two might be disappointing; some said it’s the worst season, or just not as good as the first, or just so different that I might not like it. I wouldn’t say any of that held true for me, though – it was just as good as the first, in large part because it was so different, and aside from one complaint about the plot I would be hard-pressed to offer any negative sentiments.

Again, for the handful of you who haven’t seen the series (I’m fairly certain I’m the last one on this particular ship), The Wire follows an ad hoc group of Baltimore police officers who, under the charge of Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, form a major case squad to pursue drug dealing operations. In season two, the squad has been spread to the winds after the end of the Barksdale case from the first season, but gradually Lt. Daniels puts the group back together to pursue a vendetta for a police commander, Stan Valchek, who is angry with the leader of the dockworkers’ union over the placement of a stained glass window in their local church. (Seriously.) That case mushrooms into a sprawling investigation that links the union to white slavery, black marketeering, and a source of drugs for Proposition Joe’s gang (which is a good thing, because we need more Proposition Joe).

The feel of the season is different because of the change in theme. The first season was very much about the inherent fallacy behind the war on drugs, and how ineffective and expensive that battle is likely to be. The second season revolves around the decline of blue-collar employment, which, like the drug war, is behind the economic and social decay of many older American cities. The dockworkers are struggling and their union head bets it all, in effect, on double-zero, putting illegally gained funds into lobbying efforts to dredge a nearby canal and increase port traffic. Those funds are the proceeds of payoffs from smugglers, who attract the attention of the police when one of the containers contains the bodies of thirteen dead women who were being smuggled into the U.S. to work as prostitutes, likely under duress.

The new storyline brought in a host of new characters, most strong, led by the union leader, Frank Sobotka, and the port officer who ends up joining the major case squad, Beadie Russell. Sobotka’s story plays out almost like a classical tragedy – he’s probably doomed from the start, and is so heavily invested in his work that he’s ignorant of the impending danger to members of his immediate family. (Ziggy, his son, was one character I could have done without, or simply done with less of; I almost felt sorry for him when he finally snapped, but then again, could anything we know of his history really excuse what he did?) And Sobotka is faced with some difficult choices, ones with nothing but gray area, because of his moral and political responsibility to his fellow dockworkers.

Russell was a little less well-formed than Sobotka, and her development from security guard to investigator wasn’t as well written as the development of Carver in season one from goofball to surveillance expert (although I suppose this season showed that was a fluke and he just regressed to the mean). The Russell character worked more because of how Amy Ryan played her, almost like she was trying to shed the stereotypical soft female cop image and develop some toughness, much of which falls apart in the final episode. People win Emmys for that sort of thing – that is, when the Emmys are aware that the series exists in the first place.

The expansion to the docks comes at the expense of the Barksdale storyline, although the writers did a solid job of keeping that thread alive throughout the season so they can pick it up again at a future point. Avon Barksdale remains in jail, so Stringer Bell – still the strongest central character in the show from my point of view – becomes more central, even ordering the murder of a potential turncoat and setting up a hit on someone Barksdale hired to work for the group. Bodie’s attempts to grow into some sort of leader within the Barksdale crew was one of the stronger points in the first half of the season, but was dropped for the second half as the focus shifted more and more to the docks. His scene in the flowershop, while insanely silly, was a highlight of the season for me.

That one complaint about the plot I mentioned earlier was pretty significant, even if it was probably realistic (and here comes a spoiler). The FBI agent who tips off the Greek about raids and eventually about Sobotka felt like a tacked-on element, as if the writers needed to ensure that this case wasn’t a total win for the cops, with very little on the agent’s true motivation for protecting a murderous mobster. Is he unaware of the Greek’s body count? Does he view that as an acceptable tradeoff for the information the Greek provides, especially on terrorism? Is this sanctioned by his bosses? Will he ever face any consequences? I get that a rout for the cops would seem too network-police-procedural, and absolutely not realistic, but to have them sunk because of a leak from outside their group, felt like a deus ex machina for the bad guys – a less compelling resolution than we saw in season one.

* I’m not sure what was funnier – Proposition Joe’s response to Sergei’s comments about family (“I got motherfuckin’ nephews and cousins fucking all my shit up…”) or McNulty’s one line when they finally move in on the white slavery operation (“You’re late”), but I remain continually impressed by the writers’ ability to weave in humor without interrupting the flow of the narrative. If you think about it, not only is that more like real life than the idea of separating humorous moments from everything else, but it’s the natural human response to stress, anxiety, or sometimes even grief or despair. It should appear everywhere, and should be seamless. That doesn’t make it easier to write, but it does mean it’s important to make the effort.

* And the wait for the payoff on the “Why always Boris?” joke – one of the longest I can remember in any TV series – was absolutely worth it. I wonder if that was planned from the start.

* So does anyone else think FedEx knew they’d get tremendous word of mouth by hiring the actor who played Bodie to appear in one of their new commercials, or was it just their own dumb luck?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, the wire, tv

→ November 22, 2011
→ By keith

Top 30 boardgames.

This is the fourth iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, with more games listed as my own collection of these games grows ever more slightly out of control. It’s not intended to be a critic’s list or an analytical take on the games; it’s about 80% based on how much we enjoy the games, with everything else – packaging and design, simplicity of rules, and in one case, the game’s importance within its niche – making up the rest. We are not hardcore gamers; I don’t mind a complex game, but I prefer games that offer more with less – there is an elegance in simple rules or mechanics that lead to a fun, competitive game. Don’t expect this to line up with the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

The list includes 30 titles, although we have more than that, just because the list was getting way too long and I wouldn’t really recommend anything not listed or mentioned here. I own every game on this list except Diplomacy and Tigris & Euphrates, and with one exception (Agricola) have played every game on here many times. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted on the site, the link to that will follow immediately. I’ve linked to a few of my app reviews where appropriate.

I’ve got most of these games in my aStore on amazon and am gradually adding the rest.

30. Tikal: Full review. Strongly balanced game of board exploration, but the length of time between any single player’s turns, especially with three or four players, is a real drawback. Players compete to control temples and acquire treasures while building out a board representing a Central American jungle; control of those temples can change from turn to turn, and each player’s ten “actions” presents an enormous list of potential decisions to position his/her pieces for maximum points in each of the scoring rounds. That makes it interesting to play, but also leads to the long gaps between turns. Plays two to seven, but doesn’t play well with two.

29. Maori: I haven’t reviewed this one yet, as I just got it earlier this month and have only played it (and lost, as it turns out) three times. It’s a light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon has plenty of new copies through marketplace sellers.

28. Alhambra: Full review. After playing it a few more times, I do like it more than I did the first time around, but the method used to acquire money is an awful mechanic that really screws the game up (for me) with more than two players. One of the cooler-looking games in our collection.

27. Zooloretto: Full review. A fun game, but a bit of a trifle compared to the others further up this list. You’re a zookeeper trying to fill his zoo’s three enclosures (expandable to four) with animals that arrive each turn on trucks available to all players, but each enclosure can only hold one type of animal at a time. There’s a cost to switching animals around, and there’s a penalty for picking up animals you can’t house, with points coming for filling an enclosure or filling all spots but one. I’m a little surprised this won the Spiel des Jahres, as it lacks the elegance of most winners of that award, and the two-player variant rules included in the game don’t work at all. I have played a simplified version of the game with my daughter, who loves the animal tokens and the well-drawn zoo boards. It’s a good starter game in the German-style genre, but not the best.

26. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme.

25. Race For The Galaxy: Full review. It’s a well-designed game that requires that players know the cards in the entire deck to play effectively. I know several of you who swear by it, and I do appreciate the depth of the design in both the mechanics and the variety of cards, opening up a handful of core strategies that depend on which card you receive as your “start world.” The debate over whether the military strategy or the produce/consume*2 strategy is superior might be the boardgame world’s closest analogue to the Mac vs PC debate. But the bottom line for me is that you have to play this game a number of times to learn the deck and understand what cards you need to execute each strategy, and that’s a very big hurdle for a new player.

24. San Juan: Full review. The card game version of Puerto Rico, but far, far simpler, and very portable. I like this as a light game that lets you play a half-dozen times in an evening, but all it really shares with Puerto Rico is a theme and the concept of players taking different roles in each turn. It plays well with two players but also works with three or four. I get that saying this is a better game than Race for the Galaxy (they were developed in tandem before RftG split off) is anathema to most serious boardgamers, but the fact that you can pick this game up so much more easily is a major advantage in my mind, more than enough to balance out the significant loss of complexity.

23. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. We played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value.

22. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly.

21. Agricola: The most complex game we’ve tried, with the steepest learning curve. Very well made aside from the square animal pegs, which we replaced (at the suggestion of one of you) with actual animal-shaped pieces I bought via amazon. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved. It was out of print this summer but appears to be back. (Credit to my wife for finding one of the few remaining new copies out there for my birthday, ordering it from a site based in England.)

20. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. Disclaimer: My wife doesn’t like this game because she says the board and cards look “depressing.”

19. Glen More: Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Seems to be out of print, but available through amazon marketplace sellers.

18. Puerto Rico: Full review. It’s grown on me, especially since I got to try it out a few times online via Tropic Euro, although I’ve had friends and readers tell me it can become monotonous after a lot of games. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me.

17. Lost Cities: Full review. This was the best two-person game we’d found, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and the most portable game as well, since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. We’ve since moved on to some more complex two-player games, but for simplicity (without becoming dumb) this one is hard to top. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. You can knock out a game in 15 minutes or less, so it’s one to play multiple times in a sitting.

16. Samurai: Review of the iOS app, which is identical to the board game. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app, and aside from a slightly dated design and look to the pieces and the board, it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun.

15. Vikings: Full review. Currently out of print, and unavailable through that link (which I’m including anyway because used copies may appear there in the future). A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. I’m sad to see it out of print.

14. Orient Express: An outstanding game that’s long out of print (although there are two used copies on sale via that link); I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve.

13. Battle Line: Full review. Among the best two-player games we’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind Lost Cities. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well.

12. Thurn and Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. Just don’t do what I did and play it against an operations consultant, lest you get your clock cleaned. Currently out of print.

11. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline.

10. Tigris and Euphrates: Review of the iOS app. The magnum opus from Reiner Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. One of two games on this list I don’t own in physical form; the current version (sold through that amazon link) includes some minor expansions I haven’t tried.

9. Pandemic: Full review. We haven’t tried many cooperative games, but this one sets a very high bar. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. I haven’t tried the On The Brink expansion, but several people (including my sister and her husband) rave about what it brings to the base game. If you’re looking for a cooperative game you can play with kids, try Forbidden Island, from the same developer but much easier to learn and to win.

8. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur has supplanted Lost Cities as our go-to two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour.

7. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn.

6. Dominion: Full review. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are four major expansions out there, including the potential standalone Dominion: Intrigue game – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think we have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. We own Dominion Seaside (which is outstanding) and Dominion: Alchemy (which I find a little weird), plus a standalone expansion further up this list.

5. The Settlers of Catan: I had this on top of the rankings every previous time I did this list, but it’s not realistic for me to rank it there any more when we rarely pull the game out to play it. It made this market, as a game with simple rules that were easy to learn, less luck than the typical old-school board game, and several different strategies that could lead you to victory. It’s just been surpassed by better games – games that are more fun, more complex, better designed – to the point where it’s more of a gateway game, even for us, than a core game we’ll return to again and again. We did play it dozens of times over the last few years, and if you own nothing on this list (and are good with a game that requires at least three players), this is an excellent place to start.

4. Dominion: Intrigue. Intrigue can be combined with the base game of Dominion, but unlike other Dominion expansions (of which there are now approximately 82, with a new one released every other week, or so it seems) Intrigue is a complete game right out of the box because it includes the money and point cards. And it’s better than the original game when both are viewed without any expansions because it’s more interactive – Intrigue lives up to its name in the sense that you should spend much of your time either plotting against your neighbors or trying to defend yourself, which makes the “Big Money” strategy in the base game much less effective. The changes make the game longer, but more even, and more fun.

3. Ticket to Ride. Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. We also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them.

2. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders has swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) this year for good reason – it’s the best new game to come on the scene in a few years, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. We saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that we couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up our first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well.

1. Carcassonne. Full review. I wrote last year that the game “keeps growing on me,” and that has proven true, especially with the best-of-breed iOS app (in which I have now played at least four of you). It brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. We own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. We also have Inns and Cathedrals, which we’ve only used once; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent.

Games I’ve dropped from the list, because the article was getting too long: Babel, Metro, Rivals for Catan (card game). I also removed the party game Wise and Otherwise, only because I chose to limit this list to strategy games. We do still like W&O.

I own Through the Desert and Le Havre but have yet to play either. I’ve tried Ascension and Wits & Wagers but wouldn’t rank either one in the top 30. Beyond those, I’m open to suggestions for future purchases!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, rankings

→ November 21, 2011
→ By keith

Here’s Looking at Euclid.

In case you’re interested, amazon has the Blu-Ray edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy on sale for $49.99 (almost 60% off). Not sure how long that sale will last.

—

Alex Bellos’ Here’s Looking at Euclid (known as Alex’s Adventures in Numberland in the U.K.) is a little lighter than the last math book I read, focusing instead of numerical oddities and paradoxes as well as the history of basic math. He keeps the tone light by revolving each chapter around one or more interesting personalities, such as the English dentist who used &#981 (the golden ratio) to design more attractive dentures or the various people involved in the invention and rise of sudoku.

Bellos’ gift with this book is to take mathematical subjects that might seem intimidating, such as the nature of irrational numbers like &#981 and &#960 or the concept of the normal distribution, and wraps them in interesting, easily accessible stories that might be enjoyed even by the math-phobic. There’s also an undercurrent here, only mentioned explicitly in one chapter, of sentiment that we don’t really do a good job of teaching math in American public schools. He talks about the need for someone to develop the number zero, without which no numerical system can properly function, and discusses a tribe in the Amazon that has no word for any number larger than five. The chapter on probability revolves around – what else? – gambling, from a conversation with a slot-machine developer to stories of people who figured out how to beat the house and forced changes like more frequent shuffling of more decks at the blackjack table. The final chapter was a real rarity, as it brought together one of my interests (math) with one of my wife’s (crafting) with a discussion of hyperbolic crochet, a way of building models of surfaces with constant negative curvature using yarn, which leads into a discussion of infinity and, of course, a stop at the Hilbert Hotel.

The book is not a straight narrative, but a series of chapters that can stand on their own, although Bellos tries to put them in a logical order from smaller concepts to larger ones. Readers generally interested in math will likely read it straight through – and quickly, as I did, because it’s well-written and I love the topic – but the design does allow anyone frustrated by the mathier sections to just jump ahead to the next part or the next chapter. There’s very little in here that a high school junior wouldn’t follow, however; calculus is mentioned but never used, and the hardest conceptual material appears in the final chapter.

Sudoku fans among you might be surprised to read about the puzzle’s history in the chapter “Playtime,” about math-based puzzles (including comments from Martin Gardner, not long before he died). A square of n smaller squares containing all the integers from 1 to n where all the rows, columns, and corner-to-corner diagonals add up to the same total is called a “magic square,” and has been known and studied since antiquity in Chinese, Indian, and Arab cultures, even finding favor with modern mathematicians like Leonhard Euler. The closest predecessor of modern Sudoku was first designed in 1979 by an American, Howard Garns, but redesigned by a Japanese puzzle maker named Maki Kaji and popularized by a New Zealand man named Wayne Gould, who saw one of Kaji’s puzzles in 1997 and wrote a computer program to generate them en masse. (For whatever it’s worth, I can’t stand sudoku.)

I’d love to see Bellos tackle more difficult mathematical material, given how well he translated the subjects he covered here into plain English and his ability to build a narrative around one or more people that kept the book from ever becoming dry. But I can imagine a sequel to Here’s Looking at Euclid (although I shudder to imagine the potential titles – Are Euclidding Me?) that keeps the material on the same level, as the world of math and numbers has far more stories to tell than Bellos fit into this one book.

Next up: Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide, written by the very funny folks behind the @FakeAPStylebook Twitter account. I’ve read 75 pages so far, but that’s enough to know that every writer in the world will find at least something in here that s/he finds absolutely hilarious, since it touches on all areas of writing and has enough one-liners and short sections that there’s a good mix of dry humor and crude. I received review copies of both this and Euclid from the publishers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, math, non-fiction

→ November 18, 2011
→ By keith

The Poincaré Conjecture.

As you probably noticed, I’ve got a new design here on the dish, one that was long overdue. I’d like to thank (and credit) Thomas Griffin for designing and setting up the theme, and reader Sara Showalter for designing that awesome custom header image.

—

The Poincaré Conjecture was one of seven Millennium Prize Problems identified by the Clay Institute in 2000 as the most significant unsolved problems (or unproven theorems) in mathematics, and at this point it is the only one of the seven problems that has been solved. Such a solution should have earned its developer, in this case a somewhat reclusive Russian named Grigori Perelman, a million-dollar prize, but Perelman rejected the prize and the Fields Medal he was to be awarded for his solution. (The Riemann Hypothesis, which I discussed in my review last year of Prime Obsession, is another one of the seven.)

In his 2007 book, The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe (still on sale for $6.38 as a bargain book on amazon), Donal O’Shea, Dean of Faculty at Mt. Holyoke College and a professor of mathematics, gives a brisk history of the Conjecture with a quick mention of its solution. The first half of the book, from Euclid and Pythagoras up to Henri Poincaré and the early 20th century, was relatively fast-moving (for a math book) and easy to follow, but when O’Shea got deeper into topological discussions of the Conjecture, his explanations became shorter and I found myself getting lost.

The Poincaré Conjecture states that:

Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.

In lay terms – and I apologize if I get this wrong – it means that any four-dimensional shape that is internally continuous and has no boundary can be mapped, point for point, to the four-dimensional shape called the “3-sphere.” The 3-sphere contains every point in 4-space equidistant from a single center; a point in 4-space is defined the set of coordinates (w, x, y, z). Think of a three-dimensional sphere, defined by all points (x, y, z) 1 unit distant from a single point, such as (0, 0, 0); this sphere will include (1, 0, 0), (0, -1, 0), (0, ?2, ?2), and all other points such that the square root of their sums equals one. (This is similar to the Pythagorean Theorem, but with another variable added to the sum.) We can picture this sphere in 3-space, so while we can’t picture the 3-sphere in 4-space, we can at least follow the math – the 3-sphere of unit 1 and center (0, 0, 0, 0) will include the points (1, 0, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0, 0), (0, 0, 1, 0), and so on.

Henri Poincaré, a prolific and brilliant French mathematician who built on work done by Bernhard Riemann, conjectured but could not prove that any four-dimensional shape that is “simply connected” – where any loop including two points can be reduced to a single point, meaning there is no disruption in the overall shape inside of such a loop – and “closed” – meaning if you walked on its surface, you would never reach an edge or boundary because the space closes around on itself – can me mapped, point for point, to the 3-sphere. As it turns out, this conjecture was extremely hard to prove, requiring mathematial concepts that did not exist at the time of the conjecture, and relevant to the question of the shape of the universe.

O’Shea did a solid job going into the history of first Euclidean and then non-Euclidean geometry, with interesting digressions on the lasting nature of the mathematical works of the ancient Greeks, how discoveries by Arab and Indian mathematicians (who were often religious leaders as well) spread to Europe, and how much knowledge was lost along the way, including much of Euclid’s work lost in the fire at the library of Alexandria. Poincaré himself is not an ideal central figure for a work of non-fiction, only jumping off the page in the chapter outlining his rivalry (and flame war, in letters) with the Prussian nationalist mathematician Felix Klein.

Where O’Shea lost me was with very brief introductions of critical terms used to describe the search for the Conjecture’s proof, then repeated use of those terms without sufficient explanation. I never encountered tensors in any of the math classes I took in school, and I don’t know what Ricci flows are (they were only created/discovered in 1981), or Betti numbers, or Laplace operators, but you need to understand those terms – and I mean really understand them – to follow the descriptions of the various steps leading up to and including Perelman’s solution. This is no small task; I’m asking O’Shea to describe upper-level college mathematics topics to readers who may not have gone beyond first-order calculus in a way that they will understand it. I don’t think he achieved that goal here.

I’m also not sure that O’Shea managed to deliver on the book’s subtitle. That the Poincaré Conjecture’s answer might help us understand the shape of the universe does not appear to be in any doubt. That it pushes us further toward understanding the shape of the universe is unclear, both from the book and from what I could find online that didn’t exceed my understanding. There does seem to be some thought that the universe might be a Poincaré dodecahedral space (also called a Poincaré homology sphere), a closed 3-manifold that is not simply connected, formed by taking opposing faces of a dodecahedron, rotating one to align with its opposite, and then smushing the dodecahedron and gluing each pair of faces together to form a 3-manifold in 4-space that is not homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. And I’ll stop there before I get further out of my league.

If you’re interested in these great problems of mathematics, I’d recommend John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession, which I mentioned above and found more accessible than O’Shea’s book even though the problem under consideration, the Riemann Hypothesis, remains unsolved and likely has no practical application. O’Shea’s book reminded me of Amir Aczel’s slim volume called Fermat’s Last Theorem, also rather tricky to follow because of its heavy use of topology but with a bit more drama to help the reader plow through the less scrutable parts.

Next up: Sticking with math, I’m halfway through Alex Bellos’ Here’s Looking at Euclid, sent to me by the publisher earlier this year. It’s a fun tour of mathematical puzzles and oddities with a few dashes of number theory thrown in, but nothing you couldn’t follow if you have a high school degree.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: math, non-fiction

→ November 17, 2011
→ By keith

Top Chef S9E3.

Sorry I skipped last week’s episode, but I’ll do my best to blog each week from here on out.

* Not discussed enough in the debate over purchasing cooked shrimp (which was an obvious reason for an elimination) is the idea of serving shrimp cocktail at all on Top Chef. I fail to see any way in which that could be turned into a potential winning dish, and it absolutely screams 1970s cocktail party – or bad hotel buffet. And it’s not Mexican. The fact that the pink team never thought, “Hey, this is probably a terrible idea for a dish,” is disturbing.

* Store-bought tortillas. You knew that was going to come back to bite someone, right? Have these chefs watched the show before?

* Given how unattractive the tres leches cake was, and the history of early eliminations for chefs who make dessert, Heather just got her ass saved by the rest of her team. Not only was it leaning – she blamed the heat in the kitchen, which is possible, except aren’t chefs on this show always complaining about the heat in the kitchens? – but it was decorated like an Easter bonnet (I think Hugh said that), not for a quinceañera. They didn’t love Dakota’s cake, but at least it looked the part.

* Was it odd that we didn’t get an individual winner? I haven’t seen enough of the early seasons (I jumped in halfway through the Voltaggios’ Shermanesque march through season 6) to know if this is unusual. Potential winners for me included Chris J.’s green chile, mushroom, and oaxaca empanadas, Beverly’s short rib taco with kimchi (recipe is kind of missing the part where you cook the short ribs), Chuy’s braised goat birria, and Paul’s shrimp ceviche in yuzu with corn salsa. I’d love to try that last one with a firm-fleshed white fish. (One note on Chuy’s recipe: The peanut salsa calls for 3 cups of peanuts, 8 guajillo chiles … and 1/8 tsp of cumin. Really? A good three-fingered pinch of cumin is really going to make a difference in two pounds of spicy, crunchy peanut butter? Come on.)

* Slightly surprised Chris C. – who is Anthony Dinozo from NCIS – didn’t get called out for a dish that was a little simple for Top Chef. I guess it was extremely well done.

* Did any chef actually believe they’d face a live rattlesnake in their quickfire boxes? They’re poisonous. Bravo is not going to risk a fatal snake bite on Top Chef.

* The whole “…, bitches” meme needs to die a quick and painful death. Not only is it incredibly derogatory towards women, just about everyone sounds like an idiot saying it. You are not Rick James. Stop it.

* Contrast Chuy’s leadership style – not loud, but clearly in control, leading through advice and example but never by scolding or patronizing anyone – with Sarah’s. Sarah seemed to want to be in control yet totally uncomfortable being assertive without talking down to her teammates (and Lindsay was 1A to Sarah’s 1 here). I didn’t see accountability for the shopping errors anywhere, which should come down to proper menu planning and clearer directions to the other half of the team. You can’t run a team of eight anythings without someone taking the lead. If Sarah had gone home instead of Keith, it would have been fully justified.

* What a huge boost Hugh Acheson is to judges’ table. He’s hilarious and oozes common sense; Tom Colicchio can be funny, but his humor often comes off as dismissive, whereas Hugh can be just as critical but his delivery is far more good-natured. His blog on the show is a must-read – he’s just as funny in print, with his post on this week’s episode poking fun at maybe half the chefs in the competition, and even a fellow judge or two. (“Padma double dips. There a lot of innuendo.”) Gail Simmons might be better-looking, but she doesn’t bring half of Hugh’s humor or insight to judges’ table.

* I skipped the first Last Chance Kitchen, but watched this one to see how my namesake made out. Interesting to see that the chefs didn’t know of LCK’s existence. I thought the concept might be dumb, but this challenge was very straightforward – no gimmicks, heavy emphasis on the food. I won’t spoil who won this face-off, but one comment is that the winner’s dish follows a structure that has, at least over the past three seasons, proven very successful on Top Chef when it’s executed properly.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: top chef, tv

→ November 16, 2011
→ By keith

Gifts for cooks, part two.

When I posted my list of gift recommendations for cooks last year, it was supposed to be part one of two, with the second part including more expensive kitchen items. That somehow never happened, but I figured there’s at least some symmetry in producing the second half of the post almost exactly a year later. That first list includes items at $30 and under, including the Victorinox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife that America’s Test Kitchen always recommends. (I own a more expensive Henckels, but it’s not worth paying the premium just for a better handle.)

These items range from $13 to $299, and range from “I couldn’t cook without this” to “I just love waffles.” I’ve included basic recipes with most of the devices to give a sense of how I use them.

Cuisinart 7-Cup Food Processor

This is the big one – if you’re going to purchase one major kitchen appliance for yourself, or want to purchase something for a friend who’s just starting out that will get him/her ten or more years of heavy use, you want a food processor. It’s the only way to make a decent pesto genovese, as well as roasted red pepper pesto or any other pesto you desire. It’s great for any sauce requiring an emulsion, like mayonnaise or harissa, or for hummus or homemade nut butters. It can convert stale or dried bread into bread crumbs, almonds into almond crumbs. I made a slightly easier version of sauce aux champignons recently (with brown stock rather than demi-glace – sorry, purists), then pureed the rest in the food processor the next night and used it for bruschetta.

I use my food processor every year to make pumpkin pie – the filling (from Baking Illustrated) is a cooked custard, after all. And I use it to make the pie dough for that and any other kind of pie – I’m sure some folks swear by the manual method, but you get much more even distribution of fat throughout the flour with the machine; the same applies to biscuits and scones any other baked good where you need to work the fat into the flour. I’ve used it to grind regular sugar to make superfine sugar (rather than buying superfine sugar specifically) for meringues.

Any decent food processor will also come with disc attachments to replace the blade for slicing or julienning; I only resort to this when I’ve got a lot of vegetation to plow through, preferring my Kyocera hand-held mandoline when I need a finer slice. If you don’t cook because you hate the prep work, though, a food processor may eliminate that obstacle.

We got our food processor fifteen years ago and it still runs; it’s also a Cuisinart and is a 7-cup model like the one linked above, which is nearly half off at $100. The one application where I wish I had a larger model is the pumpkin pie, which always ends up leaking because the recipe produces more filling than one crust can hold anyway.

* Season a trout fillet with salt and pepper, press it into almond crumbs, then pan-fry for two minutes per side. Add a little more butter to the skillet and a chopped shallot, let it brown, season with salt and pepper, and there’s your sauce. Bonus: deglaze the pan with white wine or – with the flame OFF, please – Chartreuse liquor.

KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus 5-Quart Stand Mixer

The model I own is slightly smaller than the one in that link, and the motor is substantially weaker (275 watts vs 450 in the 5-quart), and those “slightly” modifiers make all the difference; if I was in the market for one today, I’d spend the extra $100 and get the one I linked here. The 4.5-quart model tends to walk on the counter when working something strong like bread dough, and the bowl is a little too small for some applications – I made a genoise years ago that threatened to spill out of it and take over the counter like ice-nine.

Why do you need a stand mixer? Its primary benefit is in baking. If all ingredients are at room temperature, I can use my stand mixer to get cookies in the oven inside of ten minutes*. It’s great for meringues or anything built on egg foams, like buttercream – you really don’t want to stand there for ten minutes while you incorporate a pound of butter, one tablespoon at a time. (That’s 32 Tbsp.) I’ve made Alton Brown’s brownie recipe in here many times; it starts with beating four eggs until well-combined, after which you’re gradually adding various ingredients to build the batter. It’s a huge benefit to have both hands free while the machine is mixing.

The stand mixer is also invaluable for making breads with very wet doughs, like pain francese, or breads that require substantial gluten production that would be hard to achieve by hand, like pizza dough. You can also purchase attachments for the stand mixer to turn it into a pasta maker (I have this one; works well, bit tricky to clean) or a meat grinder (on the wishlist). The lone negative of owning a stand mixer is that there’s a good chance it will live on your counter, because it’s too tall to fit in most cabinets and heavy enough that you won’t want to store it in a difficult-to-reach place.

I’ve hesitated to recommend stand mixers before because of their cost – that model is a steal at $299, but three bills is a lot of money to most people. And that’s why I haven’t upgraded the model we’ve had for sixteen years (it was a wedding present).

EDIT: A reader explained in the comments that newer KitchenAid mixers don’t hold up as well as the model I own, and recommends the Cuisinart SM-55BC 5-1/2-Quart 12-Speed Stand Mixer, Brushed Chrome instead.

* Basic cookie formula: Cream two sticks (½ pound) of butter with ¾ cup each white and dark brown sugar for four minutes. Add two eggs, 1 tsp vanilla, with the mixer running. Turn the mixer off and add (in two installments) 300 g flour premixed with 1 tsp each baking soda and salt. Mix, stop, add the remainder, mix again. Scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula. Stir in mix-ins by hand – chocolate chips, dried fruit, toasted nuts, whatever; I think 1½ cups of mix-ins works for this batch size. Bake at 375 until the edges just start to brown.

Hamilton Beach 6-Quart Slow Cooker

I just got a slow cooker last month and have used it four times – once for short ribs, twice for carnitas (pork shoulder that ends up poaching in rendered fat), and once for dried canellini beans (which overcooked, so the magic time is under six hours, clearly). Based on that limited sample, I am kicking myself for not getting one sooner; not only is using it easy, but it frees up a burner or the oven to make something else, which, unless you’re rocking a six-burner professional stove, is a key consideration. I can fit a 3-pound pork shoulder in this one comfortably, and could probably have cooked 2 cups of dried beans. One suggestion I’ve read in several places is to line the bottom of the ceramic insert with aromatics, like sliced onions, when cooking meat, so that the meat doesn’t burn or stick to the bottom. I’m toying with the idea of braising duck legs in there for Thanksgiving, freeing the oven up for the duck breasts. (No point in making turkey when no one here really likes it.) The one thing I particularly wanted in a slow cooker was an electronic timer; lots of purists, including Alton Brown, recommend older models that have analog dials, but I like computers and wanted one that would shut itself off and free me to leave the house if I needed to, say, pick up my daughter from school just as the short ribs were done.

* Short ribs: Trim excess fat. Season ribs with salt, pepper, and dried thyme and sear on all sides in Dutch oven; remove to slow cooker. Add one onion, diced; two carrots, diced; two celery stalks, diced; pinch of salt. Saute to deglaze pan. Add one bottle/can of good quality beer, scrape bottom to finish deglazing, then pour the entire mixture into the slow cooker. Cook six hours on low until ribs are falling off the bone. Remove ribs, tear into large chunks (removing bones), season again with salt, pepper, and thyme, and bake ten minutes at 450 degrees. Use a fat separator to strain cooking liquid; reduce liquid (after removing the fat) by half to form a sauce.

Kitchen Scale

Again, not the exact model that I have, but it’s the same manufacturer; my model is discontinued, but I’ve been very happy with it and with Salter, who honored the ten-year warranty with a brand-new model when mine malfunctioned about four or five years ago. If you want to cook, you need a kitchen scale – it can be a cheap one if you’re not baking, but baking is chemistry and chemistry requires precise measurements, at which point you’ll want a good digital scale like this one. If you want a different model, look for one that does metric as well as ~~archaic~~ English measurements. The glass top isn’t necessary – and of course it makes the scale more fragile – but it looks awesome.

Black & Decker Grill and Waffle Baker

How much do I love this thing? I bought my first one in 1998. It died this spring and I went online and ordered the same model. The grids are reversible – one side flat for pancakes (or, I suppose, pressed sandwiches), one side for waffles, not Belgian-style, but thinner and better suited to conventional batters that get lift from chemical leaveners but not yeast or an egg white foam. And once you buy one of these (currently half off at $29 through that link), you might want to check out the Waffleizer blog and get creative. (I tried to waffle some polenta once. Took me two days to clean the grids.)

Basic waffles: Preheat waffle iron. Beat 3 eggs and combine in a bowl with 1½ cups milk, ½ tsp vanilla, 1 stick (8 Tbsp) melted unsalted butter, and 4 Tbsp vegetable oil. In another bowl whisk together 220 grams AP flour (roughly 1¾ cups), 1 Tbsp baking powder, ½ tsp salt, and ½ to 1 Tbsp white or brown sugar. (You can also mix the sugar with the wet ingredients, which is slightly easier for brown.) Dump the wet stuff into the dry stuff, whisk just to combine – no dry stuff visible, but not smooth. Pour by ½ to ¾ cupfuls on to the waffle iron and cook until the steaming slows, about four minutes on this iron. Serve immediately, keep warm in a 200 degree oven directly on the oven racks, or cool on cooling racks and freeze. Adapted from Joy of Cooking.

Lodge 12-Inch Cast Iron Skillet

Lives in my oven. Used four nights a week, at a minimum. I buy Dobie non-abrasive pads to clean them and generally just use hot water. I own several nonstick skillets – including this one – but the cast iron skillet is the workhorse. Nothing holds or distributes heat as well, and if you season and clean it properly it will gradually acquire a non-stick or at least less-stick surface.

–

I do own a Krups La Glaciere ice cream maker, but Krups is out of the ice cream maker business, unfortunately. For a home model, it is excellent, as long as you accept you won’t get anything as smooth as you get from a commercial machine. I also have a Le Creuset Dutch oven that I received as a birthday gift a few years ago and love; you can buy the exact model on amazon but if you live near a Le Creuset outlet you can get it for $100 less, and even cheaper than that if you choose a color they’re discontinuing. It’s a splurge, far from necessary, but it’s great for stews and slow braises and easier to clean than traditional cast iron. No-knead bread recipes often rely on Dutch ovens to allow the bread to steam itself and produce a crispier crust.

One thing I don’t own: A double boiler. I had one for years, but it just took up space, wasn’t good for anything else, and took more effort to clean because of the groove in the top pot. I just sit a bowl above a pot of simmering water, or a smaller skillet inside a larger one.

I don’t think I have anything else in the kitchen, other than the espresso maker, that costs over $100. If you don’t bake, you may not need anything (other than major appliances) in your kitchen that will run you more than $60-70 to prepare pretty sophisticated meals. A good knife, three good pots/pans, some knowhow, and the right ingredients will go further for you than all of these toys. The toys just make everything easier.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Cooking, gift guides, highly recommended, recipes, shopping

→ November 15, 2011
→ By keith

Tigris & Euphrates app.

Codito is the development group behind Tikal, Puerto Rico, Medici, and Ra, solid offerings but none earning top marks from me. Their latest offering, Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates, is their best boardgame app yet, adapting a classic 1997 boardgame from Knizia in an attractive format with a strong tutorial and (I think) very solid AI opponents. It went on sale today for $5.99.

I haven’t played the physical version of the game or reviewed it here, so if you haven’t played it, here’s an overview of the game, ranked 13th overall on Boardgamegeek. Tigris & Euphrates uses an unusual tile system where players are represented on the board by icon rather than color – that is, every player has a red leader, but each player’s red leader has his unique symbol on it. Players build “kingdoms” of adjacent tiles in each of four colors (red, green, blue, black) on a board that includes land spaces and river spaces, the latter along two rivers representing those of the game’s title. Players acquire points by placing leaders on the board and then placing regular tiles in those colors in the same kingdom as their leader(s). For example, if you have a black leader in a kingdom and place a black tile anywhere within that kingdom – contiguous with the leader tile – you earn a point in black. Players earn points in each of the four colors, and the winner is the player with the highest low score. In other words, the score that matters most is your worst score across the four colors.

You can also earn points by making a 2×2 square of tiles of the same color and converting it into a two-color “monument” that produces one point per turn in each of those two colors, awarded to the leaders in the same kingdom. And you can earn “treasures,” wild-card points that can be added to your score in any of the four colors, which the app automatically assigns to your current worst color.

On each turn, a player has two actions, which can include placing a tile, placing a leader, swapping any of the tiles from his hand for new ones, or placing one of two “catastrophe” tiles that destroy the tiles (not leaders) on which they’re placed.

Of course, there’s conflict as players compete to control various kingdoms with their leader tokens. You can place one of your leaders on a kingdom with another player’s leader in that same color, triggering a “revolt” that is resolved by the use of red tiles on the board and from your hand, regardless of the color at stake. Conflicts also arise when kingdoms are merged through tile placement; the leader with the most tiles of the same color currently in its kingdom, supplemented with tiles from that player’s hand, wins the conflict. The loser of either kind of battle removes his leader from the board.

I’ve glossed over a few details, but the key takeaway if you’ve never played the game is that each player has to balance a number of different variables: boost your lowest score, protect your existing leaders, build your hand tiles (you get six at any time) to attack an opponent, watch opponents’ lowest scores and try to sabotage them, and so on. It’s very rich, and once you play a game or two, actually quite simple to play despite the seemingly long list of rules. Knizia’s games are often subtly complex yet very intuitive on the surface, and Tigris & Euphrates qualifies as well.

The app is outstanding. The board is extremely clear and easy to navigate on the iPad; the icons on tiles are very clear, and it’s easy to see what you have available to you at any given time, as well as the percentage of the tile stack remaining. Leaders are labeled with a number indicating their current strength. Conflict resolution is straightforward and the game includes optional confirmation dialog boxes for any move, which prevents you from accidentally tanking the game through an incorrect move. You can undo either or both of your previous moves before you end your turn, unless the move was a conflict that has now been resolved. (One quibble: When playing only AI opponents, you still can’t undo a resolved conflict; since playing AI players is more like training or an extended tutorial, this might be a nice feature to have so you can get a feel for the success rates of conflicts.) Most importantly, your point totals are clear and obvious, with your current low score highlight, and the app handles the treasures for you.

I’ve found the AI players to be strong enough to keep the game challenging. There are five difficulty levels, and after waxing two low-level AIs in my first game I dialed both up to four … and then lost seven straight times. (At least.) The eventual victory, followed by a victory against two level-five AIs, were quite satisfying. There’s some predictability even in the harder AIs, especially early in the game, but their strength is that they don’t miss obvious moves and don’t hesitate to attack via all three methods (revolt, merging kingdoms, catastrophes). I’d like to try this online, but as a standalone app it’s very strong because the AI players are so well-designed. The game also comes with one of the longest, most detailed tutorials I’ve come across, reminiscent of the one in Samurai, which would be my previous gold standard for app tutorials. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.

I’ve ranked boardgame apps without grading them, but I’d say the inner circle of apps – where the underlying game is strong; the app runs well, looks good, and plays easily; the AI players are strong; and online multiplayer works – would now include five games (links go to reviews): Carcassonne, Samurai, Battle Line, Ticket to Ride, and Tigris & Euphrates. This most recent addition is the most complex of the five for those of you looking for a more hardcore experience, but plays reasonably quickly, with three-player games against two AI opponents taking me 15-17 minutes. I highly recommend it if you’re slightly obsessed with these games, as I am.

Full disclosure: I received a free version of this app from the developers prior to its release. Also, would anyone object to me including T&E on the forthcoming updated board game rankings, even though I haven’t played the physical game?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, highly recommended, reiner knizia, strategy games

→ November 14, 2011
→ By keith

It Can’t Happen Here.

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is the best-known of his works after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 (making him the first American author so honored, although they resumed their habit of giving the award to western Europeans the following year). It’s a protest novel, less purely literary than his classic novels of the 1920s (led by Arrowsmith, Babbitt, and Main Street), while angrier and livelier and a faster read.

It Can’t Happen Here melds two protests into one. Lewis depicts a United States leading up to and in the first few years after the 1936 election, where the nation seems to wilfully ignore the tyranny and pending genocide happening in Europe, and is also ripe for the rise of a demagogue of its own, a role filled by Berzelius “Buzz” Wintrip. Wintrip, a blowhard right-wing senator who spouts populist nonsense aimed at propelling himself to the White House, is backed up by Lee Sarason, the brains of the operation to elect Wintrip and a man who similarly desires power but does so for different ends. Wintrip’s ascension to President and establishment of his own dictatorship comes despite the claims of several characters early in the book that what happened in Germany and Italy “can’t happen here.”

Doremus Jessup, a liberal newspaper editor in a small town in Vermont, stands as one of the few voices of reason before Wintrip’s election, stating quite clearly that it can. He is the book’s great moral center despite a lack of moralizing; his goals are fundamental and based not on orthodoxy or theology, but on simple concepts of basic human rights and dignity. He also knows a charlatan when he sees one, and fears Wintrip’s rise because he recognizes that human nature will push him into office and then will allow the same people who voted for him to be ruled by his iron fist.

Jessup’s observations and Lewis’ simultaneous use of broad and fine strokes to define his setting give the book such tremendous staying power, so that even seventy-five years after its publication, Jessup’s observations (these before the election) still seem so familiar today:

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage‘ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles?’ And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the – well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimee McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina moutnaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their Children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? (…) Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours!”

I don’t remember those incidents, and a few of the names were completely unfamiliar to me, but I remember Freedom fries, and I remember the Kansas evolution hearings, and I remember a whisper campaign about the religion of a major party Presidential candidate, and I remember hearing a crowd cheer the governor who mentioned the 234 executions during his tenure, and I don’t really think anything is all that different today from the nation Sinclair described 75 years ago. We have more money and better toys and the tremendous degree of freedom afforded by the Internet, but we are still the same people subject to the same forces of persuasion.

The downside of Lewis’ anger is that he spends so much time setting up his alternate history and having the narrator and/or Jessup verbally knock it down that the personal part of the plot comes in fits and starts. Wintrip is elected and within hours declares martial law and begins a Khmer Rouge-like process of rolling back the clock on progress while rounding up enemies, real and potential, a process that accelerates as time passes and leads to the introduction of concentration camps. Jessup joins the opposition, supported by a government-in-exile based out of Canada, as do several members of his family and his circle of friends and business associates (with a few turncoat exceptions, including his son), with largely predictable results. There’s some narrative greed from the macro storyline as unrest begins to build locally and nationally, and more from the government’s reactions to Jessup’s treason, but the two storylines aren’t well-blended. When I was fifteen, I would have been riveted by things like descriptions of how Wintrip abolished the states and established new subdivisions to the country, but now I find them boring.

The other problem with It Can’t Happen Here is inherent to the genre of protest/dystopian novels – you know where they’re going. The individual rebels, ends up arrested, some people close to him will suffer or be killed, he’ll get out of prison, and so on. 1984, written thirteen years later, follows a similar structure but spends far less time on the political storyline and far more on Winston Smith himself. The timeless nature of Lewis’ observations on human nature and American culture balance out these flaws, but you have to be ready for a little preaching, as in these (very reasonable) lines from Jessup:

“I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

That could refer to battles today over stem cell research or vaccination, or to the murder of Hypatia sixteen centuries ago. I’d give Lewis a 50 for storyline, but a 60 for his incisive take on the baser side of our nature.

Next up: A change of pace to some non-fiction – Donal O’Shea’s The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, the story of the history and solution to another one of mathematics’ most famous problems, which lay unsolved for a hundred years (despite many attempts) until an eccentric Russian came up with a proof, only to decline the accolades that came with it. It’s a “bargain book” right now on Amazon at $6.38 new.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, dystopian, nobel prize, political novels, protest literature

→ November 11, 2011
→ By keith

Podcast and Michael Ruhlman’s books.

I did a solo Baseball Today podcast today, featuring Joe Sheehan talking free agency with me (including a diversion on the way teams view the catching position) and Michael Ruhlman talking food.

Michael’s newest book is Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto, an absolute must-own (I say that having owned it for inside of 24 hours). It’s a cookbook, but it’s more like an instruction manual for your kitchen, emphasizing fundamental techniques that will make everyone a better cook.

His previous cookbook, which also gets at fundamentals, was the indispensable Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, which I reviewed early last year.

Michael first entered the world of food writing not as a cookbook author, but as a writer of food stories, especially those around chefs and chef culture, including The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection (reviewed here) and The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, the latter of which is the book Michael mentioned on the show that had him shadowing students at the Culinary Institute of America and eventually cooking alongside them.

And, of course, Michael has co-authored several cookbooks with uberchef Thomas Keller, including the cookbook for Keller’s flagship restaurant, The French Laundry Cookbook. I’ve never seen this book myself, although there are several recipes from it in the back of Soul of a Chef that look amazing and intimidating all at once.

Finally, I recommend Michael’s blog for frequent recipes and ramblings on cooking, restaurants, and how we think about food.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, Cooking, podcast, ruhlman

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