→ December 25, 2009
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Top ten musicals.

Just one more sleep till Christmas, at least for those of you in the western hemisphere, so this post is an early present of sorts. For those of you who celebrate this particular holiday, have a safe and Merry Christmas tomorrow. And for those of you who celebrated Hanukkah, I hope you thought of me when you fried up some jam doughnuts.

—

We got The Sound of Music DVD for my daughter for Christmas – not among my favorite movies, but she loves all the songs the kids sing, and I have to admit that the bonus feature with all seven child actors reunited for the 40th anniversary of the film is awesome – but that spurred me to post a list I’ve meant to throw out there for a while: My own ten favorite musicals.

You’ll notice the absence of Judy Garland films, because I can’t stand her – not her voice, not her acting, nothing. And Meet Me in St. Louis was a stupid movie anyway. I also didn’t include West Side Story, which was ruined for me by the first scene; street “toughs” who run around New York dancing in tights are not tough and nothing they do afterwards will convince me otherwise.

Films that didn’t make the cut included The Muppet Christmas Carol (not enough of a musical), Brigadoon (good movie but the songs didn’t grab me), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (too long by half). One movie I have not seen that makes all of these lists is Cabaret. You’ll also notice that fatherhood has influenced this list quite a bit.

10. Mary Poppins. Probably my daughter’s all-time favorite movie, to the point where she heard a Julie Andrews song from the soundtrack of Camelot and shouted, “That sounds like Mary Poppins!” There’s enough humor for adults here and some strong visual effects, as well as a few songs that you still know by heart whether or not you want to, plus a performance from Arthur Treacher as the Constable, which makes me laugh just because of the fast-food chain that still bears his name. Best song: When my daughter was smaller, I’d swing her all around to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.”

9. Moulin Rouge!. It still amazes me that the huge success of this movie didn’t spur a new run of musicals from Hollywood, but apparently only Baz Luhrmann has the balls – or the good sense – to capitalize on the market for musical films. I thought the movie was incredibly creative in its reworking of pop songs into key plot elements, with lots of silliness and some very good performances by Ewan Macgregor, Nicole Kidman, and several of the supporting players. Best song: “Your Song.”

8. Aladdin. I’m not sure if any movie has had me laughing as consistently as Aladdin did on my first viewing, and it’s one of the only movies I’ve ever seen more than twice. It’s also one of the only animated films that had songs I might actually want to hear outside the context of the movie. Best song: “Prince Ali.”

7. Holiday Inn. A sentimental favorite, since I’ve been singing “You’re Easy to Dance With” to my daughter since she was a few days old. The plot is silly – it’s an excuse to sing a bunch of holiday-themed songs, and it features perhaps the worst business model ever depicted in any movie: a hotel that only opens on holidays. There’s also an unfortunate blackface scene that’s woven into the plot, so if you watch the movie without it, a thin story gets thinner and a few lines won’t make sense, but watching the original version will have you cringing. Fred Astaire’s July 4th number is one of his best dances in any film. Best song: “You’re Easy to Dance With.”

6. Royal Wedding. Two iconic dance scenes make this movie: Fred Astaire dancing with a hatstand, and Astaire dancing on the ceiling. He had surprising chemistry with Jane Powell, a new partner for him who turned out to be perfect for some of the slapsticky numbers in the Astaire’s love interest is played by Sarah Churchill, daughter of Winston, although I found the idea that Astaire’s character would be smitten with her a little tough to swallow. Best song: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life,” a rare comic-dance number for Astaire, and later a Muppet Show sketch.

5. White Christmas. A little more story and better music than Holiday Inn, and the film avoids any racist undertones by sticking to an all-white cast. (Lest anyone get the wrong idea, that’s sarcasm.) Danny Kaye doesn’t have Fred Astaire’s dancing chops but is better with physical comedy, and Vera-Ellen was a much better dancer than either of the female leads in Holiday Inn. The film’s climax, while just as absurd as everything that leads up to it, has a lot of heart. Best song: “White Christmas.”

4. Once. A cult favorite that should have been a bigger hit, made on a shoestring budget with a plot that fit on the back of a napkin, it’s carried by two great performances and a heavy emphasis on realistic dialogue. It’s magical without magic other than the magic of music. Best song: “Falling Slowly.”

3. The Music Man. I’ve certainly made enough references to this movie in chats and on Twitter, but I have to admit I thought it was dumb the first time I saw it; it took a second viewing for me to realize how witty the movie is and the way it straddles the line between admiration and parody of the small-town Iowa culture of writer Meredith Wilson’s upbringing. The film’s vernacular is unique and comical – “You watch your phraseology!” – and the use of a barbershop quartet as actual characters in the film (they play the school board) instead of just props who sing was another nice touch. The only negative for me is that Shirley Jones gets stuck with three dud ballads, making her character boring next to all the fun that Robert Preston’s Harold Hill gets to have. Best song: “Wells Fargo Wagon,” although I imagine the most popular pick would be “Seventy-Six Trombones.”

2. My Fair Lady. Take a great play (Pygmalion) by a great playwright (Shaw) and add the most beautiful actress in the history of motion pictures (Audrey Hepburn) and a handful of memorable songs and you have the shortest three-hour movie ever made. Stanley Holloway, as Eliza Doolittle’s ne’er-do-well father, is a scene-stealer and gets the two funniest songs in the film. A remake is supposedly in the works, which strikes me as a brazen money-grab and a terrible idea, as movies like this should never, ever be subject to the indignity of a remake. Best song: “With a Little Bit of Luck.”

1. Singin’ in the Rain. The granddaddy of musicals, including no end of outstanding dance numbers – the title track, “Moses Supposes,” and “Good Morning” – a great comedy number from Donald O’Connor in “Make ‘Em Laugh,” and an actual plot aside from the standard-issue romance. The silent film era comes to an abrupt end and the characters, mostly silent-film stars, have to adapt to life in the talkies, which proves very difficult for Jean Hagen’s Lina Lamont, whose voice is like nails on a chalkboard and who mistakenly believes that the film studio’s marketing angle about a romance between her and Gene Kelly’s character has some basis in fact. Kelly, a raging perfectionist as a dancer, was at his peak here, and while he reportedly drove costar Debbie Reynolds to tears, the “Good Morning” number still amazes me every time I watch it. Best song: “Singin’ in the Rain.”

By the way, if any of you happen to end up with the new Tinker Bell DVD (The Lost Treasure), check out the fake blooper reel called “Scenes You Never Saw.” I still haven’t made it through the entire film proper (although my daughter loves it), but the four-minute outtake clip is hilarious.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , ,
→ December 23, 2009
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Recent ESPN posts.

Sorry for the lack of updates here, but it’s been busy around the house with Christmas coming and I’m still just halfway through A House for Mr. Biswas (although far enough along to decide that his problems are largely of his own making). If you haven’t seen my latest posts over at the Four-Letter, I broke down the Morrow-League and Vazquez-Melky trades, wrote a brief post on Fernando Rodney, and appeared on ESPN Radio’s AllNight on Wednesday morning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ December 19, 2009
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The Human Factor.

“And yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again … and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.”
“All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.”
“No? One can’t reason away regret – it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.”

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor is a spy novel that, as the title implies, focuses heavily on the human cost of espionage, particularly the psychological cost, as it follows MI6 agent Maurice Castle through his own reexamination of his motives and loyalties to an amoral institution that might be more dangerous than the people they’re allegedly fighting.

Castle is a British-born agent who, during a lengthy field op in South Africa, fell in love with a black woman and thus also fell afoul of the laws against interracial relationships during that country’s apartheid era. That woman, the Sarah of the quote above, escaped South Africa with the help of a prominent Communist and now lives with Maurice and her son (his stepson) in a quiet London suburb. Castle’s simple existence is compromised by a spiritual bankruptcy that becomes clearer to Castle as an investigation into a leak from his small department leads to unforeseen consequences and forces him to make a life-altering choice.

Greene’s view of spy games was that they were more mundane than typical spy novels and movies would imply, and the novel has very little violence and nothing you could call action, instead focusing on the individual characters, from the complex Castle to the true believer Percival to the unregenerate South African partisan Muller, and how they view and react to the possibility of a leak. Castle’s position is precarious by definition, as he’s one of only three or four potential leaks in the department, and he has a known connection to the communist faction in South Africa, whose white-led regime was at the time a battleground for the Cold War powers. He’s aware of the investigation, but when he sees how far Percival might go to protect the agency, regardless of the moral or legal implications of his action, he’s forced to act.

Greene was among the best practicioners of the spy novel for his very reluctance to rely on action sequences and overt violence, both of which are crutches for a novelist in any genre outside of hard-boiled detective fiction. Setting that restriction on his writing meant Greene had to spend more time on character development and crafting realistic dialogue and actions for his characters, whether he was writing a farce or, as in this novel, a serious commentary. He paints a bleak picture of intelligence services as bureaucracies filled with men who either have no moral compasses or are willing suppress them for the good of the agency, and in a secondary theme takes more than his share of shots at the apartheid policy of South Africa that was still in effect for sixteen years after The Human Factor‘s publication. But while Greene fleshes Castle out fully – not that he’s all that sympathetic, and it is his spiritual bankruptcy more than anyone’s that defines the book’s lack of a fixed morality – most of his secondary characters get secondary treatment. We see, for example, glimpses of the lonely career man Daintry, but his subplot has no start or finish and he appears in some ways to have wandered on to the wrong set. Cynthia, the primary secretary for Castle’s group, plays a key role in the investigation portion of the plot, but as a prop, not as a defined character. The Human Factor is thus more a story of bureaucratic decay in the intelligence service in pursuit of questionable means aimed at dubious ends than a story of its characters, even though the climax and denuoement are very much about Castle himself.

Next up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears on both the Modern Library and TIME 100 lists and is one of two books that seem to be at the head of the Nobel Prize-winner’s canon.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 15, 2009
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Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

—

Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 14, 2009
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New Insider column + TV.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2:40 pm EST and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight sometime between 10 and 11 pm EST.

Also, I’ve got a new blog post up on ESPN.com (for Insiders) on interesting non-tenders, as well as Colby Lewis, Jason Kendall, and the Rule 5 draft.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ December 13, 2009
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A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 11, 2009
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Indianapolis eats.

Indianapolis seems like a perfectly nice place to visit in the spring or summer, but its potential as a “walking city” (even though downtown is pretty heavy on the chain restaurants) was nonexistent the last two days, with temperatures of 20 F or below and winds from 20-40 mph or more. I rented a car, so I wasn’t limited to Subway and Rock Bottom, and was fortunate to have a cheat sheet of restaurants from reader Aaron G., who is responsible for sending me to every place in this writeup except for the barbecue joint GT South’s (which was recommended by at least one of you before the trip).

Taste Café is about twenty minutes outside the center of Indianapolis in a neighborhood called Broad Ripple, about as far as I ventured from downtown on the trip, and if it had been closer I probably would have gone every morning for breakfast. Their waffles looked amazing, but my visit to Taste was to serve as breakfast and lunch so I chose something more likely to get me through to dinner (which it did), an egg and bacon sandwich on Pullman bread with basil aioli. The eggs were over an inch thick, and I ended up doing a little culinary surgery to keep the sandwich from falling apart, while the basil aioli gave a sweet background note that balanced out the salty, smoky bacon. The bread – well, it’s hard to screw up Pullman bread, and this was very soft but strong enough to hold the contents together. The dish came with breakfast potatoes which were swimming in olive oil. Taste offers a solid selection of loose teas and a lot of seating for a breakfast/lunch café.

Hoaglin To Go Café does, in fact, offer seating and table service, despite the name, although they seem to do a thriving take-out service. Their breakfast menu focuses on egg dishes like omelets and quiches, but the standout item here is their potato gratin dish called pommes anna, sliced potatoes cooked through but still al dente with gruyere as the accent but not so much that the gratin fell apart. The omelet of the day (called their “Big O,” aren’t they clever) contained sausage, mushrooms, and artichokes, but it came as a simple omelet folded over those ingredients, rather than having them cooked in the omelet with the eggs as the binder. They also use high-quality sandwich bread.

Café Patachou is a local mini-chain that has a location within “walking distance*” of my hotel and the Marriott. The menu is a little less adventurous and inspired than those of the previous two places, although it offers plenty of options and the food quality is fine. I finally gave in and had a waffle, which was properly cooked with a crispy exterior but was very dense inside, and came with a slightly sad little fruit cup that I hope would be better when fruit is actually in season in Indiana. They have a wide selection of bagged teas from a company called Revolution.

*“Walking distance” is, of course, only applicable at certain times of year. I did walk to the café from my hotel, all of four blocks, and couldn’t feel my ears, the end of my nose, or my fingers (despite my gloves) by the time I got to the restaurant, and had to catch my breath when I got inside. I’d like to think Minor League Baseball has learned its lesson about putting the winter meetings** in cold-weather sites, but I doubt it.

**If Minor League Baseball organized the offseason meetings for the NHL, they’d rotate between Phoenix, Miami, and Houston.

Siam Square is a new Thai restaurant just outside downtown on the northwest-bound side of Virginia with a menu that reaches into other Asian cuisines but offers a number of standard and, according to my dinner partner Alex Speier (of WEEI.com fame), authentic Thai dishes. The vegetarian spring rolls contained fresh julienned vegetables instead of the sad, limp, cabbage-like slop they normally contain, and the rolls were about as non-greasy as spring rolls can get. The sweet sauce that usually accompanies them was kicked up about three notches with red chile pepper, so the sauce was complex instead of cloying. Their “siam ginger” stir fry was full of strips of ginger like strands of spaghetti squash, a vague hint of sweetness (palm sugar?), and fresh vegetables that still had all their texture and crunch even through cooking. The menu actually labels many dishes as “Mild not available,” although I tasted Alex’s pad pem and didn’t find it very spicy, which says something since I find almost everything with chile pepper in it to be spicy. The restaurant offers a bonus in a highly attractive blonde (and not Thai) server named Erin who probably justifies a visit to Siam Square all by herself.

Harry & Izzy’s is the casual restaurant next door to and associated with the century-old steakhouse St. Elmo’s, although the exteriors couldn’t be more different, with St. Elmo’s looking tired while Harry & Izzy’s looks new and inviting. What appears to be their signature sandwich, thinly sliced prime rib au jus with fresh horseradish sauce on focaccia, is outstanding, with meat that melts in your mouth and is tender and moist enough that the jus is truly optional. It comes with hand-cut fries on the side for $15 (that’s the lunch price), the same as I paid for just a steak sandwich at Lobel’s stand at Yankee Stadium for an inferior product.

GT South’s came in a recommendation from one of you (I apologize for forgetting who sent it) and also showed up online as a highly-regarded Q joint, so I trekked it out with Alex again to their location right off I-70. They have the standard array of smoked meats except for sausage, and allow you to add four ribs to any platter for about $5. Both the ribs and pulled pork were solid-average, good texture and strong smoky flavor, although the pulled pork was only lukewarm when it hit the table. Their turnip greens were oversalted, but the cornbread muffin that comes with the dish is money, with a perfect crust and a hint of tang from buttermilk. Alex went for the brisket and crushed it, which I’ll consider an endorsement.

Yats is a hole in the wall – in fact, you get your food from the kitchen through a hole in the wall that separates it from the dining room. Yats serves Cajun food, and they believe presentation is a waste of time, with most dishes comprising a stew or soup slopped over a bed of white rice. The menu is limited on Mondays, the day I went, but the hunter’s stew – andouille sausage, three beans, and tomatoes – was hearty, filling, not too salty, just a little too spicy so that the taste of the beans lost the battle. It’s a good place to eat when you want to be full for hours, and the meal and drink cost under $8.

The one disappointment of the trip was, unfortunately, one of the best-known and best-reviewed places, as well as a strong recommendation from Aaron G. and from Will Carroll, a small artisanal food shop and sandwich counter called Goose the Market. The store – part salumeria, part gelateria, part wine/beer shop, part fancy packaged food vendor – is certainly a foodie’s paradise, with high-end, small-batch, local goods mixed with somewhat rare or obscure imported items (like 00 flour, something I rarely see anywhere around Boston, or very good olive oils). The salumeria has many expected meat items and some unexpected ones like salmon pastrami, and the staff behind the counter are friendly and helpful. Even the cold drink case held a few surprises, like root beer and cream soda from Goose Island Brewery in Chicago. The disappointment came in the sandwich I ordered, the Batali, with a mix of Italian meats and cheeses on an outstanding pain a l’ancienne baguette with a hard, toothy crust. Unfortunately, the sandwich is piled with so many toppings that the meat and cheese are completely lost under the mayonnaise, pickled onions, and sliced jalapeños that I have no idea how good or flavorful the star ingredients actually were. I wish I’d had another day to try it again and order the same sandwich without the nonsense. It’s maybe a five to seven minute drive from downtown, straight north up Meridian from Monument Circle.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 7, 2009
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Bryan V’s short ribs, take one.

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I took a shot at Bryan Voltaggio’s short rib dish from the Top Chef semifinal, where he braised them with figs and then used the figs in the finishing “glaze” (which may have been more of a sauce). Several of you asked for the recipe for it, but I wouldn’t say what I did was quite ready for the dish – I need to alter it and preferably make it twice successfully before posting it. However, since you asked, here’s a rundown of what I intend to do the next time.

The actual cooking of the ribs themselves went pretty well. I started with just over two pounds but probably could have gone up to three without too much alteration. I deboned them (but froze the bones to make a little stock later on) and trimmed the excess fat; seasoned them with salt, pepper, and crumbled dried rosemary (my own – fresh rosemary in a dry kitchen for a week is dry enough to use here); then browned them on all sides in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat.

After that, I drained all but about 2 tablespoons of the fat and sweated one diced yellow onion, two diced carrots, three diced celery stalks, a smashed and chopped clove of garlic, salt, pepper, and another pinch of rosemary, scraping the pan bottom as they cooked. So far, I haven’t deviated from my basic short rib technique.

Next, I returned to the ribs to the pan and added ten dried figs that I’d halved, a cup of red wine, about ¾ of a cup of chicken stock, and two bay leaves. I brought it to a boil, covered it, and stuck it in a 350 degree oven for two hours.

At about 90 minutes, I had to add more braising liquid to the pot as the pan was starting to get dry. Alcohol, of course, boils at a much lower temperature than water, and I managed to cook too much of it off too soon. Next time around, I’m going to drop the temperature to at least 300 degrees and start with three cups of a half-and-half mixture of red wine and stock. (For the wine, I went with a very cheap Italian merlot and it worked just fine, although it met my desire for a wine without too much character so well that drinking it was a somber experience.)

Even with the loss of the liquid, the ribs reached the desired fall-apart texture and they acquired a faint tangy-sweet taste from the figs and wine. I took the pot from the oven, cranked it up to 450 degrees, threw the ribs into a roasting pan, and browned them for ten minutes.

The lost braising liquid also meant that I didn’t have much of a sauce at the end of the braising process, and pureeing what was in the pot produced a paste that had exactly the flavor I was looking for – strong, hint of sweet, more than a hint of acidity, a little earthy, very savory – but the wrong texture, even after I thinned it out with some added boiled stock. Next time, I’ll strain what’s in the pot, pressing the solids, and then thicken what comes out with some of the pureed solids until I reach the thick but pourable consistency I want.

This method sits on an extensible foundation that looks like this:

  • Trim, season with salt/pepper/herb, and brown
  • Add aromatics with more of the same herb
  • Braise in stock, wine, beer, or some combination of liquids
  • Re-brown at a higher temperature

You can use just about any dried herb; I’ve done it many times with thyme and always had success. Too much alcohol in the braise will result in too little liquid before the process is through, so if you want to use wine (or spirits) cut them with stock or broth or even water if you must. (I admit to wondering whether ginger beer has too much sugar for this task, as Dark-and-Stormy Short Ribs sound, in theory, quite appealing. The resulting glaze would probably be to die for.)

Removing the bones before braising is the key to making successful short ribs in my experience. They cook more quickly without the bones, and removing the bones means there’s a lot less fat in the pan at the end of the braise – you don’t that fat in your sauce, and you don’t want the ribs to braise in that fat unless you’re trying to make a short rib confit. If you debone them, brown them, and don’t overheat them during the braise, your finished product should be very good even if you flub the details as I did.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 6, 2009
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Codex.

I’ve got a few new pieces up on the Four-Letter, including reactions to the Noel Argüelles signing, the Chone Figgins signing, and James Paxton’s lawsuit against the University of Kentucky.

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Pseudo-intellectual thrillers have thrived in recent years as a literary genre, particularly in mass-market paperbacks, with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code leading the charge, although I think the style dates back to Michael Crichton’s preachy, predictable, very fast-paced novels from the early-to-mid-1990s. They’re potboilers in fancy dress, usually with lots of explanatory text so that you’ll understand the motive of the core crime or why everyone is running very fast. The technique of putting the protagonist in jeopardy and having various suspects and witnesses killed off over the course of a book works well in the spare writing of hard-boiled detective novels, but married with …

Lev Grossman, whose The Magicians was one of the best books I read in 2009, wrote a book in that genre that dispenses with the conventions of body counts, crazy chase scenes, and character cliches (like the beautiful yet brilliant female researcher). Codex, which came out in 2004, creates tension from the core mystery around the titular Codex (a medieval book that may hide a coded message, if it can be found, assuming it even exists) rather than the artificial tension that characterizes the more ponderous entries in the genre.

In Codex, investment banker Edward Wozny finds himself employed to catalog the rare book collection of one of his best clients, an English duke and his wife, and despite his instinctive indignation at the menial task, he takes it on and finds himself gradually sucked into the search for the missing codex, even when he realizes that not everyone involved wants the book to be found. At the same time, Wozny’s friends introduce him to a time-sucking computer game called MOMUS that seems to Edward to offer unexplained parallels and connections to the search for the codex. In both quests, he ends up hopelessly lost and has to enlist the help of others, including a not-beautiful yet brilliant female researcher who specializes in the alleged author of the missing tome.

The stakes are high for the characters in the book, but Grossman ignores the trend of raising the stakes to fate-of-the-world status, recognizing that something as small as a battle between two members of the same family can be serious enough to cause people to throw around large sums of money and throw wrenches in the works of another person’s plans. I found that the pace of Codex accelerated as it went simply because I wanted to know where the codex was, what it meant, and why the person who employs Edward wanted to find it. Grossman also avoids the pat ending, concluding the book on an appropriately ambiguous note, although he does rely on one error of judgment by a main character to get us to the finish line.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s satire of the publishing circles of late 1930s New York (particularly Claire Boothe Luce), a somewhat forgotten novel called A Time to Be Born.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 3, 2009
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Pops Restaurant & the Top Chef semifinal.

Klawchat today at 1 pm. I’m on Rumor Central today talking Donavan Tate’s broken jaw and Polanco to the Phils. Top Chef spoilers at the bottom of this piece.

I had dinner with a friend last night at Pops Restaurant in Boston’s South End, a small place that serves fine-dining-caliber food with prices one level down from what fine-dining places in the South End or Back Bay would charge. I’d recommend it, as the meal was well above-average despite some small issues.

Once I saw the crispy confit duck on the menu, there was no shot I’d order anything else, as duck confit is probably my favorite meat dish and it’s not something I’ve made at home. The duck was close to perfect, with crispy skin with a little bit of spice (I think five-spice, but there was too little for me to say for sure) and outstanding texture; duck skin needs very little seasoning since it has so much flavor of its own. The meat inside was perfect, tender and moist, falling apart like a braised pork shank. The duck comes with a mixture of asparagus, wild rice gnocchi, and a ‘red wine chocolate sauce’ that was astringent and overly salty and that didn’t do much to complement the duck; duck and rice do go well together, but something like a risotto with asparagus would have worked better. The side also contained lardons that were excruciatingly salty – and really, when have you ever known me to say a bad word about any form of bacon? – and weren’t listed on the menu, which, given how many people don’t eat pork for religious reasons, is a little customer-unfriendly. We also ordered a side of French fries at my friend’s suggestion – they’re lightly seasoned with herbs (thyme and rosemary?) and perfectly fried with virtually no grease, reminiscent of the fries at the defunct Back Bay restaurant Excelsior, which made probably the best fries I’ve ever had and served them with a rosemary aioli.

We started with the truffled butternut squash ravioli with sage brown butter and fried egg; the egg was more of a garnish but the ravioli were excellent, just a little too soft, with the squash allowed to come through as the star of the dish. The arugula around the dish seemed like an afterthought but, softened slightly in the brown butter (which was mixed with a little pasta water), it was worth fishing out.

Service was good, not great; the waitress brought me the wrong beer, and it took over an hour from seating to the arrival of the entrees, although I imagine that would have been shorter without the appetizer. On the plus side, I had started at the bar and ordered sparkling water, and forgot about it when my friend arrived, but the bartender brought it back to the table for me after realizing I’d disappeared. The restaurant has two sections; we sat in the back, which is quieter but dimmer and lacks the visual appeal of the tables in the front near the bar and kitchen. The limes from the bar were dried-out, which isn’t a big deal for me but raises a small question about quality control in the back of the house.

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Quick thoughts on last night’s Top Chef semifinal:

* Is Padma trying to be condescending, or is it just that her natural way of speaking comes off that way? My wife said last night, “I can’t picture her as a mother.” Growing up with a mother who is hot, famous, and sounds incredibly disappointed at the most minor of things is a recipe for a lifetime of therapy, no?

* We need to get Gail Simmons on “What Not to Wear.” It was like someone decided to add melons to the crush party menu. I feel bad for her – it’s not like she’s unattractive, but that dress – and it’s not the first – was not working in her favor.

* Have to try Bryan’s idea of cooking figs with short ribs and then pureeing them with the braising liquid to make a sauce. I’m thinking a dry red wine with good body but not too much fruitiness, but since I know jack about wine, I’m open to suggestions from the oenophiles in the audience.

* Jennifer undercut herself by, in effect, apologizing for making duck confit instead of grilling it. Play it up, talk about how you improvised, you love how it came out, spin it positively. Telling the judges you wish you’d done it another way isn’t going to make them like your food more. Of course, there’s a limit, since Kevin’s line about the undercooked didn’t go over well.

* This elimination was predictable, although I wonder (again) if the decisions are based on the dishes in that specific challenge or on the broader body of work. The weakest remaining chef was sent home; the three best from when I picked up the show about six episodes ago are going to the finals. I’m still sticking with my pick – Bryan.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , ,