→ July 10, 2012
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Kansas City eats.

I posted some quick reactions to Sunday’s Futures Game a few hours after it ended. Next ESPN post will be Thursday’s top 50 prospects update.

The best Q I had on in Kansas City was the burnt ends platter at the original Oklahoma Joe’s location (that is, attached to a gas station). This absolutely lived up to its advance billing, as the meat had great smoke flavor and the characteristic tooth of real burnt ends (although not the crispy exterior I expected – I admit I’m not a big burnt ends expert, though), without being so dry that sauce was required. Smoke rings were evident throughout, not that I needed proof after tasting them. The French fries were just fair; many of you recommended them and I’m guessing it’s because of the red pepper-based seasoning rather than for the fries themselves, which weren’t as good as what you’d get at Five Guys or In-n-Out. I’d try the beans for a side next time. The insider tip is to call your order in ahead of time, but I spent most of the ~45 minutes in line chatting with the two sports nuts behind me, as well as one of you who spotted my tweet about being in line.

Next-best was Jack Stack, which is solid Q at a table-service restaurant, the most expensive Q I’ve ever eaten by a wide margin. Their signature item is a beef short rib, given some absurd marketing name (“Crown Prime Beef Rib” or whatever, it’s a freaking short rib, get over yourselves), and since that is by far my favorite cut of cow I was all in. It’s extremely well done with a lot of surface area for bark and plenty of fat (maybe too much, but that’s the cut) to keep the interior meat moist through a long, slow smoke. Their pork burnt ends were just chopped pork chunks with a little bark, really nothing special. The beans were outstanding though – sweet, smoky, salty, very slightly tangy, maybe a little too soft, although that’s the style (I like beans just a little past al dente). The seasonal vegetable was asparagus, funny because asparagus is a spring vegetable, but they did do a nice job of cooking it correctly so it wasn’t stringy or mushy. Service could not have been better, Q joint or otherwise. The total cost including iced tea and tip was $36, though.

Last Q joint was Gates, which disappointed. I may have ordered the wrong thing – more on that later – but I got no help from the kids behind the counter who seemed to have no interest in taking my order. I went with the short-end ribs, since ribs seemed to dominate the menu, but they were dry, tough, not smoky, and drowned in a vinegar-pepper sauce.

I had Sunday brunch – yes, I rolled out of bed around 9:30, thanks to the time difference – at Bluestem Cafe, which had a small line out the door before it opened at 10:30, usually a good sign. The special breakfast sandwich of the day comprised an over-easy egg on top of pulled pork with very crispy potato wedges and a small salad of mixed greens, a pretty significant amount of food for lunch and enough to hold me through the Futures Game. The pork was moist but the sauce was vinegary, so this could have been braised rather than smoked and I wouldn’t have known the difference. Everything else was clearly fresh and high quality, and they get extra points for the cute bartender.

I tried Eggtc for breakfast on Monday morning, looking for something quick but still local, although the quality just wasn’t there. The eggs on the benedict were poached too long – or poached earlier and held – so they had started to cook through, and since the greatest pleasure of eggs benedict is the sauce made by the warm but runny yolk, this was kind of a failure. The home fries had also clearly come out of a bag.

Finally, I have to thank all of you who weighed in on Q options for my weekend, including Jeff Passan of Yahoo! and Brooks Melchior of Sports by Brooks (via his Twitter feed). Brooks says my next trip to KC should include a visit for Stroud’s for fried chicken and cinnamon rolls and a second chance for Gates where I order the “beef and a half” sandwich rather than ribs.

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→ July 7, 2012
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Saturday five, 7/7/12.

I’ll be part of ESPN2’s broadcast of the MLB Futures Game on Sunday starting at 5 pm Eastern. If you’re going to be at the game, I’ll try to be available between BP and the first pitch up on the concourse behind home plate. My most recent preview piece on the game went up Friday.

* This made the rounds on Twitter this morning – a Times story titled ”The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” featuring not only a bad marriage, but intrigue, fraud, and murder, all in one exceptionally well-written article.

* Outstanding journalism by NPR’s Kelly McEvers, examining the effects of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, from demonstrating that official reports are understating civilian casualties to examining the question of whether such efforts are merely creating more militants than they’re eliminating.

* Friend of the dish Ken Trem… er, Michael Schur talks to TV Guide about season 5 of the best comedy on television, Parks and Recreation.

* This Smithsonian slideshow on the 20 best food trucks in the U.S. is from February, although I just came across it last week. I haven’t tried the lone Phoenix entry, a crème brulee truck called Torched Goodness.

* Mental Floss delivers again with a piece from last month on twelve famous novelists who answered a teenager’s questions back in 1963 on whether symbolism in their work was intentional.

* Finally, I mentioned this baseball-themed dance routine from So You Think You Can Dance, my wife’s new favorite show, on the podcast earlier this week. The best part is the first 15-20 seconds of the routine, when the dancer in the faux-Texas uniform does this robot-like technique that defies belief, after which it pretty much lost me.

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→ July 5, 2012
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Priceless.

Recent ESPN stuff:
* Notes on Trevor Bauer, Andrew Cashner, and Pat Corbin from Tuesday night
* notes on six top July 2nd signings
* Today’s Klawchat transcript
* Today’s Baseball Today podcast
* And my guest appearance on today’s Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast.

I apologize for how little I’ve been posting here; the draft, followed by a 16-day east coast trip with family, put a serious dent in my blogging time. I’ve still been reading as usual, with the best book I read in June a bit out of my normal interests – Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, Robert Wittman’s memoir of his time at the FBI, where he founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.

Wittman wisely spends most of the book talking about major cases he helped solve for the FBI, including recoveries of objects as diverse as Goya’s The Swing, North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, and a flag used by an African-American army unit during the Civil War. He bookends all of those stories with the attempt to recover several paintings, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, stolen from the Isabella Gardner Stuart Museum in Boston in 1990, an attempt that (mild spoiler) was unsuccessful, something Wittman blames largely on bureacracy, infighting, and one particularly obstinate and territorial bureau chief within the FBI. He also includes a little of his own backstory, explaining how he ended up the bureau’s art crime expert, how he learned enough about art and artifacts to go undercover as a crooked art dealer/broker, and how his life was nearly ruined by a car accident that resulted in the death of one of his colleagues.

I’d be stretching to call this a collection of spy stories, but there’s a surprising amount of intrigue involved in stories that you know (other than the final one) are going to more or less work out OK, and are usually very successful. Wittman and co-author John Shiffman, a former investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, manage to work in enough of the personalities of the various thieves and shady dealers with whom Wittman had to negotiate – and was usually also trying to set up, with a SWAT team hanging out in the hotel lobby or in the room next door – to keep the vignettes from feeling paint-by-numbers: Wittman gets the tip, negotiates the deal, and then the bad guys get arrested. The details on how he managed to operate for so long in fairly small underworld circles without being compromised until right before he was due to retire also made for interesting reading, enough so that I wish they’d spent more time discussing backstopping or how he’d cover his tracks after a bust.

My only other criticism is that it’s way too short – even as someone who doesn’t know art, I was interested in the histories of the pieces he was trying to recover, and would gladly have read another dozen such stories between that and the unintentional comedy of the crooks who had the stolen goods. (Really, stealing a Vermeer … I get that the piece is valuable, but you can’t exactly put the thing on eBay and get 90 cents on the dollar here. Whatever happened to knocking over a nice jewelry store?) I also thought the back half of the Gardner Stuart story treated the FBI’s internal squabbling a little superficially – it reminded me of the way The Wire often used the FBI to throw an obstacle in the main police characters’ paths – even though in both cases the Bureau probably was a legitimate part of the problem. The idea that the most significant unsolved art theft in U.S. history remains unsolved in large part because one doofus in the Bureau’s Boston office wanted to cut the FBI’s main art crime expert out of the loop should make your blood boil, but at the same time, the allegation could use more substance.

Next up: Anita Loos’ two comic novellas, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

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→ July 2, 2012
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Durham eats.

My column on this year’s All-Star Game roster flubs is up now for Insiders.

Our 72 hours in Durham were very filling, even though I ended up skipping lunch one day while at the ballpark. We stayed downtown, where there’s quite a bit within walking distance (and a relative paucity of crappy chains) and a tremendous amount of variety within a ten-minute drive.

The best meal we had on the trip was probably the first one, dinner at Nanataco just south of downtown towards Chapel Hill. It’s a fairly new gourmet taco place that offers a wide variety of meats, both normal and “dirty” – and, like any good foodie, I went right for the dirty menu, including smoked duck and crispy pork belly. The three taco plate allows you to go with up to three different meats, so I chose those two and then the suggestion of the woman (possibly the owner) who took my order, the fried calamari taco, which unlike the other two came with arugula and a very faintly spicy mayo. The corn tortillas are made fresh in the kitchen and threatened to overshadow the meat, where the duck was excellent (but not smoky, just ducky) while the pork belly was just fair (and not crispy). Learn from my rookie mistake, though, and eat the calamari first if you order that taco, since it started to overcook from its own carryover heat while I ate the other two tacos. The roasted plantain milkshake had a great caramel/savory flavor combo but the slightly fibrous texture imparted by the plantains ended up outweighing everything else.

Dames Chicken and Waffles is pretty clear about its mission, and while they make a big deal about the five waffle options and their various flavored butters called “shmears” (I know, it doesn’t really fit), the selling point here is the fried chicken, some of the best I have ever had. The two drumsticks that came with my classic waffle were absolutely perfect: hot, crispy, correctly seasoned, and moist on the inside. A bucket of those and I would have been quite content. The waffle was solid, a little undercooked like the waffle half of almost every chicken-and-waffle combo I have ever tried (exception: Thomas Keller’s Cafe Bouchon), but with a mild cinnamon flavor and plenty of air within it to keep it relatively light. The meals rather incongruously include a side dish; my daughter liked their mac and cheese, while I actually finished the buttered grits after adding some salt. (I’ve never had grits anywhere that had enough salt in them.) My wife ordered a waffle that came with a chicken cutlet – actually two very large pieces of egg-battered chicken breast, maybe two to three times the meat that my dish came with, if you’re all about quantity. The drumsticks are fried more traditionally and had a thinner, crispier crust.

We had breakfast twice at Rue Cler, a cafe attached to a French restaurant right downtown, probably best known for their beignets – six for $5, a dozen for $8, fried to order, with a thick crispy layer masking light spongy goodness on the inside. They also do an impressive egg sandwich, cooked to order, made on thin slices of fresh sourdough bread with eggs barely over medium and cheese and/or bacon. They offer local coffee roasted by Carborro roasters – I don’t drink a lot of drip coffee, but this was obviously freshly roasted – although their tea selection was sadly diminished the two days we visited. Everything was fantastic; the only negative is that seating in the cafe is quite limited. Really, though, it’s about the beignets.

With Rue Cler’s cafe closed on Sundays, we walked over to Scratch, just down the pedestrian-only Orange Street from Rue Cler. Scratch is primarily a pie bakery, offering smaller crostatas as part of an eclectic (and constantly changing) breakfast menu that may also include shirred eggs, fried duck eggs, and homemade buttermilk biscuits with an optional patty of local pork sausage, which is what I ordered. How anyone could order a crappy fast-food ‘sausage biscuit’ when places like Scratch offer the real thing is beyond me; even though the biscuit was a little dense, the flavor was buttery but not too tangy, and the sausage tasted of actual pork with a hint of black pepper, not the overpowering salt/cheap pepper profile of fast-food (or, for that matter, bad diner) breakfast sausage.

We spent Saturday at Durham’s Museum of Life and Science, and their new on-site restaurant, Cafe Sprout, is more than good enough to thrive even without the captive audience. The menu was designed by the chef behind the BBQ joint the Q Shack (a recommendation I didn’t get to try on this trip) and includes a lot of locally sourced items and real cooking in the back, not the reheating you’ll find at most museum or stadium food outlets. They smoke several of their own meats, including bacon and turkey, and the bread on the sandwiches and paninis is high quality; I went with a smoked turkey panini with fresh tomatoes, red onions, and local goat cheese, and other than the bread being sliced a little too thinly it was excellent. Prices are also insanely reasonable, with $8-9 getting you a sandwich and one of about ten options for side dishes, one of which was fried okra, which I can never turn down. (It was average, a little greasy and short of salt, but also piping hot when I got it.) They even offer the local paletas made by Locopops, with six flavors available; the strawberries and cream was a little too understated for me but the French tart flavor – essentially fruits de bois, with blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and red currents – was perfect.

Foster’s Market, towards Chapel Hill, apparently is the brainchild of a locally famous chef, offering a wide array of sandwiches and pastries; the service was excellent, but the food was only fair, probably not worth a return visit for me.

I should also mention Vin Rouge in Durham, which we didn’t visit because my wife declined my offer of a nice upscale French dinner, but would be a must for me any time I’m solo in Durham for dinner. Review is at that link; the executive summary is that you must get the bacon confiture starter.

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→ June 22, 2012
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NYC eats + Flip Burger in Atlanta.

Mario Batali’s Lupa, a “Roman-style osteria,” focuses on traditional Italian dishes (both primi, pasta dishes, and secondi, proteins), done with top-quality ingredients and many elements produced in-house. In Italy, you’d typically have a primo and a secondo at a high-end restaurant, but the portions at Lupa were too large for us to order that way, so we each went with a starter, a primo, and dessert.

Everything I had was strong, but there were minor execution issues with both the appetizer and the dessert that didn’t match the memorable primo. That pasta dish was a special that night, house-made pappardelle with a soffrito-based duck ragout, meaning it had no tomatoes in it. The ragout was hearty and rich but not heavy and was correctly seasoned, while the pappardelle were cooked perfectly al dente, of course. The starter, a salad of arugula, radish, fennel, and radicchio, comprised top-quality vegetables but was slightly overdressed – not enough to have it pooling on the bottom of the dish, but enough that the vinegar overpowered the peppery/spicy produce underneath it, which was slightly disappointing. For dessert, the zuppa inglese – an Italian spin on an English trifle, with the sponge cake soaked in espresso – was marred by a crunchy powder on top that was too hard to chew; I’m assuming the powder was there for texture contrast with the soft trifle (custard and soft sponge cake) but ended up detracting from the dish as a whole. My wife’s fresh mozzarella di bufala appetizer came with a strongly-flavored herb/olive oil mixture, with the fresh oregano taking over the dish a little, a combination I really liked but she didn’t. Her main course was asparagus agnolotti in a light butter sauce, tasting, as it should, strongly of fresh asparagus (in the agnolotti and shaved over the top). Her favorite dish of the night was the hazelnut tartufo, which I didn’t try.

I’m nitpicking here because of where I was – these are minor execution issues, not problems with concepts or ingredients. But I expected a 70, and paid like the restaurant was a 70, but what I got was more 60 or strong 55, recommended, but not a place I’m racing to visit again.

At Citi Field on Saturday night I had my first experience with the cult favorite burger joint Shake Shack; locations in stadiums, like airports, aren’t always the best way to judge a food outlet, so this may be low, but I’d grade the meal as a 60 shake, a 55 burger, and 50 fries. The caramel shake lived up to the name, smooth and strongly flavored (although it’s weird to have any caramel ice cream product without salt), with perfect mouthfeel – no iciness, no graininess. Shake Shack’s burgers are made from a proprietary blend of beef, which their site says is antibiotic-free Angus beef, “vegetarian fed, humanely raised and source verified,” and the burger does taste very strongly of good quality beef – salty, and a little greasy from the grill (albeit in a good way, not like Smashburger’s). As fast food burgers go, it’s better than In-n-Out’s, but In-n-Out destroys Shake Shack in the fries department, as this Shake Shack’s weren’t freshly cut (I don’t know about regular locations) and I could very easily have skipped them. They also have, or at least say they have, a strong commitment to sustainability and limiting their footprint, which doesn’t make the food taste any better but is always nice to hear. If their regular locations are better than the stadium stand – their menus are more extensive, and the food is probably even fresher – I couldn’t see choosing In-n-Out or Five Guys over this.

‘wichcraft, Tom Colicchio’s mini-chain of high-end sandwich shops mostly around New York City, is a small marvel – charging marginally more than national sandwich stores like Panera that peddle massively inferior food. I’m not sure how widely you can expand this concept, but it’s great that it even exists and shows that it is possible to run a business with responsibly-sourced, high-quality ingredients, like pole-caught tuna or organic arugula, made on some of the best bread you will ever find at a sandwich place. My only criticism of that tuna sandwich, made with shaved fennel, diced green olives, and a very light touch of fresh mayonnaise, was that it was hard to keep the sandwich together, but the flavors worked well together. It’s a $9 sandwich, but a far better value than a $6, mayo-drenched tuna salad at a national chain.

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On my last trip to Georgia, I did manage to run over to Flip Burger, Richard Blais’ high-end burger “boutique” that now has two locations in Atlanta and one in Birmingham, and features several different types of burgers as well as milkshakes made with liquid nitrogen, which sounds cool but does have the benefit of producing a smoother finished product. The shake was an even bigger star than the burger, just like at Shake Shack but better on both counts – I couldn’t pull the trigger on the foie gras milkshake, and the Krispy Kreme one just sounded too sweet, so I went for the caramel turtle shake, which was surprisingly balanced, sweet but also salty and even a little savory. For the burger, I went with the rbq, a 5.5-ounce patty of hanger steak, brisket, and short rib, topped with pulled smoked brisket, coleslaw, barbeque sauce, and “smoked” mayo; it was something of an umami explosion, rich and very meaty – if you like the flavor of really high-quality beef, this is your burger. I wouldn’t have deleted a thing. The fries are cooked in beef tallow, which I respect tremendously, but this batch was too greasy for me to enjoy, probably a sign that the fat wasn’t hot enough. Needless to say, I was still full about six hours later. Flip does offer non-beef options, including a “fauxlafel” burger, as well as salads and a full bar.

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→ June 22, 2012
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Le Havre boardgame & app.

The board game Le Havre is one of the best complex strategy games I’ve tried, although the emphasis is on complex, involving a lengthy setup, more pieces than I can remember in any other game (mostly tiles representing resources that need to be sorted into piles), and a lot of long-range planning with great potential for other players to inadvertently trip you up. It’s very balanced, nearly luck-free, and rewards patience and attention. But the time to set it up and the time to play it are both major obstacles unless you’re quite hardcore about your boardgaming – and you don’t have to get up early the next morning.

All of that makes it a perfect game for adaptation into electronic form, and Le Havre, released on Wednesday night by Codito, is excellent, playing easily with plenty of instructions and offering sufficient challenges from the AI opponents to allow for many repeat plays.

In Le Havre, a game by the designer of Agricola and heavily inspired by Caylus, players compete to acquire the most total value in buildings and ships while filling growing requirements to feed workers each turn, a balancing act that is far more difficult than it sounds because of the competition for scarce resources and the limited number of ways to obtain food, a problem exacerbated in games of more than two players. On each turn, a player may choose to take resources from any of the seven available stocks; to take the available supply of money (francs); to build one of three buildings visible on the stacks of building cards; or to use a building that is already built, even if it was built by another player. A player may also buy certain buildings outright in addition to that main action.

Each player has to have enough food or francs on hand at the end of every round to feed his workers, and the rounds are short – seven moves in total, so in each round of a four-player game, one player will get only a single move. Yet to acquire points from resources, players have to first acquire the right mix of resources, sometimes converting them to other kinds of resources, sometimes acquiring energy sources as well, and then build the building or the ship in question. It takes patience, and requires a lot of quick decisions about when to move for the short term (food) and when to move for the long (points).

There are multiple ways to win Le Havre, one of the key features in a game that is this complex (and my main criticism of Puerto Rico). Shipbuilding is the best way to beat the AI players in my experience with the app, but there are several different paths to high point totals through buildings, including several buildings that stack up point bonuses depending on what else you’ve already built. There are also several different paths to ensuring a regular food supply, and ships can provide a fixed quantity of food on each turn once they’re built. When a player can’t feed his workers, he can take out a loan – annoying, but sometimes the right strategic move, and sometimes the path to digging a hole you can’t quite escape.

Game play within the app is very straightforward, and one of the benefits of an app version is the fact that you are protected from rules mistakes, which, given the complexity of Le Havre, is a significant advantage. Each card replicates the graphics from the physical game, including symbols that indicate the card’s price in resources, fee to use if it’s not yours, value in points, and resources or gains from usage. Clicking on the question mark in the upper right once the card is expanded gets the full text explaining the card and all of its costs and benefits. Learning the lay of the board took me two or three games, but all of the critical information is either visible or is a click away. The game also gives players the ability to undo a move while the turn is in progress, and confirms the ‘end turn’ request as well (an option that can be turned off). There’s a solid tutorial, although it is no substitute for playing the game a few times against easy AI opponents.

Those AIs are good enough to continue to challenge me, a relative rookie in Le Havre, because they offer multiple levels of difficulty. I do find them a little predictable, and they often race out to early points leads because they plan more for the short term than the long; the first two settings are like training wheels, but in a 4- or 5-player game against all AI opponents, the hardest AI setting is a good enough challenge to allow for repeated gameplay. The app now offers turn-based online multiplayer through GameCenter, which I haven’t tried yet.

My criticisms of the app are minor – the graphics could be brighter, and the font isn’t as clear as it could be, so some of the text is tough to read without expanding it from the background. The hint feature, suggesting the next move to make, can be a little too focused on the short term, although the point of the hints is to help you learn the game, not help you beat the AI players that are running on the same software. I ran into some very minor graphics glitches that should be addressed in the first update. Also, the music made my wife want to strangle me after about two minutes, so I muted it for my own safety.

If you like Agricola and/or Caylus, I strongly recommend Le Havre. It is as elegant an adaptation as I can imagine for a game with this many elements. I’m also impressed by how Codito’s boardgame apps improve each time out – the leap from Puerto Rico, another complex game with a lot of elements, to Le Havre is outstanding – showing an internal commitment to improving the player experience (and, I presume, increasing revenues). That said, if you aren’t a fan of boardgames with a lot of rules or a relatively steep learning curve, you might find this game frustrating, particularly the physical game given all its pieces. (It took me the better part of an hour to break apart and sort all of the little cardboard resource tiles.) It’s very fair to jump off the boardgame bandwagon before Le Havre or Agricola – but at least the app lets you try it out for $5 first.

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Recent ESPN content, if you made it this far: My quick reaction to this year’s Futures Game rosters; an early look at Mike Trout’s MVP case; this week’s Klawchat; and some fun podcasts from Thursday with Dave Schoenfield and from Wednesday with Chris Sprow.

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→ June 9, 2012
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Ray Bradbury + the Saturday five.

Ray Bradbury died this week at the age of 91, leaving behind an enormous legacy in literature, one that I fear will be excessively defined as a canon of science fiction, rather than merely of great writing.

My favorite Bradbury novel is the gothic horror story Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I ranked at #28 on my list of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s a brilliant thriller, one that relies on implied fear rather than graphic violence, but it is also a wonderfully written work that includes one of my favorite lines in all of the novels I’ve ever read:

He laughed, then stopped.
For he though he heard a soft tread
Off in the subterranean vaults.
But it was only his laughter
walking back
through the deep stacks
on panther feet.

That last sentence has stuck with me for over a decade since I first read the novel. Not only is the idea of walking “on panther feet” a phenomenal, evocative image, but there’s poetry in the sentence itself: The rhyme between “back” and “stacks;” the assonance with those two words, “laughter,” and “panther;” the way the sound recedes as you read (or say) the sentence, almost like the words are descending a staircase away from you. It’s just one line in a 200-page book, not even a critical line in the story, but it’s one bit of evidence that Bradbury was more than just a great writer of speculative fiction – he was a great writer of prose.

To the links…

First, my own content:

* American League draft recaps.
* National League draft recaps.
* My day one recap.
* My June 5th chat, which took place during rounds 2 and 3.
* Where each team’s top drafted prospect ranks in their farm system.
* Podcasts: Thursday and Tuesday, plus my Tuesday hit with Colin Cowherd.

And from others…

* Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat, by Michael Ruhlman. I’m on board with all of this except the quotes from the farmer about the animals being “good with it.” If they had that kind of cognitive ability, we wouldn’t eat them at all, right?

* The New Neuroscience of Choking, by the superb Jonah Lehrer. I have two main problems with applying that study to the question of whether clutch or un-clutch players exist in MLB. The larger one is that the subjects were not highly trained since youth to perform the task they were then asked to perform with the reward promised to them. The smaller one is that my longtime argument about choking isn’t really addressed here – that players who are unable to perform under pressure would likely be weeded out long before reaching the majors, because pressure situations exist at all levels of baseball, and merely playing baseball at all in front of a crowd, knowing that your career hinges to some extent on your performances in front of scouts and your statistics, is in and of itself a pressure situation. That stance, of which I believe Occam would approve, is fully compatible with the study’s findings.

* To Grow A Craft Beer Business, The Secret’s In The Water, from NPR. Have they stepped up their coverage of food/drink subjects, or was I just behind the curve in noticing it?

* Cuisines Mastered as Acquired Tastes. Are non-native chefs who learn “ethnic” cuisines somehow at an advantage because they are more willing – or able – to think outside of the box?

* McSweeney’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Very witty but with some useful tips in here … including some I should probably try myself.

* Bonus link: An interesting infographic on how healthful, local food creates jobs. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the report and data behind it, though.

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→ May 26, 2012
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Ludivine in Oklahoma City + the Saturday five.

I was only in Oklahoma City for about 36 hours, as everything that could have gone wrong for me on Wednesday did, but I at least salvaged the day with an outstanding experience at Ludivine, a farm-to-table restaurant in downtown OKC.

Ludivine’s menu changes daily depending on what ingredients they’ve acquired, with everything except seafood and a few cheeses sourced locally. The dishes are highly creative in the way they layer flavors and use ingredients in unconventional ways, such as the rabbit liver vinaigrette on my salad, or the blueberry thyme bread pudding served with the crispy sweetbread (which I didn’t try).

I started with a charcuterie plate – they make most of it in-house, and I spotted Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie on their bookshelf – including their pork rillette, duck speck, and house-cured salmon. The rillette was very tender, held together with bacon fat, but a little underseasoned for me, so it needed help from the whole-grain mustard and homemade pickles provided on the plate. The paper-thin salmon needed nothing else, not even the hit of acid I usually crave when I eat cured or smoked salmon, among the best dishes of its kind I’ve had. Speck is a smoked product usually made from the pig’s hind leg or thigh, like prosciutto, but Ludivine uses duck breast instead; the resulting product was salty and very smoky, pairing well with the blackberry-tarragon “marmalade” also provided on the platter but too strong to eat on its own. (Nitpick: It’s not marmalade without citrus rind, unless we’re speaking a language other than English.)

The aforementioned salad had the freshest mustard greens and arugula I’ve ever had from any place other than my own gardens – they defined the color “green” – as well as half-inch wide lardons (chunks of bacon) that had been quickly fried to crisp them up and a generous shaving of grana Padano cheese (Parmiggiano-Reggiano that was made in the Padua region, so it must go by another name). The rabbit-liver dressing had a peculiar texture, not grainy, almost muddy, but it may have simply stood out because I’d never had a dressing like it before. The flavor was very subtle, and next to the bacon, cheese, and two peppery greens, the vinaigrette was just a background note.

I went with another starter rather than a full entree, trying bone marrow for the first time – which means I have nothing to which to compare the dish. The marrow bone was cut in half the long way, roasted to brown the top but leave the interior pink, and served with more whole-grain mustard and a lightly pickled shallot; the marrow meat was luxuriously soft, obviously fatty, but bright and mild in flavor, more like a fresh butter than a heavy meat. I have no idea if this was a great marrow dish or not, however, only that I enjoyed it.

For dessert, the salted caramel crème brulee was tempting, but even I have my limits when it comes to saturated fat, and went instead for the fresh strawberries (lightly sugared) and blueberries … served in fresh cream, of course. The strawberries were good, but the blueberries were perfect, and that cream was a reminder that the stuff we get in paper cartons in the store is a mere facsimile of the genuine article. (Organic Valley’s pasture-raised cream comes fairly close, though.)

I’ll give Ludivine bonus points for that bookshelf as well, since it also included The Flavor Bible and my friend Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I felt like my own cookbook collection was partially validated.

Total cost of the meal was around $50 including tip but no drink (I was too tired for alcohol), well worth it between the meal and the chance to support the local food industry. This is real food, sourced right and prepared right.

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To the links…

A WSJ piece on the rising use of “spent grains,”, the solid matter left over during the brewing process after the wort is strained. They apparently make excellent bread.

From the New York Times, a mini-memoir piece called “All I Wanted Was for Alice Waters to Feed Me,” excerpted from author Daniel Duane’s new cooking memoir.

Slate’s Josh Levin argues (correctly) that colleges shouldn’t be allowed to yank athletic scholarships.

TIME‘s Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and one of the two minds behind their top 100 novels list in 2005, argues that genre fiction is disruptive technology, in an essay of which I think Jasper Fforde would approve. Indeed, Wilkie Collins was among the earliest practicioners of what is now called genre fiction, and his mentor was none other than Charles Dickens.

Should a university – or anyone, for that matter – be allowed to patent a cut of steak? Obviously not, although I find it more galling that a public university is trying to do it. Then again, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been busy approving nonsense patents for about fifteen years, so I’m not optimistic that they’ll reject this one.

Bonus link, from my friend Rene Saggiadi: ten “Italian” food facts that aren’t authentically Italian. I didn’t know about the Feast of the Seven Fishes, but we also didn’t have that tradition in my family.

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→ May 23, 2012
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Sherlock, season two.

Season two of Sherlock, which just aired here in the U.S. for the first time, turned out to be even stronger than season one, in part because the characters are so well developed, and in part because the bromance between Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) seems so natural at this point, as if the two actors have been doing this for years. The only real negative of the season is that it will be so long before we see a third set of episodes, especially on this side of the Atlantic. (My writeup on season one went up in February.)

As in the first season, the middle episode was somewhat weaker than the two surrounding it, with the first episode the strongest of the troika. Irene Adler’s dominatrix character is fascinating – with her clothes on or off, it’s all good, really – and the tense flirtations between her and Holmes were absolutely electric, even though it’s clear he has (or will simply admit to) no interest in sex with her. The crime he’s solving is almost secondary, and she seemed a more convincing adversary than Moriarty because her methods of social engineering are so foreign to Holmes. An American police procedural would have played up her professional life, whereas this episode focuses instead on layers of intrigue and the aforementioned dialogue between the two main characters.

The second episode, derived from the one full-length Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, takes the setting and some core elements of the original story and adds a host of modern twists, including a play on our worst fears about our governments and their research into weapons of mass destruction. The solution hinged on Holmes guessing a password rather impossibly quickly, which I’d peg as a copout; it’s a neat trick, but not that likely on the first try, and any decent network security setup would lock an account after an attempt or two. (Wouldn’t the modern Holmes carry a cracking program on a USB drive? Or is that too easy?)

The final episode, “The Reichenbach Fall,” brings an unexpectedly early confrontation between Holmes and his nemesis, Jim Moriarty, played diabolically by whats-his-face, clearly having the time of his life. Based on the story “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes originally dies, only to have it later revealed that he merely faked his death after public outcry forced Conan Doyle to hit control-Z, “Reichenbach” turns the tables and puts Moriarty on the offensive, destroying Holmes’ life from the inside-out with a cleverly plotted, intricate trap, from which Holmes can extricate himself only through his own death – or so it appears. The whole detective-as-suspect plot device is quite hackneyed at this point, but I’ll give the writers points for the Richard Brook twist, and for crafting the scheme so tightly that Holmes does indeed appear to be trapped when we reach the final clash between the two antagonists. I’ll get to the end of this episode, the subject of much speculation online (which won’t be answered until next year as the show becomes victim of its own success), later on, to avoid spoiling anything for those of you who haven’t seen it.

This season felt faster and tighter than the first one, which I think is in large part because the three episodes in season one had to spend time introducing us to the main characters and developing their relationships with each other. Cumberbatch and Freeman have a very easy chemistry and superb timing, enhanced by British series’ willingness to keep the pace up rather than slow it down to accommodate an audience looking for large print and short chapters. It feels like smart television because it is smart television, rapid-fire, witty, and demanding. It should have you talking long after each episode is done. To wit…

–

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing the end of season two, episode three below. Just stop reading if you haven’t seen it.

Seriously, go away.

For those of you who have seen it, it seems like some suspected elements of Sherlock’s faked suicide are, if not obvious, quite likely to be true. We have Sherlock’s conversation with Molly, where he says he expects he’s going to die and needs her help, a plea that remains unresolved at the end of the episode but that we know would be fulfilled because Molly is inexplicably smitten with the great detective. We have the flatbed truck that starts up the moment Sherlock’s body is about to hit the pavement. And we have the cyclist who hits Dr. Watson at the moment he’s about to cross the street to see to his friend, leaving Watson on the ground and quite groggy when he stands up. I submit that the grogginess is the fourth clue.

Here’s my theory, although it is a bit tinfoilhatty: Sherlock landed in the truck and threw a cadaver, supplied by Molly and rigged to bleed from the head on impact, to the sidewalk, obscured from witnesses by the truck. The cyclist clocked Dr. Watson and somehow drugged him – perhaps a gas like that from the previous episode – so that he wouldn’t be able to properly examine or even identify Sherlock. (That gas would make him suggestible, meaning one member of the crowd could also have been a plant from Sherlock, there simply to tell Dr. Watson it was Sherlock’s body and that he was dead.) This would explain Sherlock’s confession to Dr. Watson, which was wildly out of character for him – it was an act, yet one that, oddly, didn’t set off any alarms in his only friend’s mind.

This leaves a few unanswered questions: Why was Molly, who was on Moriarty’s radar after they had a few lunch dates (seriously, Molly, are there no other fish in the English sea?), omitted from the final hit list, while Holmes’ landlady and Lestrade were included? Who notified the other two shooters (we can assume the hitman assigned to Dr. Watson witnessed the suicide) that Sherlock was presumed dead? Why did the kidnap victim scream upon seeing Sherlock’s face? And, really, why did Moriarty kill himself? I believe he is actually dead, as Moriarty dies in the original story, “The Final Problem,” that inspired this episode. I can’t imagine the writers deviating that far from the source material, and the Moriarty character, who only appeared in two of the original stories anyway, is pretty well played out from here. But why would he die of his own hand, leaving himself unable to witness Holmes’ final humiliation?

Feel free to discuss any of these spoilers or questions in the comments; I assume anyone who’s made it this far has already seen the full season.

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→ May 23, 2012
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The Man Who Loved Children.

Louie, delighted, ran downstairs. Whenever her irritations got too deep, she mooched in to see her mother. Here, she had learned, without knowing she had learned it, was a brackish well of hate to drink from, and a great passion of gall which could run deep and still, or send up waterspouts, that could fret and boil, or seem silky as young afternoon, something that put iron in her soul and made her strong to resist the depraved healthiness and idle jollity of the Pollit clan.

Christina Stead’s 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children, a fictionalized memoir of what was apparently a brutal childhood with her famous biologist father, David George Stead, lay virtually unknown for over two decades before a 1965 reprint, featuring an introduction by poet Randall Jarrell, earned critical accolades and established the book in academic circles. The book appeared on the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, and Jonathan Franzen has called the book a “masterpiece,” unsurprising given the book’s obvious influence on his own novel of dysfunctional family life, The Corrections.

Whereas Franzen’s book at least had humor, Stead’s novel is a bleak tale of psychological abuse and neglect stemming from an ill-advised marriage between a man, the egomaniacal Samuel Pollit, and his second wife, Henrietta “Henny.” Louisa, Sam’s daughter from his first marriage, is a primary target of Henny’s while suffering under the thumb of her father, while the couple’s six children all suffer more from the couple’s inability to live within their means or otherwise provide for the children.

Sam is a loudmouthed tyrant, a fatuous narcissist who believes himself to be a great philosopher who is destined for greatness, yet is despised by co-workers and loathed by his shrewish wife, not without reason on both counts. He preaches – mostly to his own children – that all men are brothers, and equal, and should be on equal footing, yet has some very peculiar views on who exactly qualifies under those statutes:

Suicide ought to be recognized and permitted, for a person was captain of his own life. Murder of the unfit, incurable, and insane should be permitted. Children born mentally deficient or diseased should be murdered, and none of these murders would really be a crime, for the community was benefited, and the good of the whole was the aim of all, or should be. Murder might be beautiful, a self-sacritifce, a sacrifice of someone near and dear, for the good of others – I can conceive of such a thing, Looloo!

He speaks to his children in a patois of babytalk, fake German accents, and an imitation of poor African-Americans that reads like the verbal equivalent of blackface. He accepts a six-month assignment in southeast Asia, leaving his wife largely to fend for herself during that period, only to return to find that his enemies at work have begun to plot his ouster – a vendetta he refuses to fight, claiming virtue but showing little more than cowardice. He’s a fraud, unaware of his falseness, who takes out his frustrations on his wife and children while feeding his voracious ego on the unquestioning admiration of his offspring.

Henny came from some money, only to find her wasteful husband ready to squander what she brought to the marriage and unable to provide for all of the children he seems to force her to have – yet one of her coping mechanisms is to hurl abuse at Sam, at Louisa, and even sometimes at her own children, including frequent threats to harm herself, Sam, and the children. She should elicit some sympathy as the victim of an emotionally abusive husband, a state that explains some of her behavior (particularly around money, which she remains inept at managing), yet her willingness to empty her well of hatred on the innocent children, especially her stepdaughter, exhausts any compassion the reader might have developed for her earlier in the novel.

Louisa stands in for Stead, who, like Louisa, lost her mother when she was two and lived with a stepmother who (she claims) never liked her. If there’s any positive storyline in the book, it’s the slow emergence of Louisa from the torpor of her home life, which gradually descends into shameful poverty, into a modest awakening and realization that she’d be better off on her own, without her parents. (How she achieves that is one of the book’s few surprises, one I won’t spoil.) Her character is little more than a punching bag for the first half to two-thirds of the book, yet she’s actually the central character; Sam and Henny don’t develop, because they’re long past the point where they might change, and are so blinded by contempt of each other that they have dug into their respective trenches and will engage in grinding warfare until one side capitulates through death. Louisa can and will evolve, thanks to outside influences that help her discover that her father is, indeed, a fraud, even a monster. The oldest of Sam and Henny’s kids, Ernie, comes to a similar realization but plays a supporting character as Louisa takes the lead in the novel’s climactic final two chapters.

As you might imagine from the descriptions above, The Man Who Loved Children is a terribly arduous read. Sam’s affected speech to his children is unreadable, for the difficulty in parsing the gobbledygook but more for the incredible condescension it entails, for how he uses the language to keep the children in his thrall and attempt to deny them their emotional maturity – they can’t grow up if I don’t talk to them like young adults. (For the record, my wife and I have never talked down to our daughter like that; there’s a clear line between being silly and stunting your child’s verbal and emotional growth.) But the arguments, the vile language, the outright abuse – especially that heaped on Louisa – was excruciating to read. This book was work, and I’m not sure the payoff was really worth it.

Next up: Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, two short novels in one volume that also served as the inspiration for the film Cabaret.

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