→ November 15, 2010
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Jambo (board game).

My series of articles for mental_floss on the history of board games begins today, with a look back at games from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. We’ll end up with some contemporary games at the end of the series, but not before going through the histories of some important games from East Asia, India, and Africa, and medieval Europe.

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Note: I revised this article about a week after it was first posted to reflect the fact that we were playing the game wrong at first. The review below reflects the correct rules. I think.

I picked up Jambo in September on the recommendation of dish reader Joe Huber, designer of the game Burger Joint, who declared Jambo his “personal favorite two-player game” in response to my lament (in the Lost Cities post) about great German-style games’ tendency to play best as 3- to 5-player games. Jambo is, indeed, an excellent two-player game, even though there are certain mechanics I don’t love. It’s a higher order of complexity than Lost Cities, but much of what’s added is random chance rather than deeper strategy.

In Jambo, each player is a trader in precolonial east Africa, with a market capable of storing six “wares,” of which there are six types available (silk, jewelry, salt, hides, fruit, and tea, although the drawing for that last one keeps reminding me of the cover of The Chronic). The goal of the game is to finish with the most money; end game is triggered when either player passes 60 coins, after which he completes his turn and the other player gets one more full turn before the game officially ends. Players earn money by buying and selling wares, most often through ware cards that allow for the purchase or sale of a specific combination of wares – usually three, but a few cards allow the purchase of six – for fixed prices. However, the deck of cards is full of “utility” cards that allow for exchanges of cards and wares, for direct purchases of wares, or for attacks against your opponent such as swiping a single ware from his market or discarding one of his active utility cards, making the game more interactive and opening up some other avenues for strategy.

The core mechanic, however, is buying and selling wares. Each three-ware card has three specific wares on it; they may all be identical, there may be two of one kind and one of a third, or it may contain three different wares. The gap between purchase price and sale price shown on the card is always 7 coins for a three-card combination. That is, if you draw two copies of the same three-ware card, you can buy them and immediately sell them for a profit of seven coins. And since on each turn a player receives five “actions” – the first is usually used to draw a card, so in practical terms we’re talking four actions – it seems to me that the ideal turn is one that starts with a purchase and ends with a sale, where in between you might use utility cards to ensure you have what you need to complete the sale. (You can’t use a ware card to sell unless you have those three or six exact wares in your market.)

The non-ware cards are where the game gets interesting, or at least gets interactive. There are two types of cards – utility cards, which are played once and used repeatedly; and people/animal cards, which are played once and discarded. (I misread the rules, and we played people cards as utility cards for a while, which really wreaked havoc with the game.) Each player may have up to three utility cards face-up in front of him – playing a card counts as one action – and may use them once per turn, with each use counting as an action. Most involve the exchange of something for something – cards, gold, and wares, sometimes allowing you to exchange like for like, sometimes allowing you to use one thing to buy another.

People cards are a wildly mixed bag, with the best of them allowing you to increase your profits on a sale or buy missing wares cheaply so you can complete another sale, but many of them are close to useless and just clog up the deck. Animal cards are all for attack purposes; the parrot lets you steal one ware from your opponent, while the crocodile (the most abundant animal card) lets you take one of your opponent’s utility cards, use it once yourself, and then discard it. You can fight off an animal attack with a Guard card, although I don’t think the deck has enough of them and acquiring one is a function of luck rather than skill or planning.

And that’s the only thing keeping me from raving unabashedly about Jambo: There’s a lot of luck in this game, more than I tend to like. You have no outright control over which cards you draw, of course, and only a few utility cards give you any improvement over that. The solution is simply to draw more cards, and there are utility cards that allow you to draw an extra card, swap a ware for a card, buy a card for gold, grab a ware card your opponent just used, or even rifle through the discard pile for a specific card you’d like to have.

But, unlike in a game like Dominion where you build your own deck, acquiring good cards in Jambo requires luck, and I didn’t feel like the deck was flush enough with good utility/people cards to allow me to set a couple of strategies up and then just pursue whichever one the cards offered me. We’ve played ten times, and each of us has had at least one game where the cards just killed us, including one where I spent five turns needing just about any ware card to win the game, never got it, and lost.

Bear in mind that I prefer games with lower luck levels than most people do – if you view a game as just a game, you’ll probably love Jambo even more than we do. I enjoy games for the thinking and strategizing as much as I enjoy them for their social aspect, and Jambo fell a little short in that regard for me. It is still an excellent two-player option that I think we will continue to play often even as the collection grows.

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→ November 9, 2010
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Gifts for cooks, part one.

With the holidays approaching, I’m starting to get more of this question from readers and friends: “What should I buy for my [friend/relative/s.o.] who loves to cook?” With that in mind, here’s part one of what I hope will be a series on kitchen gadgets I can recommend based on personal experience. Nothing on here is over $30 – I can do a more expensive list if anyone wants it – and I use all of these items regularly in my kitchen. Where possible, I’m recommending the exact make and model I own. If not, I’ll make that clear right away.

8-Inch Chef’s Knife

This knife is Cooks Illustrated‘s recommendation, and those of you who have bought it on my past recommendations, but you should know that I do not own this particular knife – I own a Henckels chef’s knife that I received as a gift but that runs about $100, and while I love it, there’s no reason for me to recommend it over a $28 knife that does the job just as well. You must own a good chef’s knife if you intend to cook; I tried to cook with a cheap one that we received in a knife set at our wedding and cut myself at least a half-dozen times inside of two years, while I don’t think I’ve cut myself five times in ten years since I received this knife as a gift.

I do own a BladeSafe for my chef’s knife, a simple, safe plastic holder that not only keeps the knife safe in a drawer but makes shipping or transporting it much easier. We’ve often gone to friends’ houses for holidays or other big dinners where I’ll offer to cook something, and there’s no good way to wrap or protect a knife en route other than a BladeSafe or the competing KnifeSafe option.

Your friend/relative already has a chef’s knife? If he or she is a meatatarian, consider this Henckels boning knife, which I do own and use often. It’s the best tool for breaking down a whole chicken, and is good for deboning tough cuts of meat, such as separating a short rib from its bone, two things I’ve done with this knife in the last five days.

Hand-held Mandoline Slicer

I have that model, made by Kyocera and sold in several colors with red, for some reason, about a buck cheaper than the other options. I’d actually lost track of it in our house in Massachusetts as it ended up buried in the back of a cabinet, but rediscovered it when we moved – that has easily been the best part of this process, realizing that I owned things I should have been using for the last, oh, five to nine years – and have found myself reaching for it more and more often. It’s lightweight and the ceramic blade will never require sharpening. Best application so far has been for shallots: Mincing a shallot for a vinaigrette or a beurre blanc is a pain in the neck, and it cracks me up when I see TV chefs (America’s Test Kitchen is the biggest violator) try to mince a shallot like it’s just a miniature onion. I use this slicer to create very thin sheets of the shallot, then stack them roughly on the cutting board and go over them twice with a chef’s knife. No, Tom Colicchio might not approve of the uneven pieces, but this ain’t craftsteak and I’m not cooking anything for 24 hours. For my purposes it creates a perfect mince, saves time, and is safer than trying to execute the classic three-cut technique for an onion on a shallot.

And while you’re at it, you could add a pair of cut-resistant Kevlar gloves, since, as Alton Brown pointed out in the last episode of Good Eats, the hand guards that come with these home slicers are about as useful as a utility infielder who can’t play shortstop.

Box Grater

The model I own is no longer available, and it didn’t come with that handy little tub at the bottom to catch whatever you’re grating, although I’ve found either a flexible cutting board or a large piece of waxed paper does the trick. I use mine at least five times a week, usually for grating hard or semi-soft cheeses. I’ve found nothing faster except maybe the food processor, and that can’t get Parmiggiano-Reggiano as fine as a box grater can. If you don’t want this exact model, make sure you get one with a strong, sturdy handle, and at least three different sizes of holes on the various sides of the grater. (I also own a three-sided grater as a backup in case the first one is in the dishwasher.)

Instant-Read Thermometer

I own lots of thermometers – a fridge thermometer (check your nearest hardware store; Fry’s sells them too), an oven thermometer ($3!), a candy/frying thermometer, a digital probe thermometer for roasting – but this $9 gadget is so simple and handy that I use it every day. It’s ideal for measuring the temperature of the milk I steam for espresso drinks, and small and unobtrusive enough to use when measuring an egg foam in the top of a double boiler for buttercream, genoise, or zabaglione. I bought a second one just to have a spare on hand for when my first one dies, but even though I see a few amazon reviews say the device stopped working right away and even though I’ve dropped it in water and in milk (and probably worse), it still works.

Silpat Baking Sheet

I own two of these and keep them in the half-sheet pans I bought from a now-defunct restaurant supply store in Belmont, Massachusetts. Silpat sheets are made of silicone and make any sheet pan a nonstick pan, meaning you can bake on the sheets without greasing the pan or using parchment paper. (I do love parchment paper, but why use more than you have to when you can buy a Silpat, never have to cut the paper to fit, and maybe save a tree?) It’s great for cookies, biscuits, and meringues, and Alton – I’d like to think we’re on a first name basis, even though he never returns my calls – uses his for candy-making. They sell other sizes but I only have this one.

Potato Ricer

Bit of a unitasker, but you can’t make great mashed potatoes without it. I’ve tried. A wire potato masher is great for making guacamole, where uneven texture is desirable, but leaves potatoes too chunky. Grid mashers are even less effective. Anything electric, like a stick blender, will make the potatoes gummy. My only complaint about using a ricer is that you have to work fast with the hot material, but I haven’t found a better way.

(I do own a stick blender and use it often, but I don’t love my model, and it’s no longer available. I’m not sure which one to recommend.)

Microplane Grater/Zester

If amazon is to be believed, I’ve had mine for at least seven years, and it’s still as sharp as it was the day I got it. It’s ideal for zesting a lemon (those tiny “zester” tools are horrid), grating fresh nutmeg (because you would never buy it ground, right?), or grating small amounts of hard cheeses like Parmiggiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano. Of all the items on this list, this is the one I’ve given most often as a gift.

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→ November 3, 2010
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Mint Condition.

UPDATE: Folks, the line about Old Hoss Radbourn being my alter ego is a joke. I’m not Hoss, but he and I have had some fun with the rumor that I am. He’s incredibly clever and I’m flattered to be thought the source, but it’s not me.

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I received a comp copy of Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession back in the spring through my connection with the guys at mental floss, but got backed up in my reading between the move and writing playoff previews that I just got around to the book now. If you’ve got any history of collecting baseball cards (I do) or an interest in that tangential part of baseball history, I highly recommend the book, a quick, fun, occasionally funny run through the history of the baseball card, one that disabused me of a handful of card myths I thought were true.

Jamieson, who must be roughly my age as he too collected a hoard of cards that are no longer worth the cardboard they’re printed on, goes back to the origins of the baseball card as a way to sell tobacco, allegedly to adults but, hey, if a few kids caught the leaf habit, so much the better. Many of those tobacco cards are, of course, major collectors’ items today, but what I didn’t realize is that they’re rare not just because they weren’t kept but because they varied so widely – manufacturers would issue many different cards per player, with different brands advertised on the backs or different portraits on the fronts, for example. Jamieson discusses the history and myth behind the T206 Honus Wagner card, but also points out that it’s not the rarest card in history (another card in the same set, the T206 “Slow” Joe Doyle error card, is definitely rarer). Instead, Jamieson posits, the Wagner card became more valuable because it was deemed valuable in the first place: The media attention paid to the card when it sold for record-breaking sums made it more desirable to other, status-seeking collectors down the road.

He jumps forward a bit to the period after World War II when the card industry really boomed with the introduction of Bowman and Topps cards, as well as the latter’s monopolization of the industry that lasted until Fleer won an antitrust lawsuit in 1981. Topps’ actions to create and defend a monopoly occurred at the same time that the MLB Players’ Association was getting started, and while at first the MLBPA was willing to let Topps have its run of the joint, Marvin Miller’s first order of business was to end Topps’ free ride and begin returning that lost value to the players – making the union, which was battling one monopoly in MLB management, a willing partner to another monopoly in the baseball card realm. From there, Jamieson chronicles the rise and fall of the collectors’ boom in baseball cards, drawing much of his material from Pete Williams’ 1995 book Card Sharks, on the formation of Upper Deck and the creative destruction it brought to the baseball card industry, a very good story in its own right.

Jamieson keeps the book from turning into dry history by, naturally, finding and discussing a few notable eccentrics along the way. I particularly enjoyed the section on Woody Gelman, longtime head of Topps’ Product Development team and the creator of, among other icons, Bazooka Joe and the Mars Attacks! series. (I remember seeing Topps’ Wacky Packages as a kid, possibly the first time I ever ran into (or understood) parody in any form, but I don’t think I realized until I read this book that they were a Topps product.) Jamieson also takes us inside the collection of a former owner of that T206 Wagner, and looks at the rise of both card auction outfits, card authentication services, and the “ethical” card doctor who doctors worthless cards to better understand how fraudsters do it to create valuable ones. And I’d be remiss if I omitted the part my alter ego friend Old Hoss Radbourn played in the book, with a quietly extended middle finger in a few early cards of himself. That’s right: Old Hoss may have invented photobombing.

The book ends with a lament on the slow death of baseball cards, a phenomenon for which Jamieson explores various causes but can’t pinpoint a single reason for boys’ lack of interest in something so innate to his (and my) childhood. (I will offer that steroids have jack squat to do with it, since interest in MLB and minor league baseball grew substantially during the “steroid era.”) I do agree with his point that cheapening the core product by adding “chase cards” – prizes, limited edition cards, or other package inserts that weren’t just plain old cards of everyday players – didn’t help, but I think the fact that the cards themselves lack any interactivity is a huge part of why they’ve fallen so far out of favor. If you’re a kid today, what are you going to do with a pack of baseball cards? There’s no game or challenge involved, and I’d be hard-pressed to explain to an 8-year-old boy why I thought baseball cards were fun. They just were. The cards haven’t really changed, but maybe the definition of fun has.

At about 240 pages, Mint Condition is a very quick read, well under four hours for me, but in that short space it managed to fill a gap in my knowledge of baseball history, one I doubt I would have explored on my own since I left my baseball card affinity back the 1980s. Aside from the unsatisfying conclusion and some need for a better copyeditor, it’s well worth your time.

Next up: I’m crawling through the desert of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt.

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→ October 31, 2010
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Bridge of Sighs.

I started Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs ready to joke in my writeup that, in book reviews, “ambitious” is merely a euphemism for “long.” I’ve read the five novels that precede this one on Russo’s bibliography, including the amazing, Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, and while I think his books are smart, funny, and deep, I did not consider them “ambitious.” Bridge of Sighs, as you have probably guessed by now, is a work of great ambition, a sprawling modern epic with multiple foci, exploring themes of love, betrayal, mortality, meaning, and hate across more than fifty years in a small, dying town in upstate New York.

That town, Thomaston, is the birthplace of the two men at the center of the book, narrator Lou C. (“Lucy,” a nickname he never wanted or liked) Lynch and his on-and-off childhood friend Bobby Marconi. Shifting among three narratives, Russo tells their stories, weaving them together and tearing them apart, using Lucy’s own memoir-in-progress for the history of Lucy, Bobby, and their incredibly different families; jumping to the third person for the present-day perspective on Lucy’s strained marriage to his high school sweetheart, the almost too-perfect Sara; and Bobby, now a world-renowned painter living in Europe and contemplating the nearing end of his career and his life while he fights an undetermined health issue.

Russo eschews the easy plot device of having everything look perfect on the surface, only to shock the reader by showing how imperfect everything is; he makes it clear from the start that Lucy and Bobby are both damaged people, and lets the gradual revelations of major events from their childhoods provide the surprises, tossing in a little narrative greed as he goes. You don’t actually find out what happened between Bobby and his father until roughly 90% of the way through the book, but you can start to create and fill in an outline just by watching the evolution of their relationship. Lucy presents himself at the start as a married father and successful local businessman, but how successful and how happy are questions that open up as the story develops. Complicating his history and tying the two estranged friends together is Sara, who came from a broken home of her own, adopted the Lynches as a surrogate family as she dated Lucy, but found herself drawn to the raw, emotional Bobby when he reappears for their senior year of high school.

The contrast between the safe, steady affection between Sara and Lucy and the seething rage that emanates from Bobby is a central theme for Russo, who never seems to favor the measured (or bottled up) Lynch style over the open, dangerous emotions of Bobby:

It was amazing, when you thought about it, how effortlessly hate slipped into the space reserved for love and vice versa, as if these two things, identical in size and shape, had been made compatible by design. How satisfying a substitute each was for the other.

But rather than mire the story in a love triangle, or a tragic romance, Russo folds that into the comfortable ground of the yearnings of kids in a small, failing industrial town – Thomaston’s main industry, a tannery, slowly heads for extinction all while polluting the river and raising the town’s cancer rates – for something more than the hamlet can offer them. In Bridge, however, Russo moves those sentiments around; sometimes it’s the kids racing to get out of Dodge, but as often it’s their parents hoping their children leave for something better, all while they try to figure out a way to survive financially in a local economy that keeps shrinking. Lucy’s father, a hopeless optimist, loses his milkman job to modernization, only to buy a corner market as A&P locates the town’s first supermarket out by the highway. That corner market becomes the central hub of action as the kids go through junior high and high school – taking the place of the diner that lies at the heart of most Russo novels – but the work the Lynches put into it, and the role it ends up playing in their lives, symbolizes the work required to keep a marriage of two seemingly incompatible people together, even in unfavorable circumstances.

Another theme, perhaps coming from Russo’s own advancing age, is one of regret even for a life lived well – a “road not taken” question that Bobby and Sara in particular end up facing, although Lucy has his own questions about what might have been and even his mother and uncle (the roguish Dec, a classic Russo character) end up in the act. Sara’s parents seemed very two-dimensional, but I thought they might represent Russo’s unflattering takes on two extreme life paths – her angry, faithless, emotionally distant father on one side, and her unsatisfiable, self-serving, emotionally stunted mother on the other – that, I suppose, help explain why Sara is so grounded, so clear, and so able (mostly) to be happy with where she is and what she has.

If I have a criticism of Bridge of Sighs, it’s that Russo’s trademark humor is so much less in evidence. If Straight Man is his funniest work, this is probably his most serious. The gags are often little verbal jabs, rather than the slapstick and broad farce that characterizes his earlier novels:

After all, it wasn’t just people in big cities who had big dreams. Wasn’t her father himself a perfect example? Though he considered himself an urbanite, he’d grown up, as her mother had delighted in reminding him back when they were still living as husband and wife, on Staten Fucking Island.

I laughed, but hey, if you haven’t been caught in traffic on the Staten Island Expressway, that might not be quite so funny.

I’m barely doing the serious side of this book justice, however; it’s deeper and more literary than even Empire Falls, even if it’s not quite as exhilarating a read. The prose is classic Russo, as are the many full-fleshed characters, the setting, and the very realistic dramas that drive the book. If it’s a little less witty than normal, he has at least made up for it through his ambition.

Next up: I finished Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, which I would certainly recommend to those of you who collected cards in your youths or are simply interested in baseball history; and have just barely begun Abdelrahman (or Abdul Rahman or Abd el-Rahman) Munif’s Cities of Salt­, which appears on the Novel 100 list at #71.

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→ October 29, 2010
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Friday links and bullets.

• Yesterday’s chat transcript.
• I won’t say the name of the Project Runway winner, for those of you who DVR’d it but haven’t watched it, but it looked to me like the judges chose probability over upside – and I’m a firm believer in going for upside. You have a chance to get an all-world talent, whether it’s a #1 starter or a fashion genius or a revolutionary chef, that’s who you go for. This wasn’t an example of the upside designer flopping in the finals; my wife, the real PR fan in the house, was mad because she thought the upside designer did exactly what the judges praised the designer for all season.
• Had breakfast this morning at the Hillside Spot in Ahwautukee, at Warner and 48th just west of I-10. To borrow a term from a certain AFL super-fan, it was “out-STAN-ding.” I’ve been hoping to find a funky, progressive kind of breakfast/lunch spot like that since we moved here, and I’m glad Phoenix magazine highlighted them last month. The food took a little while to get to us, even though the place wasn’t busy, but everything was made to order and that is the best reason in the world to wait for food.
• This NPR story on how the private prison industry pushed through Arizona’s immigration law is a model for modern journalism, a type of investigative reporting I don’t see as often as I did ten or fifteen years ago. I wish NPR did more of it, and given how many candidates campaigning here are using their position on the law as a major part of their platforms, it should be mailed to every voter in Arizona before Tuesday. (I’m not advocating a vote either way on any candidate or ballot question – merely that voters should be informed before making any voting decisions.)

• One of my favorite restaurants in Vegas, Lotus of Siam, is opening a second location Greenwich Village.
• I’m still under the weather, so I didn’t head to any AFL games and won’t today, but the forced rest meant that I finished Richard Russo’s tremendous novel Bridge of Sighs and am already halfway through Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, a quirky history of the baseball card industry – or a history of the quirky baseball card industry, and the quirky people at the heart of it. (I received a review copy of Mint Condition from the publisher.) I hope to post a review of Bridge of Sighs over the weekend.

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→ October 28, 2010
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East Valley eats.

One music note (pun intended) before I get to the food: Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs (best album I’ve heard in 2010) and their debut album Funeral are both just $5 as mp3 downloads on amazon.com, probably just through the end of the month (Sunday night). Their second album, Neon Bible, is just $5.99 as a download, but I don’t think that disc measures up – you could buy “Keep the Car Running” and call it a day.

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Jason Grey has been trying to get me to try Rancho de Tia Rosa in Mesa for at least three years now, but it was never convenient until we moved to this part of the Valley. (When we were here for spring training, we’d stay in north Scottsdale, near Kierland, so heading out to eastern Mesa for dinner was a haul and would have screwed with my daughter’s bed time.) The restaurant absolutely lived up to expectations, especially since, like Ortega’s in San Diego, Tia Rosa makes their own old-school flour tortillas, the biggest delimiter for me between an ordinary Mexican restaurant and an above-average one. We’ve been there once so far, although we’re going again soon, and the portions are generous with very fresh ingredients. I ordered the carne asada, figuring I’d start with a classic dish (the menu has a mix of classics and modern Mexican cuisine); the flavor was outstanding, deep, smoky, not too salty, but unfortunately the meat had dried out a little, probably because it was slow-cooked all day and then held a little too warm for service. I don’t pay extra for ambiance, but my wife was impressed by the building and décor inside; I’m more about the tortillas and salsas and bright flavors, enough that I’m willing to give them a pass on the dryness of the main course.

In downtown Mesa on Main Street, there’s a small lunch place called Mangos that apparently keeps inconsistent hours for dinner, but for lunch it’s more of a nicer twist on a taco shop. Their fish taco is the best I’ve ever had, hot, crispy, non-greasy, with just enough seasoning, and their aguas frescas were outstanding – I went with the cashier’s recommendation, a mix of watermelon and pineapple. The shrimp taco wasn’t as good as the fish taco, mostly because it seemed undersalted, but all ingredients on both tacos were fresh, and the tacos plus beans and rice ran about $11 for more food than I could think about eating. Mangos has a sister restaurant in downtown Chandler called El Zocalo that is just a poor imitation of Tia Rosa, as expensive but with inferior product; you’re paying mostly for setting and atmosphere, and I’d rather pay for the food.

The Urban Grocery and Wine Bar at the Phoenix Public Market doesn’t have an extensive menu, but the market itself is worth checking out. At the grocery counter you can order a few sandwich items, including a roast beef sandwich that feels artisanal through all of its ingredients, from the baguette to the spicy mustard to the unusual pickles, and the sandwich is generously filled. My only complaint was that the roast beef was sliced thickly and incorrectly, resulting in a very tough product that detracted from the experience, but if that’s not the norm, it’s a steal at $7.

For pizza, I’d still call Grimaldi’s the tops among casual places in the area, but Florencia’s on Ray in Ahwautukee (near 40th) does a very solid rendition of New York-style pizza, with just a little too much sauce separating them from NYC slice-dom. The Italian sausage had a nice pronounced fennel note, and the sauce isn’t sweet as it too often is outside of New York. The pesto was a little oily for me but had a good balance of basil, garlic, and cheese. The garden salad, while basic, has always included very fresh ingredients, and the homemade balsamic dressing is solid if a touch thin.

We’ve tried three local dessert options, two of which are gelaterias. The winner there is Angel Sweet, on Chandler Blvd just east of Dobson, tucked in a strip mall with a Starbucks and a Basha’s. The owner of Angel Sweet – whom we’ve never seen – is reportedly Japanese, but I think he has an Italian soul given how incredibly smooth and precise his gelatos are. The super dark chocolate does not boast without cause, as it is about as black as the last banana with strong cocoa flavor, while the mint is actually a straciatella with an unusually round, full mint flavor. The panna cotta and crème caramel are similar, but I prefer the darker caramel notes in the panna cotta. The coconut, one of my two bellwether flavors along with dark chocolate, is bright and fresh and not too sweet. My wife and daughter are both big fans of the seasonal pumpkin pie flavor.

The other gelateria we’ve found is Enzo’s, on Ray Road, run by an emigrant from Italy who also pulls what looks like a legit shot of espresso. He’s extremely friendly, but unfortunately the gelato we had was slightly grainy and didn’t have the same powerful flavors as Angel Sweet’s. Che peccato.

Cake Cafe on Ray Rd in Ahwautukee is primarily a cupcake shop that also sells custom cakes, typically selling a dozen or so cupcake flavors on any given day. I’d call it fringe-average, not quite as good as Sprinkles (which to me is the definition of solid-average, useful since it’s likely some of you have tried it) because the cupcakes tend to be slightly dry, and the frosting portions are a little meager. The buttercreams are smooth and rich with solid flavors, as good as my own but made with (I assume) less swearing. At $2 apiece they’re actually a good value relative to what most cupcake shops charge.

Finally, to the burger debate. It started on Twitter when someone asked if I’d tried Smash Burger, which I did shortly afterwards, but devolved into a partisan Five Guys/In-n-Out argument, which I assume was geographically motivated. Smash Burger itself was a big disappointment; other than the fact that the burger was extremely hot when it reached the table, there was nothing good about the meal. The burger was greasy, but not with the rich, fulfilling flavor of beef fat – it tasted of the grill, of a thousand burgers and chicken breasts and other who-knows-what made before, a stale, slightly burned flavor that made me feel like I was in a rundown diner at 1 in the morning. The fries, covered in a rosemary-garlic mixture, weren’t fresh-cut and probably went from a freezer bag to the deep fryer. With In-n-Out here and Five Guys invading, I see no reason to think Smash Burger can succeed. Then again, I have no idea how Burger King still exists, so who knows.

As for Five Guys and In-n-Out, I stand by my assessment that Five Guys offers a better burger. Most of the counterarguments I’ve heard revolve around the In-n-Out burger package, not the meat itself. When you cook an extremely thin, tightly packed hamburger to well done, as In-n-Out does, you’re going to end up with a dry product. In-n-Out compensates for that by putting Thousand Island dressing, which at its heart is just jarred mayonnaise, on the bun, which adds fat back to the sandwich and keeps the bottom bun from getting soggy, but the burger itself is as dry as it gets. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment: Order a plain burger at both In-n-Out and Five Guys – no cheese, no condiments, no vegetation. Just the burger. Five Guys also cooks their burgers to well done – I wish they would stop at medium well – but the burger is thicker and loosely packed, so it retains some moisture and fat. I just don’t see any comparison.

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→ October 26, 2010
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Top Chef: Just Desserts midpoint review.

Top Chef: Just Desserts has reached its halfway point, and so far, I’m sorry to say I’m underwhelmed. I had pretty high hopes for the show, primarily because as both a cook and an eater I love desserts of all sorts – classic and modern, simple and complex, pastries and custards, you name it. Even though I understand the chemistry behind the transformations, there’s something thrilling about watching a handful of basic ingredients turn into a finished product that delivers flavors and textures unimaginable from the initial list of components, just because of a little know-how and the skill that comes from repetition.

But the emphasis of TC:JD hasn’t been the food so much, but the contestants, who seem to have been selected for their capacity to generate drama rather than their culinary know-how. As a result, the show seems to have more in common with Project Runway than with the original Top Chef, and while I watch Runway*, it’s primarily my wife’s show – our deal is I watch that with her and she watches the Top Chef series with me.

*I had to leave the room after the elimination on last week’s episode of Project Runway because I couldn’t watch the eliminated designer’s reaction, which seemed to me to reveal a lot of pain beyond the end of his time in the competition. I can’t imagine a life where something as fundamental to your identity as your sexual orientation leads to a gulf between you and your parents, and it’s clear that his parents’ treatment of him has had lasting, negative effects on his emotional state and even his self-esteem. It was brutal on its own, and to see that in light of the recent spate of news stories about suicides by gay teenagers … I couldn’t watch it. Just love your children, people.

The initial drama was high-strung (but apparently talented) chef Seth, who won the first quick-fire of the season and by the end of the second episode seemed to be suffering from some sort of mental illness or breakdown – I’ve theorized something along the lines of Asperger’s, although I am not a professional and recognize that you can’t diagnose someone through a television set. But his reactions to setbacks and inability to communicate with other contestants had to be evident to the producers during the interviewing process, and I can only conclude that they chose him for the show because they thought he’d be good television, rather than seeing him as an unstable person who, at best, would make other denizens of the house uncomfortable with his antics. His exit, after an unseen anxiety attack, was more than welcome if only because of the amount of time in each episode devoted to his weirdness and others’ (valid) complaints about it, although I find it odd that they didn’t show whatever meltdown he had right before the attack. (You put him on the show, and he does something crazy yet utterly predictable, and you don’t show it? Exactly how bad was it?)

No sooner was Seth out the door, however, than Heather H. loses her mind over some slight, real or perceived, from Morgan, although the edited version we saw made it appear that she volunteered to do the one group piece for her team by herself and then was annoyed that Morgan didn’t help her with it and won the overall challenge himself. Again, we’re seeing edited footage, but the complaint that he degrades women by calling them “darlin” doesn’t hold much water with me – it’s not an insult by itself, and he’s pretty clearly a charmer by nature, with that language just part of his overall act. Last week, there’s a pea-puree-style controversy when one of Heather H.’s items disappeared, and she’s blaming Morgan despite a total lack of evidence that he did anything, making her look like the paranoid nut job brought in to create drama after Seth left. That’s a lot of unnecessary, uninteresting drama for six episodes, and I haven’t even mentioned the apparently-depressed Heather C., the definitely-depressed Malika (with good reason – she was going through a divorce after her restaurant failed), or the angry Tania (thankfully ousted in episode 1). Was this really the optimal set of contestants, or merely the mix most likely to deliver water-cooler fodder for the show?

As for the competition itself, I thought after week 4 that three of the eight chefs remaining had separated themselves from the group – Morgan, Zac, and Yigit. I’m pulling for Yigit primarily because I’m most interested in his food; Morgan seems extremely skilled and I do like his ideas, but Yigit offers the best combination of pushing the envelope and technical ability, although I’d like to see him able to use his reported background in molecular gastronomy more, perhaps as we approach the finale. Zac appears to be very talented and might have the strongest sense of flavor of anyone on the show, although his personality is about as grating as a rusty Microplane, and the whole obsession with Gail’s shoes fell somewhere between creepy and stalker-ish.

Other thoughts…

  • I’m glad to see that Eric, the lone baker among a group of pastry chefs, is faring better in the various challenges, but if you’re going to invite a baker to compete on the show, at some point don’t you have to have a baking challenge? Some of the early competitions made him look sloppy and talentless, but the issue is that his talents are geared toward a different sphere of desserts.
  • Gail’s been a little better in her role as head judge after the first week or two, when her attempts to seem severe (a la Tom Colicchio) made her seem unlikeable, but her main issue now seems to be excessive awareness of the camera. She needs to just forget the camera’s there, because what she says is usually informative, but she’s coming off as stiff when I would wager good money that she’s nothing like that off air.
  • My wife and I both feel like Johnny Iuzzini keeps falling on the wrong side of the snark fence. There’s funny snark, and there’s vicious snark, and I think Iuzzini too often comes across as nasty, or at least cutting. If a contestant’s dish sucks, it sucks, but there’s a way to express that without conveying the sentiment that the contestant is simply incompetent and should stay out of the kitchen – especially when said contestant is standing right in front of you, already humiliated at his/her place in the bottom three (and often with the knowledge before judges’ table that his/her dish failed).
  • Erica’s soapy ice cream is a real mystery to me, and I wish they’d spent more time on that – or, in general, on why certain dishes failed. Soapy taste or texture is usually a case of too much baking soda or an otherwise basic (as opposed to acidic) product, but that wouldn’t apply here. Was there actually soap in the ice cream, perhaps from the last time the ice cream machine was cleaned? (That would be ironic, since the whole show is sponsored by a soap company. I imagine Dial executives hitting the ceiling when they saw the judges talking about “soap” like it was a dirty word.)
  • Was it just us, or were the judges awfully lenient about the “black” part of the black-and-white desserts challenge in the last episode? There was an awful lot of brown on those plates, as well as some purple. (My wife thought red should have been acceptable, since newspapers are black and white and “red” all over.)

At this point, I’d rank the remaining six contestants, best to worst, like so: Yigit, Morgan, Zac, Heather, Eric, Danielle. I think any of the first three could win, and I expect Danielle to be next out the door. The biggest gap in those rankings is between Zac and Heather, with another between Heather and Eric, but I think Yigit has the potential to blow away the field if the challenges give him more opportunity to show off his technical skills.

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→ October 24, 2010
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A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

Robert Olen Butler won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, yet another entry in the canon of literature about the Vietnam War. Butler’s conceit is a new one, revolving around Vietnamese immigrants in the greater New Orleans area, transplants from one delta to another, dealing with the culture gap as well as the weight of history, of a country left behind, a war lost, and often a family divided by death or distance. These depictions show great empathy for his subjects, but rarely veer into the sentimental, instead giving greater depth and color to a population that is marginalized here after a war that, despite hundreds of novels and stories on the subject, is still in search of its great, defining literary work. I’m not sure that this is it, though.

The strongest stories blended the experiences of their central Vietnamese characters into American settings, giving readers familiar ground underneath the unfamiliar emotions or cultural norms of their subjects. “The Trip Back” takes a common subject, the declining health and memory loss of an aged family member, and grafts it on to a Vietnamese couple struggling emotionally in their new country as they receive a visit from that family member, not realizing his mental state until after he gets off the plane. (Nice job by the Vietnamese branch of the family, failing to inform the American branch that the man was senile.)

One exception, the title story, is the best of the collection as it follows the conversation between a dying Vietnamese man and the ghost of Ho Chi Minh, whose hands are coated with sugar from his time in Escoffier’s kitchen before his own radicalization. Ho admits to his dying friend that he is not at peace in the afterlife, and the friend realizes it’s because Ho used confectioner’s sugar – which contains cornstarch or another anti-caking agent – instead of granulated sugar. Is the sugar standing in for the standard “blood on one’s hands” metaphor, with the wrong sugar the betrayal of the Marxist philosophy underlying the revolution, leading to Ho’s restlessness beyond the grave? Is that the dying man’s own conscience, questioning his onetime friend’s radicalization while he himself chose Buddhism and a life of peace? (In reality, the Communist leader probably did not work for the famous French chef, or, at least, there is no evidence that he did, but the symbolism depends on that connnection.) Meanwhile, the man overhears his family here in America admit to knowledge of and perhaps involvement in the murder of a local Vietnamese man who wrote an editorial urging the U.S. to admit that the war was over and begin normalizing relations with Vietnam, in direct contrast to his own non-violent philosophy.
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Two of the stories flopped because of fully predictable endings – “Letters from my Father,” which repeats an urban legend that most of you have probably heard before; and “Love,” told by a cuckolded husband who used to protect his wife (and manhood) in Vietnam by telling U.S. forces that Viet Cong fighters were hiding where his wife’s would-be suitors lived.

The one longer story in the book, “The American Couple,” was for me the weakest entry in the collection. Told from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman, Vinh, a sharp observer whose skills help her win a trip for two to Mexico on an unnamed game show that is obviously “Let’s Make a Deal,” and whose husband fought for South Vietnam. They strike up a slightly awkward, arm’s-length friendship at the resort with an American couple, one that gradually drifts into a childish battle between the two men, both of whom are dealing with the memories of a war in which they participated but never truly fought. Telling the story from Vinh’s perspective robs us of any insight into the behavior of the two men – the entire episode seemed juvenile to me – while she is almost robotic in her relaying of the action.

Next up: Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls, which fell at #33 on the last version of my own top 100.

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→ October 18, 2010
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Tar Baby.

I’ve filed two pieces from the AFL so far, one on Sunday and one on Thursday. Jason Grey also wrote a piece on Friday; we saw Brothers pitch again on Saturday and his stuff was down about 2 miles an hour.

—

You can’t spoil a child. Love and good food never spoiled nobody.

In his New York Times review of Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel Tar Baby, John Irving referred to it as “her most ambitious book” to that point. If true, I think Morrison missed the mark for which she was aiming, but I also think Irving’s comment sells short her previous novel, Song of Solomon, which put her on the literary map after her first two novels found little commercial success.

Morrison’s two best novels – Song of Solomon and 1987’s masterwork Beloved – deal with enormous themes of African-American history and culture, replete with symbolism that took compelling stories with magical realism and elevated them to magnum opi that explored the black experience in the United States, from the present day all the way back to our shameful history of slavery. Compared to those two novels, Tar Baby is an inchoate exposition with less structure and a jumbled storyline that crystallizes around its two central characters in the final third, only to end with one of the most ambigious conclusions I’ve ever seen.

Jadine, the closest thing Tar Baby has to a central character, is a light-skinned African-American woman who was raised by her aunt and uncle on the Caribbean island of Dominique (Dominica) on the estate of the wealthy, eccentric white man Valerian Street and his beautiful but aloof wife Margaret. Jadine, now a successful model who spends much of her time in Paris and New York, finds her world turned upside down when a fugitive deckhand, a black man named Son, is found hiding in Margaret Street’s closet, an arrival that creates battle lines not between white and black but between wealth and poverty, and between old black and new black. These battle lines, more than the characters or the torrid romance that forms between Jadine and Son, define the novel.

The most interesting division forms between Son and the various black characters in the book – Jadine, her aunt Ondine and uncle Sydney, and locals on Dominique who are almost invisible not just to the Streets but even to Sydney and Ondine. (One regular helper from outside the house is often fired, but continues to come under a new name because the Streets don’t know the difference.) Son represents something atavistic to Jadine and her aunt and uncle, a throwback to the time of overt social and economic repression; Sydney and Ondine refer to him as a “swamp n—–r,” ostensibly a comment on his initial appearance in Margaret’s closet, but more likely a reflection of their own discomfort at seeing their own racial past incarnate before their eyes. Jadine finds herself attracted to Son and drawn into an affair with him that spans from Dominique to New York, where Son finds himself alienated and disgusted by the way African-Americans live with and yet unequal to whites, to Son’s poor hometown of Eloe, a Florida backwater where Jadine is appalled and terrified by the ambition-less, self-satisfied poverty:

You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don’t ask me to do it with you. I won’t. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over. But no, you want to talk about white babies; you don’t know how to forget the past and do better.

Jadine and Son’s affair begins as the marriage between Valerian and Margaret frays under the revelation of a three-decades-old secret, one shocking and yet inconsequential in the book’s larger plot, as the two white characters are mostly absent from the remainder of the book. Morrison’s characterization is normally first-rate, but the Streets are rendered in two or two and a half dimensions and stand more as props for her various black characters than as fully-realized individuals of their own.

Margaret is waiting for her son, Michael, to bring salvation or exoneration when he comes for Christmas, but he never arrives and the plot strand frays and disappears, which stands in for the main problem with Tar Baby as a novel: Nothing is resolved at the end of the book, and what conclusion Morrison does offer us is ambiguous at best.

By and large, Morrison doesn’t take sides in the Jadine/Son conflict; if anything she seems to offer criticisms of both the complete rejection of the past and of the willingness to repeat it. That said, Jadine’s love of a sealskin coat read to me like a condemnation of her embrace of materialism. She’s rejecting her own skin and replacing it with something natural yet artificial and inhuman, and the manufacture of such a coat through violence against nature ties into the conflict between modernity and nature, another of the themes Morrison explores in the book.

If you haven’t read any Toni Morrison, Tar Baby, isn’t the place to start; I’d send you to Beloved (one of the ten best novels I’ve ever read), then Song of Solomon, and then either Tar Baby or Jazz. Those first two novels are must reads for anyone interested in American literature, but Tar Baby doesn’t measure up to them in scope or story.

Next up: Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

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→ October 9, 2010
→ By

If You Follow Me.

Before I get to the book, I wanted to suggest again that you check out “Where I’m Going,” the new single from Cut Copy, available for free on their website. I may have sold it short by calling it “straight-up early Britpop;” after listening it a few more times, including once with the volume turned up (inadvertently) too high, I realized that there are layers of sound beyond that surface candy, even beyond the Who-like keyboard bridge in the middle of the track. At a cost of zero, it’s worth every penny.

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I received a review copy of Malena Watrous’ debut novel If You Follow Me in the spring, and I think it speaks to how deep my book queue is that I just got around to it last week after finally abandoning the leaden Night Train to Lisbon after about 130 pages. Watrous’ novel takes the standard fish-out-of-water plot and layers a story of personal drama and growth on top of it while achieving the unusual feat of tying up the minor plot threads while leaving the macro issues open.

The narrator, Marina, has come to Japan as an English teacher with her girlfriend, Carolyn, whom she met in a bereavement group about a year and a half before the novel starts when her father took his own life. (Carolyn’s mother died of cancer about eight years before that.) Marina isn’t so much following Carolyn as running from her unresolved grief and anger, but Watrous never allows that darkness to choke the life out of the novel, allowing other characters to come to the fore and even slipping in some light humor.

While Watrous works the fish-out-of-water angle for humor, particularly with Marina’s struggles to understand their small town’s rules for disposing of garbage (gomi), she uses it more to introduce a cast of unusual characters, some eccentric, but most with very real problems. Marina’s supervisor, Hiro, has a strange love of karaoke, communicates with Marina primarily through letters, and is thoroughly depressed by his job. Keiko is ignored by her useless husband and struggles to manage her two sons, one suicidal and another socially maladjusted. Haruki, the only boy in the school’s “secretarial” track, has just returned to school after bullying led him to shut himself in his room for three years, and the boys who bully him have, of course, their own reasons for their behavior. The array of well-drawn characters gives the book a richness that wouldn’t normally be present in this type of story, which usually has the protagonist/narrator as the only normal person and the major focus of the book, with the locals serving as comic relief or simply foils for the main character. Marina also serves as her own sort of comic relief, from her trouble with the gomi rules to her misadventures in driving (in a car with doors that don’t open) to her use of some rather risque materials to get the tough-kids class to pay attention to her English lessons, and the self-effacing voice Watrous gave her alter ego works extremely well through those episodes.

Beyond the mature characterization, I loved Watrous’ infusion of grief and loneliness into the novel without turning it into a bleak, depressing, or hopeless work. Marina keeps her grief at arm’s length – she can’t dispose of it any more than she can dispose of her intermittently-operating refrigerator – and learns something about her grief and herself from watching her charges and neighbors in the small town of Shika … but not everything, as Watrous doesn’t tie it all up in a neat package at the book’s end. Marina makes headway, opens herself up to new adventures, and finds some closure with her father, but at the end it’s clear that she’s still a work in progress. That realistic touch elevated the book to something more than a trivial read for me.

Three disorganized thoughts on If You Follow Me:

  • The cover isn’t doing the book any favors – celery green with a healthy dose of pink. It’s not chick lit, but it sure seems like they’re marketing it that way. I don’t view a book about a female main character as de facto chick lit, and the themes Watrous explores are universal across gender and sexual orientation.
  • If you’re thinking a book starring a lesbian is going to have some hot girl-on-girl action, you’ll probably be disappointed. That said, I thought the few brief mentions of sex seemed a little extraneous to the plot – more placeholders to get from one scene to the next (start sex scene, drop curtain) than actual plot drivers. I do give Watrous credit for a delicate hand, since I think 90% of the sex scenes I come across are painful to read.
  • Watrous studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under, among others, Marilynne Robinson, author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Gilead and her debut novel Housekeeping, #58 on the last iteration of Klaw 100. And Watrous’ prose did remind me in many ways of Robinson’s – not quite as beautiful, as Robinson appears to have invented the English language and merely tolerates the rest of us playing with it, but gentle and sensitive in ways that Robinson’s is as well.

Next up: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.

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