→ November 27, 2007
→ By

Um, Bob…

This is priceless: Minnesota Twins should trade stars for Boston Red Sox’s cheap youth.

The article itself is bad enough – there’s a reason I don’t do “these two teams should make this trade!” columns – but here’s the doozy: Writer Bob Sansevere – a sportswriter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press since 1984 – says that the Twins should trade (among others) Carlos Silva to the Red Sox. Which would be a brilliant idea, if Silva hadn’t declared free agency about a month ago. But hey, don’t be afraid to keep track of the 25 players on your one local major league team, Bob.

(Hat tip to River Ave. Blues for sending the link.)

EDIT: FJM weighs in, and as usual, they’re funnier than I am.

Filed Under: Humor, Media
→ November 24, 2007
→ By

The Sheltering Sky.

Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, another entrant in the TIME 100 (and on the Modern Library 100 as well), is a strange psychological novel in a fantastic setting with interesting side characters, but it ultimately falls short because the two central characters are so very uninteresting.

The Sheltering Sky tracks the breakdowns – one physical, one mental – of Port Moresby and his wife, Kit, as they travel into the Sahara with a friend, Tunner. Kit Moresby is neurotic to an extreme, while Port is alienated from almost everything in his life.
Yet both find their downward spirals hastened by bad choices – not just bad, but stupid and unrealistic as well. It’s clear from the start that their marriage is doomed, but it’s doomed because the thinly drawn characters have no emotional intersection, so the reader is left watching each of their demises at a distance. And when one or the other (usually Port) attempts to offer some deep philosophizing, it reads as hollow, as if the character is speaking the author’s words rather than his or her own.

The shame of it is that Bowles dropped these two-dimensional beings into a wonderful three-dimensional world. His various fictional Saharan towns and oases are richly detailed, some evoking beautiful villages under blue skies, others ominous with their narrow streets and unfriendly denizens. The handful of side characters – a comical mother-and-son due named Lyle, various French colonial administrators with their own troubles and biases, a Jewish shopkeeper in the oasis where Port takes ill – are all sketched with greater clarity and depth than the two nitwits at the story’s center.

I’d love to say that this novel, Bowles’ first, represented a fine first effort upon which he’d likely improve with future works, but every evaluation of his canon lists this novel as his finest, so if you don’t care for The Sheltering Sky, you might wish to follow my example and skip the rest of Bowles’ writings.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With:
→ November 23, 2007
→ By

Thanksgiving eats & random thoughts.

Thanksgiving at Chez Law is a simple affair. My in-laws came for the holiday, and my mother-in-law started asking about a pumpkin pie (not on my menu) two or three days prior to their arrival. My father-in-law likes pumpkin pie, but also likes apple pie, which I had already made, and I wasn’t about to make two desserts for four people plus a toddler. My mother-in-law explained, “I just have this thing about not wanting anyone to be disappointed,” which is how we ended up with eleven dishes for eight people in 2004. My response to her philosophy? “I don’t give a shit if anyone’s disappointed, so I tend have a lot less stress on holidays.”

The menu: turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, green-bean casserole, Irish soda bread, cranberry sauce, apple pie.

I always use Alton Brown’s roasted turkey recipe – half an hour at 500 degrees to brown the outside, then drop the oven to 350 with foil over the breast until the white meat is 159 degrees and the thigh hits 170. I brined it the night before using his brine recipe (same link), but instead of allspice berries and candied ginger, I use whole cloves and a pinch of whole mustard seed. I filled the cavity with half an apple, half an onion, two sage leaves, and two rosemary sprigs. The turkey took about 2:20 to cook, longer than I expected, but aside from the deepest part of the drumsticks, every bit of meat was still moist and juicy, and the white meat (usually pretty bland) had a nice flavor that didn’t require help from gravy. Speaking of which, I had plenty of pan drippings for a simple gravy – deglazed with a mixture of sherry (Amontillado!) and cognac, with a little chopped celery and rosemary in the pan, then boosted with homemade chicken stock and thickened with a flour/butter paste. It was very dark and strongly flavored, but delicious.

EDIT: One thing worth mentioning about AB’s cooking method is that during the first half-hour, the oil from the outside of the bird and some of the rendered fat from the bird itself run off and hit the bottom of the pan, which is at 500 degrees, so it smokes. While not good for the smoke alarm, it does end up briefly smoking the bird, so the turkey gets a little pink smoke ring all over the meat, and the drumsticks in particular have a texture a lot like a fully smoked turkey leg. Definitely good eats.

For dressing, I always use Joy of Cooking’s basic bread stuffing recipe, just adding one cup of chopped red bell pepper for flavor and color:

The keys here are always starting with a good-quality bread – I used the fresh Italian bread from Whole Foods, but any artisan bread would be fine – and using fresh herbs and, if you can, homemade chicken stock to moisten it. I grow parsley, sage, and thyme in my tiny backyard, so I had all three fresh and available, and I grind the cloves and grate the nutmeg fresh as well.

The sweet potatoes were another AB recipe, chipotle mashed sweet potatoes, kicked up with 2 Tbsp of brown sugar and about 1 Tbsp of cream:

I melt the cream and butter together in a small saucepan and dissolve the salt and brown sugar in it, just as I would do for mashed potatoes. You should never add cold butter or cream to hot potatoes of any sort, and using them to dissolve the salt and sugar helps distribute the seasonings more evenly throughout the mash.

The green bean casserole was, sadly, the one from the back of the can, because my wife insists on it:

I did throw about a half-teaspoon of hot sauce in there; it doesn’t make the finished dish spicy, but it adds an undertone of heat that I like and that no one complains about.

I make my own cranberry sauce; cranberries are very high in pectin and they gel pretty quickly. The rough rule of thumb is eight cups of fresh whole cranberries, three cups of sugar, and two and a half cups of water. I kick it up a few notches (sorry) by going with 1¾ cups of water, ½ cup of rum,

For bread, I skipped my usual sponge bread and made the white Irish soda bread recipe from Kevin Dundon’s Full on Irish cookbook:

Great texture, perhaps a bit too much buttermilk flavor for my tastes, so next time I might play with it and try a baking powder/milk combo instead of baking soda/buttermilk. Raglan Road, the Downtown Disney restaurant about which I raved earlier this month, is Dundon’s creation, and they serve a brown soda bread there (recipe also in that cookbook) that’s outstanding.

For dessert, I had already prepared and frozen an apple pie, using apples we picked ourselves in late September. You can prepare and freeze an unbaked pie without too much extra work – I have another one in the freezer for Christmas – and it allows you to get the fruit into the pie while it’s still in season. Baking is simple: don’t cut steam vents or glaze before freezing; glaze before baking; bake 10 minutes at 425°, then cut vents and bake 20 minutes more; then drop to 350° and bake until thick juices bubble up through the vents, about another hour. Anyway, the pie was a bit of a disappointment, as the flavor was bland. I think I used too little salt in the crust, although its texture was perfect (it’s the lattice-dough recipe from Baking Illustrated), and the filling probably needed a bit more lemon juice both for tartness and to emphasize the contrast with the sweetness. Apples are always a bit unpredictable in their sweet/tart ratio, and I missed this one a bit. Anyway, the obligatory picture, although the damn thing fell down between slicing and picture-taking:

I can’t emphasize enough how good that dough recipe is, though. Working with it is very easy, as it doesn’t tear or crack, and it’s flaky and tender when it’s baked.

One last hit is the beverage – every year, we make cranberry daiquiris (don’t laugh, they’re about 60% rum) based on a recipe that I could swear was in Bon Appetit but that has disappeared from epicurious.com. Since they seem to have lost interest, here’s my take on the recipe:

Dissolve 1/2 cup sugar in 1/2 cup water in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add 1 cinnamon stick, two or three whole cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon grated orange peel; bring to boil. Mix in 1/2 cup cranberries and cook until cranberries begin to pop. Cool; discard cinnamon. Pour mixture into jar; add 1/2 cup light rum. Refrigerate until fully chilled. Strain syrup into pitcher; reserve cranberries. Add 6 tablespoons each dark rum, light rum, orange juice, and lemon juice to pitcher. Chill. Serve over ice; garnish with reserved cranberries.

I use Gosling’s Black Seal rum for the dark rum and squeeze the orange and lemon juices myself. They’re very good and potent for a fruity drink, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I like the demon rum.

—

A few random observations from the holiday:

• Love the AFLAC commercial using the Rudolph characters. Unfortunately, OfficeMax scooped them a few years ago with their Rubberband man spoof, which was almost as funny as the making-of video.

• More props to TIAA-CREF for using Bob Mould’s “See a Little Light,” one of my favorite songs ever in any genre, in their “Power of” commercial.
• Shouldn’t Les Miles be named Fewer Miles? Does Michigan really want to hire a coach whose own name is a grammatical error?

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With:
→ November 21, 2007
→ By

Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea isn’t just on the TIME 100; it’s one of 25 books to appear on that list, the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s rival list. (Others include 1984, An American Tragedy, Lolita, and The Great Gatsby, all of which are also in The Novel 100, as well as another recent read for me, All the King’s Men.) What makes Wide Sargasso Sea unusual for any of these lists is its genre: It’s a prequel to a classic novel written by someone else – Charlotte Brontë’s gothic romance, Jane Eyre .

Rhys (née Ella Williams) apparently connected with a minor and almost stock character in Brontë’s book, Antoinette Bertha Cosway. Rhys was also a Caribbean-born woman sent to England at the brink of adulthood, only to find her hopes of a paradisiacal England like the one she found in literature dashed by a change in fortune, the death of her father, forcing her to abandon her studies and find work. She was haunted by Antoinette’s character, saying, “I was convinced that Charlotte Brontë must have had something against the West Indies, and I was angry about it.” So she wrote.

The prequel comprises three sections, with the third just a short look at Antoinette’s life in England. The first two depict her childhood with a mother who is going insane (although Rhys leaves it vague whether it’s due to genetics or circumstance) and then her somewhat rushed marriage to a confident young Englishman who is seduced by Antoinette’s beauty as well as by her substantial dowry, an inheritance from her mother’s second husband. Antoinette herself is anxious, depressed, and submissive, looking for some vein of independence but finding herself always chained to the people and places around her.

Wide Sargasso Sea is short and its main theme is straightforward – Rhys emphasizes the imbalance she sees in interpersonal relationships, primarily romantic ones, with parallels in master/slave relationships. It is almost a feminist tract in response to the Victorian sensibility of Brontë’s work, although Jane herself was a strong character with an independent streak; think of it more as Rhys’ response to Brontë’s treatment of Antoinette (known as Bertha in Jane Eyre) as a helpless creature, more her husband’s ward than wife. Rhys also employs one of the more obvious symbols (fire) I’ve come across in any literary work, one that would be a great example for teaching literature students about symbolism and how it can be integrated into a novel in a way that is unobtrusive yet still powerful.

As an exploration of an underdeveloped character in another novel, Wide Sargasso Sea is profound and thought-provoking, opening the door to broader questions of how the dominant/submissive dynamic permeates many romantic relationships. Without Jane Eyre to hold it up, however, it’s an unfinished novella that trails off without a proper ending to its linear plot. If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, you certainly should, as it’s one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language and appears on The Novel 100, but also because it opens the door not just to Wide Sargasso Sea and to the amazing world introduced in Jasper Fforde’s hilarious book The Eyre Affair.

—

Speaking of lists, this book pushes me past the halfway point on the TIME 100 list, to 50 7/12, since I’m seven books into Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. Anyway, I hope you all have a safe, happy, and (most importantly) delicious Thanksgiving. If all goes well and I have time to take some pictures tomorrow, I’ll have some food pr0n on the site over the weekend.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With:
→ November 18, 2007
→ By

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, another entrant in the TIME 100, is a wonderfully terse novel, or perhaps novella, that manages to pack a ridiculous amount of detail and emotion into its 130-odd pages.

TPoMJB is a comedy of manners set over a novel of ideas, or more accurately of ideology. Miss Jean Brodie is an independent-minded teacher at an all-girls school between the wars, and she chooses six girls from her class of ten-year-olds to be the “Brodie Set,” singled out allegedly for their unique personalities, but more apparently for Miss Brodie’s gratification of her own ego and the imitiation of some of her own religious ideals. Miss Brodie teaches the girls what she believes is important, often running afoul of the private school’s authorities and other teachers, and lets the Brodie Set see or hear glimpses of her personal life, including her aborted affair with a married co-worker – whose Catholic faith she subsequently denigrates, as she blames it for the end of their tryst – and longer-running affair with another co-worker. Yet Miss Brodie is not the enlightened teacher of a Dead Poets Society, instead blaming the one “stupid” girl in the Brodie Set, Mary, for almost everything that goes wrong, and never hesitating to point out the failings of her other chosen charges.

The story itself covers the time from the selection of the Brodie Set to Miss Brodie’s downfall when one of her charges – the identify of whom is the only real “spoiler” plot element of the book – betrays her to the school’s headmistress. Underlying that story, however, is a tripartite battle of ideas: Miss Brodie’s Calvinist beliefs against the Roman Catholic beliefs of her paramous Mr. Lloyd, with a non-religious ideology, fascism, entering the fray over the course of the book as fascism itself rises to prominence and then becomes a threat in Europe.

Spark employs a brisk, matter-of-fact style, and she plays with time by never really establishing a “present” time, jumping back and forth in an anecdote-drive story. She reveals future plot elements with almost offhand comments early in the text, such as telling us that Mary dies in a fire or that Rose eventually becomes known for sex, then giving the reader more details at later points. It’s an unusual style, but effective in keeping things moving while also keeping the reader a bit off balance. And if you don’t like it, at least it’s over quickly.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With:
→ November 17, 2007
→ By

New ESPN column.

If you don’t read my ESPN articles through an RSS reader, you’ll probably miss my most recent column, which isn’t linked anywhere on the baseball page at the moment. The article lists ten guys who are currently out of favor or simply out of luck with their current teams, making them likely trade targets for this offseason.

Also, due to the holiday and the attendant cooking obligations (I haven’t even made the cranberry sauce yet, so I’m behind schedule), there will be no KlawChat next week. The next chat will be November 29th.

Filed Under: Chat
→ November 14, 2007
→ By

Sabernomics interview.

JC Bradbury of Sabernomics fame did a Q&A with me, and it’s up now on his blog. We talk about life in baseball, the Braves, and a little bit about my non-baseball interests.

Filed Under: Chat
→ November 14, 2007
→ By

Pasta alla Carbonara, and why Giada is a bubblehead.

So I was looking for a new recipe for pasta alla carbonara, a common dish from central Italy where beaten eggs are whisked into freshly cooked pasta to create a sauce right before serving, and a little Googling came up with this recipe from David Leite, which I made tonight. It was quick, easy, authentic (no extra ingredients – more on that in a moment), and delicious. The only changes I made were to use 3 eggs without the extra yolk, and to make the sauce in the pasta pot rather than the skillet; stirring a pound of cooked pasta in a skillet is treacherous, and one thing you need to do to keep the eggs from scrambling is to keep the pasta moving. That’s just easier to do in a big pot than in a skillet, especially one with flared sides.

One other hit on page one of my Google results was this recipe by the Big Giant Head Girl, Giada de Laurentiis. Check the fourth ingredient: 2.5 cups of whipping cream. Say it with me, folks: There is no cream in carbonara sauce. It is creamy, but contains no cream. So Giada isn’t authentic, but we knew that already from the first time we heard her say spa-ghee-tee or open a jar of store-bought sauce. What’s worse is how incredibly unhealthy she’s made this dish: One pound of pasta plus one pound of chicken should mean six to eight servings, and by my calculations, her Chicken Carbonara has 35 to 40 grams of fat per serving (at six servings), two-thirds of which came from the whipping cream she added because she’s lazy. At least Raechel Ray can cook a little, but what the heck does Giada have swimming around in that enormous head of hers?

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With:
→ November 13, 2007
→ By

Picking on Bill.

I’m an avowed Bill Simmons fan, but I have to point this one out:

Reason No. 12,349 why I love the NBA: In honor of Friday night’s historic Yi-Yao matchup, I successfully convinced the Sports Gal to order Chinese food and watched the first quarter while eating General Tso’s Chicken.

Um, Bill, General Tso’s Chicken is about as Chinese as I am. Maybe less so. (Sugar has always been expensive in China since the country had to import it, so it’s very unlikely that they would have used it in a savory dish like this one. The leading theory is that the dish we know was invented in the US in the 1970s.) Next time, try the twice-cooked pork belly if you want to get your zhen zhongguo fan on.

Filed Under: Food, Humor, Media
→ November 12, 2007
→ By

Disneyworld eats.

The perks of working at a Disney subsidiary include discounts at some Disneyworld restaurants, and stays at hotels on the property when I have to go there for business. Since the GM meetings were held at a hotel just outside the northern entrance to Walt Disney World, I stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and ate all my meals within the property (thereby putting my per diems back into the company).

Raglan Road is by far our favorite restaurant in Walt Disney World. A celebrity-chef venture involving Kevin Dundon, one of the top celebrity chefs in Ireland, and amed after a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, Raglan Road pretends to be an authentic Irish pub, but in reality it’s far too upscale in décor and food – not that either is a bad thing. The Guinness on tap is served at just the right temperature (that is, not too cold), and the upscale twists on some classic Irish comfort foods are excellent. Their shepherd’s pie is pretty close to the standard recipe, with a generous portion of lightly spiced lamb/beef mixture sitting below whipped mashed potatoes. Their take on bangers-and-mash includes a small dollop of their beef stew as a sauce, and the pork sausages (bangers) are outstanding. Even the Irish soda bread (no raisins!) and the olive-oil-and-Guinness-reduction that come before the meal are excellent. And the “bread and butter pudding,” served with butterscotch sauce and crrème Anglaise, is easily the best bread pudding I’ve ever had, with the bread still firm despite a thorough soaking in custard, and both sauces good enough to drink straight from the creamers.

We ate several meals at Boma, the buffet-style restaurant at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. Breakfast was mostly straightforward, with a mix of standard American breakfast fare (nothing special) and some African-influenced dishes, including a sausage-and-biscuit skillet dish with a spicy light-brown sauce and fluffy Southern-style biscuits that was out of this world. They also offer a “jungle juice” – just a blend of orange, pineapple, and guava juices – that tastes mostly of guava, which is fine by me because guava juice is naturally very sweet. Their pastry selection is strong, with scones, apple turnovers, banana bread, and four kinds of muffins (the orange bran muffins were the best), all clearly baked that morning or overnight.

Their dinner buffet has a huge menu of choices, leaning more towards African food (or African-influenced food), including bobotie (a South African tamale pie, with an egg topping and dried fruits mixed in with the meat), Moroccan couscous, cardamom-spiced pork, carved prime rib (get the ends), fufu, and so on, as well as some American choices for kids and fussy eaters. Their signature desserts are “zebra domes” and “tiger domes,” little fondant-filled chocolate domes with a hint of liqueur, but we preferred the chocolate mousse and the peach crumble (a touch heavy on the nutmeg, though). I was most impressed by the fact that the savory dishes are strongly flavored, unlike a lot of restaurants aiming for a broad market, and I never had to reach for the salt shaker.

The problem with Boma is that it’s not cheap – $26 per adult for dinner, $17 per adult for breakfast – and unless you’re a huge quantity eater or you have an employee discount, it probably won’t pay. Also, if you’re going for dinner, make a reservation ahead of time, as they’re sold out most nights. One minor bonus – about half the staff come from either north Africa or sub-Saharan Africa, and we chatted up one server from Botswana, asking her if she was familiar with Alexander McCall Smith’s books to see if they presented an authentic picture of the country. (Answer: She hadn’t read the books, but told us they had just filmed a movie based on the first book right near her apartment in Gaborone.)

The Animal Kingdom Lodge has one quick-service restaurant, called the Mara, offering all three meals. The Mara has a large refrigerated case with drinks, yogurts (packaged and in parfaits), puddings/cakes, and so on, and they offer a short menu of hot foods. Their breakfasts were greasy, and the dinner selection wasn’t great except for one option – the roasted half-chicken with (hot) couscous, a Moroccan-style dish that was delicious albeit a bit overcooked. They offer French fries or a cold couscous salad as side options for their other dishes, like hamburgers and fried chicken strips. It’s buried within the hotel, so it’s not worth seeking out.

The Earl of Sandwich is a Panera-style sandwich place at Downtown Disney, and they serve panini on a homemade English-muffin bread that is out of this world. The list of sandwich options is huge, but the fillings are mostly pre-sliced or pre-cooked; I went with a Caribbean jerk sandwich with chicken (pre-cooked), bell peppers, sliced banana peppers, and a jerk sauce that turned out to be mayo-based. But the bread was delicious, and my wife liked her Caprese salad sandwich, which had just the traditional fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and sliced tomatoes, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The Earl also offers salads and wraps, and for breakfast they have egg sandwiches and yogurt parfaits.

While we were down in Orlando, the Epcot Food & Wine Festival was just wrapping up its six-week run, so after the GM meetings ended we took the afternoon to check it out. The World Showcase part of Epcot is lined with food stands and a few shopping kiosks representing every country with a permanent pavilion, as well as separate stands for Spain, Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Oklahoma (Native American foods), India, Poland, Turkey, Greece, and the Champagne region of France (selling wines and champagne truffles). Just about everything we ate was good; the portions are very small and run $2.50-$6 for savory dishes and as little as $1.50 for desserts. Hits included “shrimp on the Barbie” (grilled marinated shrimp) from Australia, mofongo (mashed yucca with pork cracklings) and more grilled shrimp from the DR, a beef empanada from Argentina, and spanikopita from Spain. The papas con chorizo from Spain were more like a stew with a heavy tomato flavor, and the “boxty” potato pancake from Ireland was greasy and lukewarm, although the six-ounce Guinness hit the spot. I didn’t try the bobotie at the South Africa pavilion, but I did have it at Boma, and it was excellent despite the presence of raisins. My wife gave high marks to the chilaquiles from the Mexico stand, but since they were smothered in cheese, I passed. The apple strudel at Germany tasted great but the dough became a bit tough from sitting for so long, and the ginger ice cream at China was very good; we never go to Epcot without slipping into the Patisserie at the France Pavilion for a chocolate mousse. The Food & Wine Festival ran from September 28th to November 11th this year, and I hope they expand it next year so it doesn’t overlap so perfectly with the MLB playoffs.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , ,