December Film Festival

Just as a refresher, back at the beginning of the month I decided to work my way up the AFI 100 Years, 100 Movies lists (both editions), watching about five classic movies a month until I reach what should be the best movie of all time.  Well, now it’s the end of the month, and I’ve made it through the first five.  Things went remarkably well, actually, and I saw all that I had planned to.  Here are my thoughts on the first five, ranked from worst to best.

5) Unforgiven (1992) – I had already seen this, since it was given as part of a 2-pack of DVDs for a Christmas present one year.  Neither Stacia nor I liked it at all, but then I had to go and start this new list, so I had to watch it again.  Not a lot better the second time.  First, it’s a Western, which I don’t usually love, but I probably could have gotten over that.  What I couldn’t get over was how long and boring it felt, with the same things repeated over and over again.  I get that it was made to be the kind-of anti-Western, showing that it wasn’t all gunfights and excitement, but by about halfway through you are willing Clint Eastwood on to get to Big Whiskey (no joke) and start killing bad guys already.  On the plus side, some of the wild west scenery was pretty and well-photographed.  Also, there’s the possibility of a fun drinking game, taking a drink every time Clint Eastwood says, “I ain’t like that no more.”  But aside from that, I probably would never watch this again.

4) Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) – To be fair, I didn’t see this all the way through, thanks to the crappy condition of the Clive Library’s copy, and the fact that they are the only metro library to hold this movie.  What I did see seemed okay, but not spectacular.  It’s a biopic of George M. Cohan, who apparently was some sort of singing, dancing, acting entertainer-guy.  Maybe his life got more interesting down the line, but in the part I saw it was basically a recounting of his family moving to a town, performing a show, moving to a new town and repeating.  There was some nice stuff about his family supporting him (morally, not financially) and hopefully the later songs got better so they were entertaining.  It’s hard for me to judge, since I missed so much of the movie, but I didn’t really get emotionally invested in the part I did see.  I’ll probably have to try to find this again so I can feel good about crossing it off the list without an asterisk.

3) Ben-Hur (1959) – This was actually better than I thought it would be, and only ranks third because the other two were very good.  It’s over three hours long, but once I started watching, I went the whole way through, which surprised even me.  Being an epic, lots of stuff happens, from the Romans first arriving in Judea to being a galley slave to Rome back to Judea to chariot races, with a little bit of Jesus thrown in.  Since there’s so much story, you are kept hooked even though there’s not a ton of emotional depth (note that I am not religious, so ymmv).  Oh, and the chariot scene is awesome.  I know that it’s the one thing Ben-Hur is known for, and deservedly so.  It’s about 10 minutes of insane action and death-defying stunts that are essentially the thing to watch the movie for.  I’d recommend seeing the whole thing to really get the backstory as to why the chariot race is so important, but that scene is really where you get your money’s worth.

2) Toy Story (1995) – How much fun was it that Toy Story showed up on my list?  A ton, that’s how much.  I’m sure you’re familiar with this one, so I won’t needlessly bore you with plot, but let me just say that for the most part, this movie holds up very well.  Stacia and I were laughing aloud on more than one occasion at the pun-ny jokes and great sight gags.  Toy Story really defined the genre in terms of CGI movies, and also the kids movie that adults will enjoy too.  The story is clever and well-paced, with nicely distributed sentimentality and humor.  After 14 years, the CGI effects are looking a little dated; things are too shiny and the humans are just damn creepy looking.  But this is a modern classic.  I can’t imagine having kids without them seeing Toy Story sometime.

1)  Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967) – Top movie of the first month, and there’s a lot to like about it.  The subject matter (interracial marriage), though less shocking than in the 1960s, offers insight into prejudices and human behavior that are still pertinent today.  Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn are spectacular together, and bring their real-life love for one another to the film as caring parents faced with a difficult situation.  Sidney Poitier, in one of his early roles, exudes grace and charm as the source of the “problem.”  And the writing is great – each main character has a speech at some point in the movie that epitomizes and defines who they are.  Tracy’s in particular, at the end, is hard to watch with a dry eye, especially knowing this was his last film, and the relationship he and Hepburn had in real life makes it even more poignant.  The more I think about it, the more I like this movie, and it seems unjust that it is ranked #99.

So there they are.  The first 5 out of 123, if I remember correctly.  Already one film has made it to my mental list of movies I love, and there are certainly a lot more to go.  Here’s what I have to look forward to in January.

97(1) – Bringing Up Baby (1938)

97(2) – Blade Runner (1982)

96(1) – The Searchers (1956)

96(2) – Do the Right Thing (1989)

95(1) – Pulp Fiction (1994)

95(2) – The Last Picture Show (1971)

Belated Happy Holidays!

I'm a little late, but I hope everyone had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, winter solstice, or whatever you might have been celebrating!  I was with my family, so I had way more important things to do than blog.  Best wishes for a Happy New Year!

O we will fight, fight, fight for Iowa State...

I originally intended to post this column last week sometime, but then something unexpected came up: Christmas.  I’ll try to write a real Christmas-themed column in the upcoming days, but somehow last week arrived and I came to the abrupt realization that I had less than two weeks to figure out what the heck I am doing for the holidays, do all the Christmas shopping, and get the house cleaned up so our catsitter doesn’t think we’re a bunch of slobs when she shows up.  So, imagine, if you will, that it is December 13^th instead…

December 13^th finds us in the car on Interstate 80, just east of Omaha.  There’s a duffel bag of clothes in the back, along with a cooler of Whole Foods goodies (that you may have heard about), and we are just settling in for the two hour drive back to Des Moines.  The roads are fine now, but it is still just days after the biggest snowstorm in thirty years, so there was some question as to whether conditions would be suitable for travel when we left.  So just what was it that caused this pilgrimage to Omaha?  To answer that, we have to look back further, about four years ago.

It’s a crisp fall day, or maybe it’s a blustery cold Iowa day, or perhaps even one of the freakishly hot sunny days that arbitrarily pop up in September and October here in the Midwest.  The point is, I don’t exactly remember the weather, but I do know exactly where I was.  Jack Trice stadium, with Stacia alongside, cheering and shouting (most likely in vain) for our Iowa State Cyclone football team.  Of the six years that I lived in Ames, only one was spent without season football tickets, and we made it to nearly every game.

So there we were, enjoying the cool air, or huddled together for warmth or sweating like crazy, when an announcement was made on the giant videoboard.  Anyone with a football ticket for that day was invited to the ISU volleyball game that followed at the nearby Hilton Coliseum.  Stacia was fairly excited, as she had played volleyball in high school.  I was fairly confused, as I had no idea Iowa State even had a volleyball team.  But hey, I was an open-minded college kid, so why not give it a try?

We got inside and sat down, amongst a strangely disparate crowd of older folks and frothing superfans, as well as a few students like us who looked just a bit lost.  The first set started, and I thought, hey, this is pretty exciting.  I started asking Stacia all sorts of questions about the rules, and also started getting into cheering the team on.  I can’t recall if the team won or not that day, but I remember being astounded at the athleticism needed to play this sport, and walked away having enjoyed the experience as much, if not more than the football game we’d just come from.

Over the next few years in Ames, we made it to several volleyball games a year, and gradually became more knowledgeable about the nuances of the game.  I started to grow less excited about the commercialized, big-business football team, and shifted my focus to the raw emotion and talent on the volleyball court.  We eventually moved down to Des Moines, and due to schedules and travel times, missed all but one game this season.

We did follow the team online, and knew they were pretty good, so we weren’t shocked that they made the NCAA tournament.  What was interesting was that ISU was selected to host the first and second rounds.  It was a quick consensus that since we’d hardly seen any volleyball this year that we should darn well make it to the tournament rounds.  Forty minute drives back and forth on Friday and Saturday were well worth it to see ISU decisively beat George Mason and Wichita State.  The team was on to the quarterfinal rounds.

Which were in Omaha, interestingly enough.  A short two hour drive from Des Moines.  As we drove home, relishing the win over Wichita State, the same thought occurred to the two of us: let’s just do it.  Let’s follow the team on the road, and cheer them on.  After all, they were facing Nebraska, the local favorite and a national powerhouse, so they could use the support.  Within an hour of arriving at home, we’d ordered tickets and booked a hotel on Priceline.  We were on the road to Omaha.

 Omaha was good, and also not so good.  Taking an arbitrary vacation on less than a week’s notice – good.  Getting a 4-star hotel in downtown for less than $50 a night – way good.  The smoked gouda-pale ale soup at Upstream Brewery in Omaha’s Old Market – quite good.  And being there to see the Cyclones play volleyball for the last times in 2009 was great.  Unfortunately the game didn’t go as planned, and ISU got swept by Nebraska.  But through it all, we had a blast.  We were an island of cardinal and gold in a sea of Nebraska red.  When our band played the fight song, we were the only two in our section standing and loudly singing along.  We cheered every Iowa State point and yelled encouragement until our voices were gone.  It was awesome.

Omaha was nice to us, too.  With Nebraska fans all around us and their team utterly dominating ours, they could have been mean or spiteful or even snarky, but everyone we talked to was polite.  We went to the second game of the series, where Nebraska eventually lost to Texas, and it was fun, but without a side to root for it wasn’t quite the same.  We drove home, having spent a very pleasant weekend in a nice city, and even though our team lost, we were there to let them know we had their backs.  With the 2009 season at a close, we studied our roster and saw we had a lot of returning team members, a good sign for a solid 2010.  And based on the last few games we’d seen, we vowed that we would be back for many more games in the upcoming year.

Congrats and good luck next year to the Iowa State Cyclone volleyball team!

From G's to Chefs - One Fish, Two Fish

Stacia pulled the car into a snow-piled parking spot, nosed in toward a three foot drift, shifted into park, and turned off the engine. We were now 137 miles from home, halfway across town from the reason we’d even traveled in the first place, and we were about to see one of the best things in the city of Omaha: Whole Foods.

Just inside the front door was the produce department, which left us flabbergasted. There was more variety of fruit and vegetable than we’d ever seen in one place, many of which we’d never even heard of. And there was so much of everything, with numerous employees moving along the displays removing anything that wasn’t of utmost freshness. For a time we simply wandered through, pointing at fruits and vegetables and making oohing and aahing sounds.

After a while, we made our way back to the fish counter, which was my main motivation for going in the first place. I’m very big on sustainable food, much of which is easy to come by in Iowa by shopping directly from the farm for produce or meat. However, fish is pretty darn tricky, and you’re pretty much stuck with whatever Hy-Vee carries, sustainable or not (much of it is, but they could definitely do better). Following some serious browsing and deliberation amongst ourselves, we made our selections. Tacking on some produce and grocery items, we paid and headed out.

We’d thought ahead enough to bring a cooler along for the weekend, so we packed the fish and produce on ice and started the journey back. Once home, we froze what we could, put the rest in the fridge, and made plans to start utilizing the rest that night, before it started to spoil. It was, then, no surprise when at 5 o’clock I found myself staring down four whole, fresh sardines.

I’d never even eaten a sardine before yesterday, much less cleaned one, but hey, that’s what they invented the internet for, right? I found a sufficiently graphic website illustrating the process, laid down some newspapers, grabbed a sharp paring knife, and prepared to be entirely grossed out. But you know what? Well, I won’t lie, it actually was pretty nasty. :) I won’t go into too much detail, but the general procedure was as follows.

Chop off the head, pulling away with the knife to bring along some of the guts. Slit the belly and scrape out the remaining innards. Butterfly the fish flat, grab a hold of the tail and pull on it to lift out the entire backbone. Grab the skin and pull/scrape it off the rather small remaining fillets. Finally, hand the finished fillet to a disgusted-looking wife to rinse off and lay on a plate ready for cooking. Oh, and sardines are an “oily fish,” so this is all done with a slippery fish fillet, for added fun.

Now, if that sounds disgusting, it kind of is, but I am usually the first to get grossed out or queasy from something, and I was able to do all four fish. As Stacia said, she doesn’t mind if it looks like an animal, or if it looks like food, but she doesn’t want to be involved in the conversion process. Well, I converted four sardines, and after close to an hour of cleaning, we were left with 8 tiny fillets.

The recipe we used was pretty basic, a simple homemade tomato sauce, the sardines on top, bread crumbs on that, a few herbs, and a drizzle of wine, baked in the oven. We made some pasta to serve it on as a way to stretch it, but these were sardines we’re talking about, so it didn’t make much. When the kitchen timer finally chimed, we dished up a small amount of spaghetti, placed the essentially breaded sardines on top and garnished with the sauce. We then sat down and apprehensively stared down our first-ever sardine meal.

You know what the funny thing is, after all that work? When we tasted the dish, it really wasn’t too distinctive, one way or the other. I had no idea going in if I’d like sardines, but I thought for damn sure I’d have an opinion about them. I mean, they tasted fishy, I guess, but it wasn’t like salmon, or cod where there’s a unique flavor to the meat. I was fully prepared to love or hate sardines, but I was left thinking, “well, that’s okay.” Not quite what I expected.

Naturally this makes it hard to recommend using sardines in more food. They are abundant and caught in a way that doesn’t do much damage to the environment or harm to other species, so it’s a good choice for the planet. But it’s a whole lot of work to go from whole fish to fillet to dinner, and there’s not a lot of reward, flavor-wise for all the effort. I think sardines have a bit of a stigma from years of being a poor man’s food, in the little cans, so I feel compelled to defend them a little, but like their flavor, they don’t make a strong case one way or the other.

So, what did I learn from the sardine cooking adventure? For one thing, the closest ones are in Omaha, which isn’t exactly trivial. They aren’t my new favorite food, but I won’t need to feel frightened of them in the future. And, if it’s absolutely necessary, I can clean a fish without puking. That’s something I didn’t know before. Hopefully it doesn’t come in handy too often, though.

Blizzard '09 - thrills, excitement, terror, inactivity!

I have a distinct and mildly horrifying memory from my youth imprinted on my brain that I remembered yesterday.  Don’t worry, that first line is almost entirely hyperbole, but it did leave an indelible enough mark that I can picture the entire thing even though it must have been close to two decades ago that I first saw it.  And yesterday, when blizzard ’09, the storm of the century, hit, that memory thankfully left me inside with a cup of coffee in my hand rather than outside with a shovel.  And just to be more melodramatic about it, I won’t tell what this is all about until at least halfway through the post.

People are often skeptical of meteorologists, and on Tuesday night, it didn’t look like the storm was going to be too bad.  There was snow, but not too much yet.  Well, Wednesday came, and it was all that the newscasters had claimed.  Accumulated and blowing snow had formed multiple-foot high drifts across our street.  The parking lot was impassable, blanketed by a waist-high sea of white.  The howling winds had blown a mound up to the door of our building, leaving only a narrow passage out to the garage areas.  And they weren’t done yet, throwing so much snow about that we could scarcely see across the street at times.  That, coupled with WHO’s announcement that my work was cancelled, convinced Stacia that she shouldn’t chance it, and we took a snow day.

The day was, actually pretty great.  We had plenty of food in the house, so there was no need to venture out.  We brewed a pot of shade-grown coffee, toasted up some English muffins, and wrapped ourselves under a blanket to watch mindless TV for a little while.  After a little bit of this, we started to move about – Stacia knitting as I watched an old movie, when Stacia spotted a truck stuck on our street.  We immediately went to the windows to watch.

At first we didn’t see anybody about the truck, so we ignored it, assuming it had been abandoned.  Maybe an hour later, though, two people were outside it with a snowblower, gas can and a pint of oil, apparently intending to dig themselves out.  Unfortunately, it seemed neither had used a snowblower before, because they were out there reading the instruction manual as they went, and really struggling to make any progress clearing the snow.  I felt bad for them, but I’ve never used a snowblower before, either, so I wasn’t sure there was much I could do to help.  With a little bit of sympathy, we retired from the window and made some lunch.

A few hours passed.  We checked in from the window on and off with the truck people, increasingly pityingly, but again without much we could do to assist.  Then Stacia shouted from across the condo “There’s someone coming!”  I rushed to the window in time to see a GMC Yukon barreling down the road, while the truck people fruitlessly waved their arms to warn of the huge drifts.  What followed was like something from a movie: the Yukon raced down the street, right into a four-foot snowdrift!  A giant cloud of powder blasted out and the Yukon stopped immediately.  We now had two vehicles stuck in the snow in front of our building.

As we stood there in awe, we began to wonder more if there was anything we could do to help.  We discussed it, and finally decided we couldn’t, for three reasons.  1) Everyone had been told all day not to be out traveling.  The only places these people could reasonably be headed to on our street are the mall or nearby stores, so I doubt it was any sort of emergency besides a shopping one.  2) There was no way these people were going to get out.  Maybe if it had been a little bit of snow like a normal snowstorm, they might have stood a chance.  But come on, the plows weren’t even out at this point, there were tow bans, and the cars were stuck in drifts higher than my waist.  Even if we’d tried to help, we wouldn’t get anywhere.  And 3).

3) is a movie we were forced to watch in elementary school.  Ostensibly it was a winter safety video, but it was really creepy.  The one part I remember in detail showed a kid getting out from the bus and climbing atop a drift to wave to his friends inside the bus before it pulled away.  Then the child slipped down the embankment beneath the bus, which then pulled away, not seeing him there.  It wasn’t too graphic, but geez, what a thing to show a 7-year old!  In a sense it worked, since I’ve always been careful on slick surfaces and around large vehicles, but maybe there was a less traumatic way to show it!

So when I looked out the window and saw these drivers throwing their cars rapidly from drive to reverse and back, spinning their wheels at high speeds, I wanted nothing to do with being in front or behind them pushing, in the off chance they did gain any traction.  With a little bit of a feeling that we were somehow bad people, we became gawkers instead, watching their (lack of ) progress from the safety and comfort of our condo.  The two vehicles exhibited varying degrees of dedication, but in the end, neither could get out (told you so) and they gave up to head to the mall or a hotel.

I still feel like a bit of a jerk for not helping, but all seems to have worked out.  As of this morning, the cars are out, so once the plows began to run and the winds died down, they were able to recover their vehicles.  And as we were leaving home today, a neighbor was stuck in our lovely, still unplowed lot, but in a spot with only in a few inches of snow.  We were able to push him out, since we weren’t attempting the impossible, and there was almost no chance of getting run over.  Maybe that makes up for the others, karma-wise.

So at the end of blizzard ’09, we had done as we were told: staying inside, not traveling, and you know what?  It was a great snow day.  Relaxing, warm, comfortable, and Stacia, Roxie and I got to spend a peaceful and lazy day together.  Beats being in the office anyday.

Preview - December Film Festival

I’ve always been a fan of lists.  I could write a full post about that alone, but I think I’ll mostly save it for another day.  Suffice it to say, though, that when I was little, I was the kid with the most complete, hierarchically ranked and frequently updated Christmas list.  I never outgrew this love of lists, and once I got a computer with Excel, things really blew up.  Making lists in Excel is so much fun; if someone would pay me to do that, it would probably be the perfect job for me.

Naturally I have lists pertaining to most of my pastimes, including watching old movies (And cooking, and restaurants, and books…).  At some point, I decided I wanted to watch all the classics, and happened upon the American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” countdown special.  I decided I’d try to watch all of the movies on that list, just by recording them whenever they happened to be on Turner Classics.  Well, then AFI decided to follow that one special up with 10 others: 100 Stars, Laughs, Thrills, Passions, Heroes/Villains, Songs, Quotes, Scores, Musicals, Cheers, 10^th Anniversary Edition of 100 Movies, and a Top 10 in 10 different categories.  Before I knew it I had a list of 479 movies to watch!

It became pretty apparent that my random recording method wouldn’t make very quick progress of the list, or ensure that I saw the best movies out there.  Sometimes I’d find myself recognizing a film name in the guide, and recording/watching it, only to find that its only claim to fame was having the 98^th best film score, or something.  While I might want to see that movie sometime, it shouldn’t take precedence over the ones that are best overall.  So I drafted a new list and started a new plan.

To begin with, I will only work on the movies from the “100 Years, 100 Movies” and “100 Years, 100 Movies, 10^th Anniversary Ed.” lists, which contain a lot of overlap, leading to a total of 123 films.  Since I am very much a save-the-best-for-last kind of guy, I plan to start at the bottom of each list and go back-and-forth, working my way up to number 1.  Obviously they won’t necessarily be on TCM when I want, so I’ll make use of the metro libraries as well.  I’m starting fresh now, so even if I’ve seen something before, I get to (or have to) watch it again.  And I’m shooting for 5 movies per month.

With all that said, here is the lineup for the December Film Festival:

100 (1) – Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

100 (2) – Ben-Hur (1959)

99 (1) – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

99 (2) – Toy Story (1995)

98 (1) – Unforgiven (1992)

98 (2) – Yankee Doodle Dandy (Already listed as 100 on list 1)

Assuming I make it through all these movies by the end of the month, I’ll post one wrap-up for the whole “Film Fest,” rather than writing a summary/review for each movie I’ve seen.  I like to write a little about what I’ve seen, but it’s fairly challenging to say too much without giving away any spoilers.  That seems more conducive to one combo post than 5 individual ones.

So, we’ll see how this goes.  Last time I started writing about movies, I got one film in before I decided to give up.  I think I like this plan better, since it has some structure to it, so it might go a little better.  However, 123 movies at a rate of 5 per month will take something like 2 years to get through entirely, so it will be a bit of a challenge.  Regardless of how it goes, I will end up getting to see some good old movies, and I got to make a new list, so I can be happy about that.

From G's to Chefs - Curried Away

I’ve never really cared for Indian food, and that has bothered me a bit lately.  I know everyone has their own likes and dislikes, but if I want to become a better cook, how will I be able to get new ideas and expand my culinary knowledge if I automatically cut out an entire subset of food?  On a broader sense, too, I like to think of myself as a fairly open-minded person, yet there are a lot of foods I simply don’t think I like.  Japanese, Indian, Thai – they just never resonated with me.  Not that I am afraid of these cuisines, but I just never have been excited by them.

Part of my dislike for Indian food may be due to my first experience eating it.  My brother and sister were visiting me in Ames, and Stacia and I decided we’d take them out to eat at a unique place.  We ended up deciding on the local Indian restaurant, which was a bit of a gamble, since we’d not yet tried it ourselves.  It ended up that most of our fears were mostly unfounded, as the bulk of the food was pretty good.  I don’t know how authentic it was, but the Curry item I tried seemed decent but pretty blah - nothing to write home about one way or another.

The side dish was another story.  Not being familiar with Indian cuisine, I again don’t know how common this is, but my meal came with a side of yogurt, or “jo-gurt” as the waitress pronounced it.  It arrived in a small shallow rectangular container, vaguely reminiscent of a sardine can, and consisted of thin milky liquid with tic-tac sized chunks scattered throughout.  I decided to be brave, which I perhaps shouldn’t have been, for it was like chewing sour milk in a salt water broth.  Perhaps that’s not entirely surprising, since to a certain extent yogurt is solidified milk, but let me just say it was horribly unappetizing and put me off Indian food for a long time.

So when I was home this weekend and my Mom proposed we have Fragrant Chicken Curry, my initial reaction was less than enthusiastic.  Then I thought about how long it had been since I had decided I “didn’t like” Indian food, and realized I was being silly not to give it another shot.  So I voted we give it a try, a sentiment resoundingly echoed by my less biased siblings.  And as we got the recipe together, planned the shopping, and started cooking, I began to grow more excited about the prospect.

The recipe was incredibly simple, and turned out to be a lot of fun.  We started from a rotisserie chicken – the ones at the grocery store near the deli.  I’ve grown much less intimidated by raw meat in the past several years, so I probably could have handled using raw if that was specified.  However, I think the rotisserie chicken was a shortcut, and would make for a good option on nights when you don’t feel like doing a ton of cooking.  Most times I enjoy even rather time-intensive preparations, but there are certainly days where grabbing a pre-cooked chicken and doing just a little prep on it sounds nice.

So there we were, my sister and I, with a chicken that needed to become chicken pieces.  Time to roll up our sleeves and start literally pulling the meat off the bones.  Now, in theory you could use a fork for this job, but where’s the fun in that?  Before too long, we had reduced our chicken to a mostly bare set of bones and had a surprisingly large bowl of meat.  But we weren’t quite satisfied, and my sister in particular seemed to want to get every scrap off the carcass.  Which is where things took a turn for the macabre… ;)

As I stand there peeling small bits of meat out from between the ribs, my sister holds up what appears to be a spine and implores that I check it out.  I take a look, give an approving response and turn back to what I was doing.  Then I hear a loud crack from next to me and see that she has broken the backbone apart and is peering at a little pink strip hanging out from between the vertebrae: what can only be a section of the spinal cord.  I can’t say for sure which of us suggested that she eat it (I really don’t think it was me) but it ended up not taking much coaxing.  Correct me if I’m wrong, Karin, but I believe it was spongy and hard to chew, and I know it ended up feeling like it was caught in her throat until she had a snack a little later.  Needless to say, I didn’t try any spine.  I told you my siblings were more adventurous than me!

Lest you become frightened, let me reassure you that no spinal cord made it into the final recipe, which was quite delicious.  It was a simple mixture of some sautéed onion and garlic, a ton of curry powder with a few other spices, the chicken, and cans of coconut milk and tomatoes.  We simmered it all together for 20 minutes or so, added a little corn starch to thicken, and served it over some jasmine rice.  As the finishing touch, my Mom incredibly found a jar of mango chutney that had been in the pantry for many months, and served that alongside.  As awesome as the food was without, the mango gave it a little extra kick of sweet and spicy (great combo) to really finish the dish.

In the end the Chicken Curry really helped solidify my thoughts that I need to be more adventurous and give up some of my old inhibitions about food.  I already do that for the most part, but there are some areas where I’ve been a little obstinate.  I thought I didn’t like Indian food, but this dish was spicy yet very flavorful, with a sweet and zippy punch from the mango chutney.  The recipe used coconut milk, which I’ve always thought makes food taste weird, but it ended up making a nice creamy sauce without being overpowering.  And it was super easy to make, which I suppose I didn’t have any hangups about, but is still a good thing.

So, while I might not have eaten jo-gurt or chicken spine, I tried something I thought I disliked, and it was great.  There aren’t a lot of foods on that “don’t like” list, but it seems like a few more of them need to get another try.

Thanks giving

Last time, I wrote about how much I was looking forward to Thanksgiving.  As one of my favorite days of the year, it lived up to my expectations and was a really great time.  Everyone was there, I got to do some cooking, we had a great meal, and best of all, I got to spend a lot of time with my family.  I love my family a lot, and can honestly say that I enjoyed every minute I got to spend with them.  Overall, I only have two regrets from the weekend.

The first is that four days was nowhere near long enough, and I don’t feel like I had enough time to really hang out with everybody before it was time to go.  There’s not much I can do about that, except to look forward to Christmas being less than four weeks away.  The other one, though, came at Thanksgiving dinner.  Before we started, my Mom said grace and added some very nice words about what she was thankful for and what we all hoped for in the future.  She asked if anyone had anything to add, and though I don’t want to speak for everyone, I feel that we all thought she put things so well that we just couldn’t add to it.

So no one said anything formally, but we all kind of agreed with what Mom had said, then we enjoyed a great dinner.  However, now that it’s been a few days and I had time to think about it, I would like to try to reflect on what I feel thankful for as well.  Though I know this doesn’t begin to cover all there is to say, I put together a few sentences on each of you.  Here goes.

Mom – Thank you for being such a great mother.  You are supportive and nurturing, and always encourage me to be my best.  Whenever I need inspiration, advice or direction, you are the one I turn to.  Like the song from our dance at my wedding says, you raise me up.  I love you.

Dad – Thank you for being such a great father.  You are practical and wise, and have the bizarre sense of humor that I share.  Whenever I need some advice or some help figuring something out, I can turn to you.  I love you.

Jeremy – Thank you for being such a great brother.  You are fun and exuberant, and I can always count on an adventure when I’m with you.  Whenever I feel like I need energy or passion for something, I look to you.  I love you.

Brian – Thank you for being such a great brother.  You are caring and thoughtful, and can always find fun in whatever we do together.  Whenever I need to quit stressing; to just relax and enjoy life, you are there.  I love you.

Karin – Thank you for being such a great sister.  You are unique and confident, and have insight and vigor beyond your years.  Whenever I need to open my mind or look at something in a new way, I have you.  I love you.

I know that’s not much, but I just wanted to express how much I care for each of you and how thankful I am that you are my family.  It’s not just on Thanksgiving that I feel glad to have each and every one of you in my family, but now seemed like a very good time to say so.  I am very thankful that we were able to all get together for the holiday, and I look forward to seeing you all in a few weeks.

And one last thing: since I only did a few sentences on each of you, there’s no way that what I wrote begins to capture the complex essence of any of you.  Many of the great qualities I mentioned are shared by the entirety of my family, and I intended everything I wrote as a compliment.  If it doesn’t come off that way, remember I’m not that great a writer, so there could only be a shortage of writing ability, not of love that I have for you all.

It was a great Thanksgiving, and I know that I have much to be thankful for.  Ostensibly, the holiday is all about a big feast; eating and drinking and having a good time.  To me, though, it is one of the most magical days of the year – a time of love and family.  For those of us fortunate enough to share those things, Thanksgiving Day has to be one of the best days of the year.  Happy Holidays to all!

From G's to Chefs - Feeling Thankful

You know what I love about cooking?  Well, there are a lot of things I love about it, some of which I’ve mentioned before, but here’s a big one.  Anyone who cooks, from a lowly engineer/blogger/wannabe cook to the most respected and admired star chef, can tell you exactly how they came to fall in love with cooking (full disclosure: I just made that up, but you’d have to think it’s true).  It can be rather vague; for instance the author of my latest cookbook simply points to growing up in a home where her mother cooked all the time, and being around the pleasant aromas and tastes during her childhood.  For others, it can be incredibly specific, and they can point to one key memory that led them down the path to where they are today.  Others like me.

As a quick aside, I should note that I don’t feel that this phenomenon is innate to cooking.  My wife loves to knit and crochet, and I have heard some of her fond memories of crocheting that led to her rekindled interest in that area.  Since knitters are the largest demographic of my readership, I wouldn’t want them to think that I felt in any way superior with my love for cooking, since I’m sure they share these feelings for their chosen art.  But contrast either of those activities with my day job; if someone asked me how I fell in love with engineering, I’d probably strangle them (j/k, and though it pains me to admit it, I do have a story for that question).

Today’s story, appropriately enough, centers on Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving Day is one of my two favorite days of the year (the other being Christmas Eve, but that’s for another time), and I have many fond memories of Thanksgivings over the years.  Early on, it was just about playing and eating – mild years meant we could play outside while Mom and Dad cooked, or else we’d just keep ourselves busy upstairs until dinner was served.  A few years later, I remember munching on the pre-dinner snacks while watching football with my Dad.  But the real significant events didn’t start to take place until my early teen years.

By this time, I had begun to realize that simply keeping out of the way wasn’t really helping enough.  So I asked my Mom if there was anything I could do to help out.  It started small: setting out a bowl of ripe olives for people to nibble on before dinner.  The next time I asked, I was given the responsibility of making the Stove Top stuffing (boil water, add bread crumbs, and stir).  I did a little bit more each time, and before you knew it, there I was assisting my Mom and Dad with almost every step of the dinner.  I wasn’t really in charge of anything, but I was there ready to stir this, chop that, or hold this for a moment, would you?  I became the Thanksgiving Day sous chef.

With six members of the family, there was always a lot of food, so I’m sure the help was appreciated, but in a relatively small kitchen, things tended to get crowded.  And for a Thanksgiving dinner, everything has to be ready at the same time.  So that meant we’d cook little by little over the course of the day, gaining momentum and dishes until we hit critical mass, sometime around 4:00.  It was like someone suddenly hit the fast-forward button and all of a sudden we had to untent-the-turkey-drain-the-potatoes-grab-the-green-bean-casserole-quick-open-the-cranberry-sauce-check-the-turkey-temperature-fluff-up-the-stuffing-oh-my-gosh-we-forgot-to-pull-out-the-sweet-potatoes-ok-they-look-fine-mash-the-potatoes-stir-the-gravy-or-it’s-going-to-stick-ok-let’s-get-this-turkey-on-the-platter-someone-pour-the-wine-and-let’s-eat!

Somehow, every year, six hours of careful planning and staging culminated in a whirlwind 15 minutes of chaos that resulted in rushing here and there, frantically pulling things together into a phenomenal and always perfectly executed meal.  I know my Mom hates this part of the holidays and especially Thanksgiving, but here’s the thing.  I LOVED it.  The energy in the air, the feeling of excitement and anxiety as we flitted from one pot to another, stirring, slicing, serving, multiple timers blaring as we went, was the most fun part of the day.  I can close my eyes and picture our little kitchen, nowhere near big enough for three people moving amongst one another, all working on different parts of the final meal, and I can’t help but smile.

I never paid much attention to it at the time, but I absolutely loved the Thanksgiving panic every year.  Granted, I don’t get to experience that same feeling all that often when I cook at home, but there are occasions.  Sometimes I decide it would be nice to have dinner waiting for Stacia when she gets home, and start out deliberately so things will be done at just the right moment.  Yet somehow in the last 15 minutes I end up with three different pans going, stirring a sauce while I try to dish up the main course, and it’s almost like a mini-Thanksgiving rush.  I don’t think anyone who knows me would call me an adrenaline junkie, but the final act in cooking a meal sure does it for me.

To be fully honest, I don’t know what year it was when I first helped in the chaos of the Thanksgiving kitchen, so I can’t put a specific date on the event that made me fall in love with cooking.  But I have the scene memorized precisely from years of repeating, every time just a little different, but with the same energy and excitement.  That’s when I knew I loved cooking, and any time I feel it again, it’s like seeing an old friend after time apart.  Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and I’m planning to see that friend once more.  I can’t wait.

Real Patrons of the Arts

A few minutes after 6:30 last night, Stacia and I were sitting in a bright blue row of seats, ten rows back from the stage, breathlessly waiting for the show to start. Casually, out walks Anthony Rapp, clad in his trademark maroon sweater and striped scarf, to open the musical Rent. Within a few more minutes, the first big number has begun, and the bass on the speakers is pounding as Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal, now Mark and Roger, kick off three hours of energy and raw emotion with the titular song. I sit back to enjoy, as this is the show we’ve been waiting to see. But it was a long road to get here, in more ways than one.

The most immediate wrinkle was the ticket fiasco. We’d planned to get to the Civic Center early to get situated, and had found a parking spot around 5:40. Just as we were about to get out of the car, I realized that our tickets were sitting on the kitchen table of our West Des Moines condo, 13 miles away. After a few obscenities, we threw the car into drive and high-tailed it back home. Stacia ran in, got the tickets, we zoomed back downtown, and made it to the Civic Center no later than 6:10. Let’s just say it was a good thing there were no speed traps on I-235 last night.

But the real story starts some time earlier, in my sophomore year at Iowa State. Stacia and I had essentially just met, living in the same dorm, and weren’t even dating at the time. I’d never even seen a play that I wasn’t acting in, much less a musical. Then an interesting series of events led to us going to see Cabaret together. Our affable RA wanted to plan an event for the floor to do together, and was perusing the schedule for the Season at Stephens Auditorium, and was leaning toward some upcoming philharmonic orchestra. Then serendipity stepped in.

Stacia happened to be nearby and was asked what she thought of the idea. Now, while I had no previous experience with musicals, Stacia had acted/sung in them, and had been to Iowa City to see a touring production of Rent and was a huge fan. Not so much a fan of philharmonic orchestras. So she quickly glanced at the schedule, found Cabaret and suggested that as an alternative. The invitation went out to the entire floor, and although I had no particular penchant for the show itself, I did have some interest in going to whatever Stacia was going to. So I signed up.

We did the whole getting dressed up thing, and headed out to Stephens to see the show. I can’t really claim that it was a magical moment where I discovered that I loved musical theater (Cabaret still isn’t my favorite, but that had more to do with a lame attempt to look cool than with the actual show), I did sort of enjoy it. Our seats weren’t spectacular, so I can’t recall too many of the details of the show, but it did leave me open to the prospect of seeing musicals in the future.

Over the course of the next several years, Stacia and I dated, got engaged, and married, and Stacia’s interest in musicals became ours. We saw (in approximately chronological order) Cabaret, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rent, Fiddler on the Roof, Aida, Rent, Chicago, The Color Purple, Sweeney Todd and The Civil War. And, within the past five weeks, we added Wicked and Rent to that list. That sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that Stacia and I have been together in one way or another for six years, and that tickets were half price when we were students. Things really got crazy with Wicked and Rent in back-to-back months, but neither one was skip-able, so we decided just to go for it.

In the seven years since the first show we saw together, naturally lots of things have changed, but it seems my appreciation for these events has just grown more. Naturally I have overcome the “cool dude” act where I’m just going to the show to make Stacia happy, and I am now willing to give more praise than “it wasn’t too bad – you know, for a musical.” In a good musical, there is such visceral, raw emotion being broadcast, that I think it takes a true cynic to not feel touched. Granted, I tear up watching Rudy, so I’m not exactly the frostiest guy out there, but I contend that you can’t honestly watch Rent dry-eyed the whole way through.

After a whirlwind month of shows, I think we’ll take some time off before our next one, especially since the last two have been so great. Wicked and Rent (featuring the original Mark and Roger) are my absolute top two shows; at home I’ll play “La Vie Boheme” or “Dancing through Life” for fun energy while doing things like washing dishes, and I blast “Defying Gravity” or “One Song Glory” for inspiration if I’m feeling downtrodden. And while I can’t imagine that the next one we go to will be up to the standards of those two shows, I’m willing to give it a chance, whatever it might be. After all, it took me trying something new to find out that I like musicals, so I had better keep an open mind for the next evening out. That, and remember to bring the tickets.

From G's to Chefs - Pancheros?

The latest incarnation in my evolving efforts to talk about cooking.

So, last night was a Panchero’s night. There was a trio of evil forces at work, forcing us to dine out: 1) It was Monday. Who gets home from work on Monday, especially after the fantastic weekend we had, and has enough energy to cook? And I say that as someone who really enjoys cooking! 2) Stacia had to run some errands after work and got home a little bit late. Ordinarily we cook together, and if we only get started by 6:00, we’re not going to eat until 7:00 or so. 3) I forgot to thaw things out to cook anything anyway. I had the foresight to make an entire meal plan for the week, but with all the meat still sitting in the freezer, we couldn’t do a thing with it. So it was off to Panchero’s.

Panchero’s, for those who are not from the central Iowa area, is an analogue to Chipotle or Qdoba, but quite a bit tastier in my opinion. It’s your typical burrito-as-big-as-your-head place, a “fast-casual” joint where for about $15 we both end up satiated. It’s one of the usual standbys for dining out options, along with such other fine-dining establishments as Sonic, Tasty Tacos, and Little Caesar’s. In fact, I’d estimate almost two-thirds of our dining out trips are spent in this same “cheap out” category. I’ll readily admit that most of these places are inherently unhealthy, but we go out about once a week, so it’s nothing too serious.

This all leads to the question: as someone who enjoys cooking and likes food, why do you go out to these places and not the fanciest, hoity-toitiest restaurants in the city? Isn’t that a bit incongruous? Actually, I’d argue just the opposite. As my knowledge has increased and my skills have improved, a lot of the typical restaurant fare just isn’t impressive to me. Many times as I’ve sat at a moderately nice restaurant looking at my food, I’ve thought to myself, “I could make this. And for a lot less than $18 a plate (or whatever it was).” Which is simultaneously awesome and just a little bit sad.

First, the kinda sad part. Like almost every person in America, I like to go out to eat. It’s just a fun thing to do, going somewhere different, having people wait on you, and getting to try something new. But as I’ve continued to work at becoming a better cook, the usual fare doesn’t seem quite as spiffy as I one thought it was. Places that were once old favorites are seen in a new light, and don’t seem worth going back to. Couple that with my interest in budgeting and personal finance, and you get a stingy guy who’s unimpressed with his food. Well, you might describe me that way. I wouldn’t exactly, but it gets harder and harder to justify the price tag at the end of the evening.

Now, before you start to think “poor Greg – he can’t go out to eat anymore,” let me show you the other side of the coin: the awesome side. This means that I have the ability to create food that I feel is just as good as the stuff that other people pay professionals to make. That’s a powerful feeling, and not only in the “Greg is really full of himself” sense (although there is that, too). Thinking about cooking, it really is quite amazing. I can take a pile of raw ingredients and through nothing more than my own effort and some tools, I can transform it into something new and delicious. In a primal sense, there really is no skill more vital and extraordinary.

And remember, I started this whole blog because I felt I needed an outlet to be creative. In the kitchen, I truly feel like I am creating in a way I’ve never really experienced before. I was never any good at art, can’t sing or act, and let’s face it: my writing is pretty pedestrian. But if you give me a pile of meat, vegetables and spices, I can make something not only edible, but tasty as well. That is why I cook.

Of course I have a long way to go, and am only beginning the voyage from recipe-follower to originator. It’s like being one step above paint-by-numbers, and looking at the Louvre. I know that nothing I make can hang there yet; Hell, if I tried to copy one of those paintings, it wouldn’t look much better than something a parent hangs on the refrigerator. But I can feel that I’m heading in the right direction. I put down the paint-by-number book, and I’m tentatively starting to sketch. It will take me a while, but I’m looking forward to the journey.

We got a bit tangent-y there at the end, so this one won’t wrap up as smoothly as I usually strive for. Suffice it to say I really enjoyed my burrito as a fast alternative to cooking on a Monday night. And, lest you get the wrong idea, we do go out somewhere nice about once a month for the fun of the whole thing and the chance to see some new ideas in person. For example, we had a great anniversary dinner last month at Dos Rios, which actually gave me a great idea of more authentic Mexican food, should I attempt to undertake that in the future. And somewhere down the line, I bet I will.

TCM Files - Young Frankenstein

I love old movies. Luckily for me there is Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which shows a ton of these great films, so I generally record one a week and try to find time to watch it before the next week begins. This may become a semi-regular feature describing my thoughts on the previous week’s selection.

Week 1 – Young Frankenstein (1974)

This is a really odd choice to lead off with, since it’s not really a classic in the Casablanca or Citizen Kane sense. However, I have been regularly watching old movies for over a year, and just now started the corresponding blog entries. So this is what we ended up with – luck of the draw. Young Frankenstein made the list because it is ranked on the American Film Institute’s (AFI) lists of 100 comedies (#13) and songs (#89).

I’ll start by saying I’m not generally a fan of Mel Brooks movies. Everyone in my dorm seemed to think that Blazing Saddles was the funniest movie ever, so I laughed along but never really got into it. I tend to think Spaceballs is overrated, but it has been a while since I’ve seen it. And there are two movies of his that I started and opted not to finish: High Anxiety, which I just thought was a little blah, and the Producers, which is in the running for the worst movies I’ve seen (maybe it gets better later on, but I doubt it). On the flip side, I do like Gene Wilder, though that’s almost solely due to his playing Willy Wonka in the film of the same name. So I started the movie with rather low expectations overall.

And those expectations were almost entirely met. I didn’t find the movie awful, but at the same time I didn’t much like it. It followed the usual Brooks format – lots and lots of buildup for one sight gag or pun-ny quip. Those would generally make me chuckle, but there certainly weren’t any moments where I laughed aloud. I was expecting the “Walk this way” line (which is famously from this film) to be funny, and was disappointed. I thought the same gag was much better done in After the Thin Man, a film 38 years older than Young Frankenstein. Igor was funny at times, having some of the best lines, but there weren’t enough to really keep me interested. And the two most amusing lines of dialogue (“Eye-gor…” and “Werewolf…”) happened within the first half hour or so of the movie, after which things continued downhill.

Oh, and lastly, this movie made AFI’s list of best movie songs for the well-known “Puttin’ on the Ritz” scene. That scene pretty well captured my thoughts on the movie as a whole – the first time the punchline occurred, I chuckled a little to myself, but then it kept going on and I got bored with the whole thing. The plot moved fairly well, but you more or less know the storyline going in – you watch movies like this for the jokes, and those didn’t impress me. Overall, I didn’t hate this movie, but I certainly disliked more than I liked.

2 stars out of 5.

Hey Halloween, we cool?

"This could be love - Love for fire"

Happy Halloween, everybody! It’s not my favorite holiday; in fact it just barely sneaks into the top 5, but it’s still a good time. And it might be Stacia’s favorite, so I should be careful what I say. Anyway, it’s Halloween, I have no idea what we’ll be doing to celebrate, and as usual it is rather unpleasant outside. It always seems funny (and a little sad) when the trick-or-treaters have elaborate costumes covered up by their winter jackets because it’s so cold out. Hey, at least it’s not snowing! So with nothing new to discuss about Halloween, here are some of my favorite memories from Halloweens past.

Interestingly enough, I lead off with an unpleasant memory. I couldn’t have been much more than 5 years old at the time, and I was dressed in the frog costume. For those unfamiliar, my Mom made a batch of really awesome costumes when I was young, including a penguin, a lion, some clowns, a frog, and maybe some others I can’t recall. The frog was noteworthy for having a homemade mask/helmet so the face couldn’t be seen, and it was more realistically froglike. So, as a frog, I was trick-or-treating with my Dad and brother when we got to the really elaborate house.

In our subdivision, there was one house that always had a really neat setup for Halloween. There were spiderwebs everywhere, creepy lighting, a fog machine, and a big cauldron on the front yard that was stirred by someone in a witch costume. We walked up, said trick-or-treat, and held out our plastic pumpkins for some candy. Unfortunately, the witch lady was a bit too in character, and said something about how a frog would go just perfectly in her brew. My dad and brother laughed it off, but I was really scared. I figured I looked too much like a real frog, and I’m pretty sure I walked the whole way home holding the frog head.

Of course, once I got a little older I wasn’t quite as terrified by our neighbors, and had some good times. I remember the time my brother was Luke Skywalker, using an early model glow stick as a lightsaber. For some reason the stick was sold with a rigid clear plastic tube. The idea was you crack the glow stick, slide it into the tube and fold over the ends of the stick to hold it in place. Well, it didn’t take long for us to realize that simply unhooking the bottom fold and snapping your wrist resulted in a launched glow stick, which was, naturally, awesome.

We were in the “on our own” stage of the trick-or-treating night, where our younger siblings were already home for the night and we were just racking up the candy and goofing around. As we switched off playing with the lightsaber, my brother gave it one particularly vigorous snap, and off it went. It sailed up into the night sky, gently arcing in a nice parabola and finally landing… on the roof of a house. Well, there was no getting it back at that point, so we just went on, needing to provide just a big more costume explanation to those who asked.

I can’t forget the Star Trek costume my Mom made for me in 6th grade, and which I wore every year until I literally couldn’t fit in it anymore. I already had all the gear, with the communicator, tricorder, and phaser, so being in uniform to match was too cool. And not to be too full of myself, I only applied the rank pins to make myself a commander, not a captain. Besides, the commander got to go on all the really fun away team missions. This was my all-time favorite costume, and I even have a picture of myself in it hanging on my wall at home (thanks Mom and Dad!).

Then there’s lots of fun memories walking my younger brother or sister around as they trick-or-treated when they were younger. We never went far or late into the night until they got a little older, but just the time spent together between houses was really nice. I enjoyed our candy recycling program, where we’d make periodic return trips to the house to dump out what we’d accumulated. Then we’d quickly sort it to find the less desirable candies and put those in our outgoing candy bucket. My parents always bought lots of good stuff in the days leading up to Halloween, and it was up to us to make sure that it lasted the night!

There was the faceless ghoul mask, the cat nose and the mardi gras mask I combined into what I still think was a pretty neat costume. There were the fun glow-in-the-dark vampire fangs we all used to love. Trick-or-treating in the mall the day before Halloween. And who could forget the year we dressed up as the cast of Little Red Riding Hood? I know whomever played Grandma certainly can’t! And there’s a lot more that keeps coming back as I write this, but not enough time for it all.

Looking back, it seems like I’ve always had a fair amount of fun on Halloween, especially when you consider that I never used to be a huge fan of chocolate (which has since been rectified, incidentally). I don’t think there’s any way it can overtake anyone in the all-important holiday rankings, but it has its place. Don’t think that a low ranking means I don’t love you, Halloween. And we’ll just see – maybe we’ll find something fun to do this year too.

A Letter to Splash Seafood

Splash is the preeminent seafood restaurant in Des Moines. What follows is a letter I sent to the management at Splash. If anyone is interested in contacting these gentlemen as well, their email addresses are jeffstegeman@yahoo.com and lucyhomey@yahoo.com.

Dear Sirs,

I love seafood, and I want to be able to love your restaurant. Geographically, Des Moines is about as far as we can get from the oceans in the US, so an upscale fresh seafood place is a great and novel idea. However, I have deep concerns over the many unsustainable options on the Splash menu, so that I cannot in good conscience dine there.

Sustainable seafood is a complex issue, with worries ranging from overfishing to environmental damage to bycatch of endangered species. As the world’s desire for more and more seafood continues to grow, these issues become magnified, and we see that continuing with the status quo is not a feasible option. A prime example is bluefin tuna, listed as an option on Splash’s appetizer menu, which has been overfished to the point that it is listed as critically endangered (IUCN).

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program is a helpful tool in guiding consumers and restaurants to more sustainable options. Species are neatly broken out into Best Choices, Good Alternatives, and Avoid. The guide is even available in a handy pocket version for reference at the store and when dining out. Sadly, many of the menu items at Splash are in the red-listed Avoid category (Bluefin Tuna, Russian Caviar, Chilean Seabass, Red Snapper, Atlantic Salmon).

Splash is in a unique position as the prime seafood restaurant in Des Moines - able to take the lead in sustainability on a local level, joining national personalities such as Rick Moonen, Alton Brown, and others in this mission. Menus can change, and making an effort to shift Splash from unsustainable to Best Choices would have a very real impact. I implore you to please consider the future of our oceans when selecting seafood for your menus, so there is a chance our children will be able to enjoy seafood as we do today.

Sincerely,

Gregory Zink

Former (and hopeful future) Splash diner

Figuring myself out

"Sorry I misspent so much of your time. Now I'm trying to put your riddle to a rhyme."

Let me tell you a story. For about a year and a half of my college career, I was a terrible student. I dozed through class, hardly studied at all, and did all my homework at the last minute. A brush with some really bad grades provided the wakeup call I needed and I kicked some ass during the rest of my time there, but that’s not the story I’m telling today. During those first years, I lived on the same floor in the same dorm, with a crowd of characters ranging from the nerdy to the obnoxious to the awesome, up to and including my wife. Although that’s also the fodder for lots of interesting tales, it’s again not the story I want to tell.

The story I do want to tell begins with me, during those lazy years, lounging around in the parlor of the dorm until the wee hours of the morning. This was nothing unusual; at this time of my life, it was in fact my usual routine. But as I was lying on a couch chatting, a friend of mine had to leave to go study, commenting on the way out “Greg, you need a hobby.” It was intended as a joke, to point out that there were obviously other things (like schoolwork) that I should be doing with my time, but for some reason it really stuck with me.

More recently, after I graduated college and transitioned over to a “9-to-5” life, I began to think about this a little bit more. I didn’t have homework anymore, and there weren’t intramural sports or club meetings filling my time in the evenings. Add in Stacia discovering knitting and deciding to pursue an online Master’s degree, and I was going to be stuck either watching TV all the time, or actually finding a hobby. I’d never had a hobby before, so I was going to have to think pretty hard to find one, but I was determined.

In the beginning I had no idea what I was looking for, so I tried almost anything. I began to build a model kit I’d had since I was a kid, but it just got boring and tedious. I thought about learning to draw, but never had enough desire to pick up a pencil and work at it. I tried writing fiction, but never really could get going with a great story idea. I went running a few times, but, let’s be honest, running sucks (I had been on the track team in high school, but I didn’t even like it then, always finding excuses to miss practice). And one time, I even let Stacia try to teach me to crochet.

After all these failed attempts, I was a little disheartened. So one evening Stacia and I spent our usual workday wind-down cooking dinner together, and I was griping about not having a hobby. She then pointed out what should have been obvious all along. “Well, you like this, don’t you?” I thought about it a little, and realized that, actually I really kind of loved our cooking adventures. Oftentimes it was my favorite part of the day, and while a large part of that was just us spending time together, the cooking itself was something I really enjoyed.

Quickly I was able to come up with all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t work as a hobby. “It doesn’t leave me anything to do after dinner.” “I don’t have any training and I’m not very good.” But after thinking about it some more, those excuses started to sound lame even to me. After dinner was over I could always work on meal planning, look up recipes and learn about nutritional aspects or new techniques. Stacia was entirely self-taught with her knitting, so I could learn on my own too. If I wasn’t very good to begin with, the best way to improve would surely be to practice.

And on top of all that, I found myself becoming excited about the whole idea. Which, when you think about it, should have been the key all along. Stacia knits not because she actively sought out a pastime, but because she tried it and had a blast. Who cares what I call it; if I really love cooking, that should be how I spend my spare time. So now it is. It’s an ongoing process, one that I’ll probably talk about on here more than you’d care for, but why not? After all, cooking is my favorite hobby.

The Best Thing I Ate Last Week (Week 2)

It was really a toss-up this week, with two really delicious contenders for the crown of best thing I ate last week. In the end, I think there is one that stood out more to me, but I don’t think I’ll reveal that until after I’ve described both dishes. That way each one gets its due, and there’s a new element of surprise to the article. Fun all the way around!

The two competitors couldn’t be much more different. In the near corner, we have a modified version of Chorizo and Potato Empanadas – a blend of spice, starch and sweet wrapped up in a crispy golden brown pouch. The modifications led to it not packing too much of a punch, spicy-wise, but the flavors really coalesced into a great tasting dinner. In the opposite corner is a batch of Lemon-Ricotta Pancakes – simple flapjacks made smoother and lighter with the addition of ricotta cheese, plus the zing of lemon, all topped with a dab of crème fraiche. It’s not a complicated recipe by any means, but it’s a fresh and unique twist on a breakfast staple. Which one was the best, though?

Chronologically speaking, the empanadas came first, so that’s where I’ll start. We’d been planning these for so long, but every time we decided to make them, we realized there was a lot of prep work and that we didn’t have the time for it. Finally this week, we got an early enough start - and it’s a good thing, too, since they took about an hour longer to make than we anticipated.

The ingredient that spawned this dish, to my recollection, was a batch of Farmer’s Market potatoes. Interestingly enough, the first potatoes we had were baby/fingerling types that I thought were too cute to mash and chop for the empanadas, so we had to go out and get new ones anyway. We ended up picking purple potatoes, which just look a whole lot more fun, have more antioxidants, and taste about the same as a regular white potato. In addition to that change, we substituted plain ground beef for the chorizo, which, I know, made them a little more bland. But we had a pound of ground beef sitting in the fridge that we needed to use up, and figured the spices would liven things up enough as it was.

The cooking process was very involved on these guys, and I won’t go into every detail, but here’s the condensed version. I cooked the beef with chopped onion, garlic and green onion, and mixed in lightly smashed potatoes, raisins, and broth while Stacia made a masa harina (fine corn flour) based dough. Both chilled for 30 minutes. I made lime-cilantro sour cream while Stacia rolled out the very crack-prone dough and vowed that she’d never make this recipe again. Since we don’t own a single cookie cutter, we then used a custard cup to cut out circles of dough, plopped filling mixture on it, and folded each circle in half into a pouch, hoping it didn’t crack too much. Egg wash with our new brush (very handy so far) and then into the oven.

The oven step is a little unique, since I believe the traditional way to make empanadas is to deep-fry them. We were a little concerned, but held to our motto to try the recipe mostly verbatim the first time, then modify if necessary. To our surprise and excitement, they came out crispy little pockets filled with a unique flavor sensation that, while maybe not worth the time and effort to try again, at least made for a tasty couple of dinners.

The Lemon Ricotta pancakes, on the other hand, were made entirely with items we had in the house, and was thanks to Stacia’s brilliance. The ricotta was leftover from last week’s squash blossoms, and the lemon we had from something or other, so all we ended up buying new was the crème fraiche. Now maybe you could argue we could have done without that, but it really was the perfect topping for the pancakes.

The cooking story isn’t too exciting for this meal, since pretty much all pancakes are made by mixing up a batter and cooking on a griddle. But it was kind of neat in that we first had to zest the entire lemon, using a handy microplane, and then juice the whole thing. We have some little plastic juicing tool, and I admit it did help quite a bit, but the real results came from me squeezing the hell out of the lemon until it was almost unrecognizable. Greg smash. Anyway, that, coupled with ricotta cheese, and your usual batter ingredients (eggs, flour) was pretty much it. We mixed it up and got the griddle hot.

Perhaps a little too hot, actually. We took turns making batches, cooking and flipping, and soon had a plateful of light, almost yellowy discs. The first ones we ate (which were the last to come off the griddle) were a little mushy in the middle, not cooked all the way through before the outsides got done. But as we worked our way down the stack, back to when the griddle wasn’t quite as hot, they had cooked all the way through and were delicate, flavorful versions of an old favorite. We ate them all in two consecutive mornings.

Both of these dishes were great, and perhaps each one was the best in its own totally different genre, but the title implies that there has to be one best meal, so here it is. I’m going to surprise everyone who knows me and go with the Lemon Ricotta Pancakes. I know, I’m choosing sweet over savory, and not picking the pseudo-Mexican cuisine. Very out of character. Well, the pancakes were not only equally delicious as the empanadas, but they were nostalgic, too.

You see, on our honeymoon in Sonoma two years ago, we ate breakfast the second morning at the restaurant at the Fairmont Sonoma Hot Springs Hotel. We hadn’t stayed there, but had been advised online that the Big 3 restaurant at the hotel had fantastic Lemon Cottage Cheese Pancakes. As peculiar as that sounded to me, we opted to give it a try, and it was great. It was a cool, crisp October morning in Sonoma, and we were heading up the valley toward the vineyards. We stopped at the Fairmont and started the day off with great food, smiling, chatting about the fun we’d had so far and had yet to come in the week ahead. It was a fantastic time, which was only enhanced by the delicious pancakes. Being able to even remotely replicate that atmosphere at home is simply awesome. When I think about it, it makes choosing a winner pretty easy actually.

The Best Thing I Ate Last Week

The genesis of this meal began, as most in our household do, at the farmer’s market. Des Moines has a great farmer’s market (to which I plan to one day devote an entire entry) that we attend almost every Saturday morning. Last time there we saw that one of our favorite stands, Cleverly Farms, was selling squash blossoms. I’d never eaten a squash blossom before, or any other kind of flower to my knowledge, but Stacia was excited and told me we had to get some so I could try them.

Squash blossoms are somewhat strange looking, several-inch long green pods that flare out with bright yellow petals at the end. They weigh almost nothing, and surely need to be filled with something to make any sort of substantial dish. We asked for a bag of blossoms, which we received along with a recipe sheet for a means to prepare them – stuffed with cheese, battered and fried. Perhaps not the most nutritious preparation, but it certainly sounded tasty.

We do make a point to eat one vegetarian meal per week, but as unsubstantial as the blossoms felt, it seemed a better choice to pair them with something else than to have them go it alone. Seafood jumped out to me as a nice pairing, so we decided to go that way. Fish choices are sometimes an area of consternation in our household (more on that at a later date perhaps), but I had recently spotted fresh rainbow trout in the seafood case at the local Hy-Vee and lobbied hard for its inclusion with the squash blossoms.

Trout is strangely less popular than salmon, despite the fact that they are very closely related. I’d tried it for the first time on a trip to Virginia and found it very tasty, which has continued to be the case every time since. Most is farmed in the Northwest US or Canada, but it’s done responsibly and generally does not negatively impact the local ecosystems. In my book, trout is a good fish.

A quick perusal of the Food Network’s site got us a good recipe for grilled trout, courtesy of Bobby Flay. There was the meal. Grilled trout with lemon-parsley butter, served with ricotta and parmesan stuffed squash blossoms. With a bottle of Gloria Ferrer (our favorite winery from our honeymoon in Sonoma) champagne chilling in the fridge, everything was ready to go. And a good thing, too, because by the time we had done all of the planning and shopping, we were really hungry!

Stacia and I usually cook as a team, and in this case with two separate items to be prepared, Stacia took charge of the blossoms while I wrangled with the fish. Stacia combined the cheeses and some spices, filled the blossoms with the mixture, and started dredging them in flour, egg and masa harina. We got a pan of oil hot, and as the battered blossoms were ready, they were dropped in and started a-sizzling. It looked like a lot of gooey fun, but I had bigger fish to fry. Or grill, as the case may be.

Knowing that the recipe was written by Bobby Flay, I knew it would call for grilling. I’m still not quite as comfortable with the full-size grill as I am with the George Foreman version, so I decided to go with George. Got him plugged in and heated while I brushed the trout with some olive oil using our brand-new pastry brush. Yeah, it’s seriously been like 6 years of cooking for ourselves, and we just now got a pastry brush. We’re a little silly sometimes.

While that was getting ready, I made up the lemon-parsley butter, which was way easy. Throw lemon zest, lemon juice and chopped parsley in a bowl with some butter and mash it all together with a spoon. Seriously, that was all I had to do. Bobby recommended chilling it for an hour before serving, but there was no way we were going to wait that long on everything else, so it got maybe 20 minutes but seemed no worse for it.

I had a diabolical plan for using the George to replicate what Mr. Flay was going for on his grill. He called for grilling skin side down for a longer time to get the skin crispy, then flipping just to cook through. I have mixed feelings on eating fish skin, crispy or otherwise, but I thought I should try to make it that way and decide whether or not to eat the skin if it turned out

Anyway, my plan was to not make use of the George’s capability of cooking two sides at once. I’d leave the top open while I grilled the skin side, then flip it towards the end of the cook time to finish the rest. First problem was that Stacia was already frying squash blossoms before George was hot, so I didn’t get it as preheated as I think you’d need to crisp up the skin. I was in a hurry so I just threw the fish on and got it cooking. After a few minutes of that, I carefully slid the flipper underneath and was shocked to discover the skin was getting a little crispy!

Unfortunately, the flipper was also wanting to dig into the crispy skin and tear it off, so a little improvisation was necessary. I decided to keep the fillet skin-side down, and close the grill plates for the last few minutes to cook the top side. I figured that was basically the same idea, cooking the skin side for a little bit longer. After that had gone for a few minutes, the fish was ready and Stacia’s blossoms were just finishing up, too. We put half the trout on each plate, topped with lemon-parsley butter, and placed half of the blossoms alongside. With a glass of champagne, a plate of fresh food and a nice breeze on the deck, we sat down to enjoy our dinner.

Everything turned out to be very tasty, although the fish skin didn’t crisp all the way through. It was a little crispy on the outside, but turned to a skinlike texture closer to the meat, so we didn’t try to eat it. No great loss, since I wasn’t sure I would’ve even if it had turned out. The rest of the trout was great. The meat was perfectly flaky, and the sauce of fresh lemon and parsley really made it pop. Stacia said it tasted very fresh, and I think that’s a good word to describe the result. And the squash blossoms were neat, kind of a ricotta-parmesan fritter. The blossom itself didn’t have too much of a flavor, but the breading turned out great with a nice little crunch on the outside, and a nice savory filling within. The two really went well together, and turned out to be the best thing I ate last week.

If I CAN Learn to Do It, You CAN Learn to Do It

I have a gallon of pickles in the pantry right now. I know that can be hard to imagine, so I’ll just pause here a moment to let that sink in. A gallon of pickles. Like if the milk jug didn’t have any milk in it and instead was full of pickles. Not that that would be really any good for anyone, but it does get a nice visual. I mean imagine waking up and pouring out a bowl of cereal only to find the milk jug full of pickles. Ugh. Not the best way to start the day. Anyway, I’m getting a little sidetracked here, especially since they are in four separate quart containers, not a milk jug. I just like to think of it as a gallon because it makes it more clear what a cool accomplishment it was.

Now, simply having a gallon of pickles isn’t really a great feat. It’s not something Hercules would have set out to do, or some sort of Mission Impossible task. Anyone, Greek heroes and Tom Cruise included can simply jaunt over to the nearest grocery store, pick up four jars of pickles (Hercules would do it with one hand, by the way), and buy them. Presto! A gallon of pickles in the pantry. So how about this? The whole lot of them, with the exception of one teensy little insignificant equipment expense, cost $1.68. That’s some good bang for the buck, pickled vegetable-wise.

Of course, the argument could be made that such an incredible quantity of pickles, obtained for such an astonishingly low price, is not so spectacular an achievement. Suppose these pickles were on clearance at the store? Maybe they were expired, or about to expire, if something surrounded by brine and vinegar can even expire in the first place. Then perhaps the store, in a quest to rid itself of the overzealously ordered and apparently unloved pickles, marked them down to, say 42 cents per jar. A strange price point, to be sure, but that’s not to say that it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t, for the record. No, these were so inexpensive because, we made them ourselves!

The whole story begins several weeks ago, when we received a surprise visitor. Or more accurately, an expected visitor, though that sounds much less intriguing. Or to be more accurate still, a visit from my Mother-in-law. She stopped in to town to visit us, we went out to lunch, checked out a local winery, went shopping at the mall, chatted and snacked, watched a movie, and much fun was had by all. I expected that we’d all have a good time. What I did not expect is that she would come bearing a bag of cucumbers. Almost eight pounds of cucumbers which were going to be unused in Edgewood, and naturally were given to us. Maybe because we’re so cool? (Ouch, lame joke).

It was during the aforementioned snacking and chatting stage that the cucumbers were discussed further. My wife or I indicated that we had no idea what we would do with eight pounds of cucumbers, short of building a green Lincoln Log-style fort. Then my Mother-in-law mentioned how easy it would be to make them into pickle relish, and since the vinegar would help preserve things, they could even be stored in the refrigerator in old jars from the store, without sealing. That made things start to sound more interesting.

The final piece of the puzzle came just a few days later, on a random browsing trip to World Market. Sipping my sample tea and meandering through the food aisles, on the lookout for a bargain or currant Lakerol, something caught my eye. A small pouch, with pictures of pickles (or pickle pictures) on the front, and better yet, a red clearance sticker. It was a seasoning mix for making pickles, marked down to $1.68! That was all we needed, cosmically speaking. Through the free cucumbers, the relish suggestion, and the clearance spices, it was clear that the universe wanted us to make pickles. The reason has yet to be revealed - maybe the universe has a burger it needs to garnish - but we certainly weren’t going to ignore the signs.

There’s an old saying about helping those who help themselves or something, so we weren’t going to wait for the universe to plop a canner into our laps. We took the initiative on that one and outfitted ourselves with a top notch pressure canner, pint and quart jars, and a toolkit to help fill and handle the hot jars. This would be that minor equipment expenditure I mentioned earlier. It’s kind of an inside joke for people who have bought canners before. See, they’re not actually cheap. Get it? But we had everything we needed to make pickles, we weren’t going to give up with the finish line in sight. Sure, the entertainment budget took a hit that month, but it turned out making the pickles was entertainment in itself.

That is, if frenzied and harried rushing around with stuff you’ve never used before is entertainment. The jars need to be washed and then kept warm. The cukes need to be sliced and crammed into the jars, then covered with hot (not boiling) pickling liquid. The lids need to be pulled out of a pot of hot (not boiling) water and placed on top. Then the ring gets tightened down and the jar is put into the canner full of boiling (and hot) water, for a prescribed amount of time. It is possible that you can take your time doing all of this, but I’d never done it before, so I was trying to get everything full, closed down and put in the water while things were still hot. It was just like preparing Thanksgiving dinner, assuming that you were just serving pickles for Thanksgiving, which I have to say is a little weird.

Eventually the jars came out, and one by one, we heard the “pop!” noise that meant all four jars had sealed. Following a brief happy dance, we got to end the entire ordeal… by putting the jars into the pantry. You see, they need to pickle and marinate for something like four weeks before you can even think about eating them. So don’t ask me how they taste. I said I have a gallon of pickles in the pantry, not a gallon of pickles in my belly. But give me a few more weeks, and that will all change. If you think it’s impressive to make that many pickles, just wait ‘til I find out how quickly we can consume a gallon of them. Now that should be interesting.