Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
The FDA has a plan to reduce the American populace’s salt intake over the next few years. This is anti-Constitutional. This is an expenditure of resources we don’t have on matters outside government’s proper purview. This is finger-wagging do-gooderism on steroids. This is surreal.
Fresh off the grill. Cherry-balsamic chicken for Mrs. BN. Barbecued ribs for moi. I give the ribs a rub and slow-roast ‘em, then add sauce and finish them off with a little sizzle.
Indescribably fantastic spring evening – redbud, tulips, magnolias. Birds chirping. As good as it gets.
Well, looky here: a mandate requiring fast-food chains to put calorie information on their menus. There’s even a new supervisory body to make sure they do it. States had increasingly been going in for this kind of tyrannical meddling, but the fed-level FHers apparently felt that you don’t send a Mugabe out to do a Stalin’s job.
This is yet another example of the gastonomic nanny-state-ism my American Thinker piece last Tuesday dealt with. As I’ve said several times before, I consider food – the preparation, consumption and sharing of it – to be one of life’s most sublime delights. This is personal. (As well as national.)
Something we ablsolutely must do at this juncture is cultivate sharpness. Take great pride in how sharp you are. The regime is trying to spread the notion throughout society that we are too dense to come in out of the rain. They want you to think of yourselves as cattle, dumbly staring into space as you’re corralled into the pen.
Stay sharp.
In the course of musing on the Audi ad that ran during the Super Bowl, Mark Steyn coins a new term: “Conformo-radicalism.” And, no, it’s not a contradiction.
There’s another ad along the same lines that grates on me to no end. It’s for some butter-substitute product. It starts out showing a throng of fit and beaming Danes sashaying down a Copenhagen street. The voiceover says that Denmark recently banned transfats nationwide. Then the ad sells the product, winding up with a message along the lines of “We’re as smart as those with-it Danes!”
Now it’s hip to piss away your freedom.
Each radical socialist regime has had its particular set of marketing ploys, if you will, its own ways of selling totalitarianism, in the hopes of bringing the masses along peaceably before the grim police-state tactics have to be employed. The TCM regime’s style for peddling utopian madness is uniquely creepy.
Today’s exhibit is the return of Michele O to high visibility and policy involvement. She’s going to push for government programs to address childhood obesity. In case you, as the ordinary citizen, should respond along the lines of, “aren’t fat kids their parents’ problems?”, which, by the way, is how she handled the matter when her pediatrician told her that Sasha and Malia needed to slim down, she says it’s a national security issue.
This is the TCM regime’s modus operandi: press upon us the urgency of a particular development, the solution to which is implementing what they want to socialize. More fat kids means a military so understaffed as to leave us vulnerable to enemy conquest. Uninsured people means the government should pick up the tab for our doctor and hospital visits. Bankrupt car companies means we should drive golf carts.
Since food is hugely important to me (I strategize lunch options two or three days in advance; I fixate on food photography the way my much-younger self did on pictures of unclad women), I really get my dander up when the leviathan state starts poking its nose into what I’m putting in my mouth. That comes under the headin’ of my business, pardner.
Only FHer off-the-chart goofballs could make a political correctness issue – to the point of poisoning the atmosphere with implications of racist caricature – out of foods that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. actually immensely enjoyed.
The best do I’ve achieved in years. I have my routine down now to the point that I don’t need to calculate minutes per pound 0r anything like that. It goes in the oven at 5:30 and it’s done at 12:30. In fact, the problem with Wendy last year was that I thought I ought to go a little longer and the legs basically fell off.
Classic sage and celery stuffing.
Fettucine with pumpkin and sage.
Here’s what you do:
Cube the meat from what’s left after you slice a small pumpkin into strips. Or two thirds of it if it’s not as small as small. Sorry I’m not being more scientific. You don’t feel very scientific after wrestling this concrete-skinned squash with the very best knife in the house until it succumbs to your will. Anyway, you’re looking for three cups of cubes.
In a large, wide frying pan over medium heat, melt some butter. Slice a small white onion into paper-thin slices and saute it in the butter. When that’s translucent (isn’t that a cool term?) add the pumpkin cubes, raise the heat a little and cook, stirring often, until tender, about 20 minutes.
In another pan, lightly fry about 12 sage leaves until they break up under pressure from your wooden spoon.
Cook about 2/3 lb. fettucine until al dente. Drain and add to the pumpkin and onion. Add some shredded parmesan. Toss. Add the sage, some salt and some white pepper. Toss some more. Serves 4.
It had been a long time since I’d made a classic cheeseburger at home. Two four-ounce angus patties, a red-onion slice, sauteed mushrooms, a handful of shredded cheddar jack, red-leaf lettuce, and a hefty dollop of full-strength Hellman’s mayonnaise. (I’m batching it this weekend.) I pondered my glorious creation, so precariously stacked, and gave myself one of those talking-tos that I administer from time to time. “Now, Barn,” I said, “You know you’re setting yourself up for a damn-it moment, don’t you? You know you’ll be determined to eat it as an intact unit of food and not let it fall apart into its various components. Look at it. Do you really think that’s possible?”
I can report that it worked out well enough for me to avoid getting on the express train to the damn-it zone. The main challenge is finding a bun that can stand up under that kind of heft. The one I used wasn’t up to the task. My last bite was patty and lettuce covered in mayo.
And let’s not talk about me. I need a shower, badly.
But was it fun? Let’s not fool with understatements here. It was exquisite.
Now I’m ready for the Colts – Seattle game.
Bookworm Room on Julie & Julia.
This was to be expected. Whole Foods is being subjected to boycott-organizing attempts and various forms of Internet vitriol over CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal column in which he outlined how his company is pointing the way to a free-market alternative to FHer-Care.
It’s not surprising, but it is sad and pathetic. None of the lefty remarks in this item about the development offer any kind of substantive refutation of Mackey’s argument. These people just see him as a turncoat. What he proposes is working wonderfully in his own organization. It would greatly and quickly transform our nation’s health care landscape if put into practice on a widespread basis. Yet these idiots cling to their utterly unfounded ideas of what’s “fair.” And “hip,” whatever that means at this late date.
They want to regulate pay in private businesses.
They want to tell you how fuel-efficient your car must be.
They want to require you to have health insurance.
They want judges who “empathize” with certain demographic groups.
They want more “diversity” in the local programming of radio enterprises.
Now, they want to tell you what to eat and make sure you exercise.
Read the whole thing if you’re in need of a good hurl. It’s full of the stock phrases, bureacratic doo-doo and touchy-feely “guidance” (a euphemism for the feigned pity / actual contempt that is a hallmark of the left) that is taking over American life: nutritional counseling (because we pathetic rubes have no business choosing foods we like and, in any event, since we can’t hit our own asses with a yardstick, don’t know how to fashion a healthy diet), bike paths (you can kiss the day of local municipalities deciding whether they want stuff like that good-bye), and grocery stores in “underserved areas” (which are those places where people can’t get it together enough to hop in a car or on a bus to get to a store, much less start a store to serve the damn area).
Taxes on alcohol and sugar.
I’ll tell you this. Any goose-stepper who comes between me and my hot wings dripping with ranch dressing and my Woodford Reserve manhattan is asking for the barrel of an AK-47 up his nose.
Chicken thighs with braised fennel, scallions and kalamata olives, with a side of rice pilaf.
I’ve done a couple of variations on Chicken Marsala lately. The one I did for supper last evening entailed a fairly straightforward procedure: brown the chicken breast medallions in a little olive oil, set aside, add a little more oil, add minced garlic and sautee mushrooms, add the marsala and deglaze the pan, add heavy cream, put the chicken back in, add some crumbled gorgonzola. Serve over pasta, sprinkle with chopped flat-leaf parsley and some more gorgonzola crumbles.
Won a thumbs-up from Mrs. BN. Served with an Australian shiraz, mainly because that’s what we had.
Pan-seared chicken breast with chanterelles and creamed leeks. Washed down with 2006 Caposaldo Pinot Grigio.
Great think piece in Policy Review by Mary Eberstadt, “Is Food the New Sex?”
. . . free market economics. Bookworm points up the unintended silliness of a New York Times article on where the local / global thing has taken itself.
I’ve made this observation for years. As I’d stroll down the aisles of health-food stores, looking at cereal brands such as Barbara’s, Health Valley and Kashi, I’d ask myself, “What’s the difference, in the minds of the NPR / peace-diversity-and-social-justice / transgendered bathroom / meditation-and-contortion crowd, between these brands and General Mills and Kellogg? Groovy hippies made the ones in here. The others were made by greedy white male corporations.”
