Happy to see you.

I love Flo and Eddie. They even showed up down here, when George Wallace was the Beatles.

pastoralist’s wet dream

accompanied by lightning

The bottom has fallen out here. It’s almost like we might have a wet summer for a change. Never seen one before. There will be grass. Hay will be affordable. Pasture will hang on well into winter.

And I planted grass this Spring. Yay!

Too hot to eat.(With apologies to Zappa)

She’s an octomom, and They call her Tawdra.

The boys on the range say she’s all kinds of bawdra.

Kids is a drag, you know how they is.

They’re all kinds of trouble

once they pop out yer snizz.

She took all eight peeps to the trailer park zoo

To see what that Hambone the tiger could do.

But Hambone got nothin.

No mojo, no juice.

He’s just oozing right down that Geritol sluice.

Pizza with harissa, arugula and tomatoes.

Some months ago, I was reading a discussion of Pizza at Eating Asia. Someone mentioned a Naples style pizzeria in Manhattan that  serves theirs with a minimum of toppings,  and a chili and garlic infused oil as a condiment.  It brought to mind an essay about the Camorra, and its amphetamine juiced teenage killers dousing their pie with oil in an effort to hydrate themselves before the next sidewalk slaying.

I found a couple of recipes that incorporate harissa in the tomato based sauce, but I like the idea of adding the infused oil later. We have a low temperature oven (450-480 tops), which makes for long cooking times and dry pizza, and I will go out of my way to drink olive oil anyway. Some enterprising douche has probably already manufactured olive oil flavored vodka, and I’d be fine with that.

We planted a few seedlings  of arugula a couple of weeks ago:  daily rain and muleshit growth medium has conferred weed status upon them, and they must be eaten. We won’t be harvesting our own tomatoes until late June, but we bought some hydroponically grown leathery simulacra at a local store that specializes in bumpkin approved versions of fine foods: Nabisco chicken flavored croutons, Dijon Mayonnaise, Bone Suckin’ (!) sauce.

The mealiness of the worst tomatoes tends to wither away under broiler temperatures, though.

I found a harissa recipe on the web that’s pretty good, and here it is with a few modifications.

24-30 salt cured or plain dried chilis, a handful of garlic cloves and a tablespoon each of ground cumin, ground coriander, and caraway seeds. Whirl it with a cup of olive oil,  jar,  then add another 3/4 cup to cover. You can keep adding oil to the top for a couple of months if you’re like me. I’m still eating from jars of Indian chili relish we bought when Elvis Costello was thin.

Here’s the dough. I used four cups of high gluten unbleached organic flour, a quarter teaspoon of yeast incorporated directly into the flour, 3/4 tablespoon of salt, and water enough to make a fairly slack, ciabatta-like dough. Look at that gluten!

I divided the dough into two lumps, one for the pizza, one for a small boule we can eat with an industrial size slab of Brie marked sternly ‘For Export Only’.

The dough is pressed down onto the sheet with a generous amount of oil, then piled with mozzarella, Parmesan, and arugula wilted in oil. I  add a can of stewed tomatoes whirled with a tablespoon of harissa, imitation tomatoes and more cheese.

Ready for the oven. I baked it at 480 for twelve minutes. Served with harissa on the side, for drizzling.

The boule turned out nicely, too.

Outside every fat man, there’s an even fatter one closing in.

-Kingsley Amis.

Drunk time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba8GNBPjZyY&feature=PlayList&p=8FBBFCD120FBE85D&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=11

If  I am drunk I will post this. Sometimes repeatedly.

Poor old/dead folks. They sort of look like a checkout line at Wal-Mart.

I’m sorry. Somebody is picking the bones of this corpse.

Play date

Purley and Bodankey .

Welcome to Old

I’ve developed a real knack for busting my ass. I haven’t had anything to post lately because I’ve pulled something in my back. It’s not so much pain as a not so subtle reminder I’m wearing out. Fortunately there are miracle drugs.

Capsaicin ointment and aspirin are my friends.

Tammie took these photos yesterday, while I was out in the yard moaning, trying to find something it didn’t hurt to do.

The orchard. All trees alive so far.

the republican party (In Retreat)

nowhere

From the time I started singing in front of the mirror to my Beatles records to the time my guitar teacher told me I ought to find some dumbasses and make a band before my hair fell out, music was good to me. Delicious, in fact. I wasn’t entirely awkward socially,  especially for a short uncoordinated little bastard who could not make the dance.

Strangely, the drama folks let me be in some of the high school plays that required dance. When the sweater draped choreographer came round to telling me my moves they usually just shrugged and said: “Do whatever. Just try not to get in anyone else’s way.”

That’s not just a dance lesson, it’s a way of life. I found I could mimic dancing by jumping on tables on the set, and taking dangerous falls. This was historically at the tender edge of the litigious society, so in a sense, the drama coach and the choreographer had balls. Neither of them were avowedly homosexual or heterosexual, but they married, after the drama coach flushed the choreographer’s Mexican headache weed down the toilet and made her an honest woman. I suppose part of the deal was that she would trim his neat little forked beard in exchange for his  abject renunciation of coitus.

Me and the pit drummer smoked some trash  with her one night. We had to drive to a cul de sac in one of the new suburban hells that was springing up. The first one we tried was already being staked by a cop car, so we kept driving until we wound up on a road by the Flat River. She was nervous, being with two guys, even though I kept trying to reassure her we were musicians. I hated smoking pot myself: it was a kind of duty. It made me sullen, when I wasn’t paranoid enough to ask to be let into the trunk of the car and driven home. The drummer wasn’t a pot etiquette freak, so it wasn’t too harrowing as we settled into smoking from a superheated machined piece of brass  and Teflon.

The choreographer heard it first.

This was around the time of the first Omen movie, so it was unmistakable. Latin. Chanting. Probably about fifty yards away from the car. The only thing I knew about Wiccans at that point was they tended to be in the military,  they had embarked on the same tendentious course of study I was about to embrace in college, and they shared some pathologies with Stevie Nicks.

Choreographer began hyperventilating.

I tend to superimpose memories, but even with rigorous auditory memory analysis it still sounds to me like I was hearing E.F.EF HUTTON. E.F.HUTTON, BLAH BLAH.  We’d never  even heard Carmina Burana, so it struck us as weird. She started to crawl out of the car. The pit drummer told her to sit still. I wasn’t a smoker yet, so when she broke from the car in a kind of sidelong run I sort of halfassed followed her, looking over my shoulder for the Duke geeks who were probably processing infants into candles, or blending exotic teas from cow-itch vines. I stressed that the most likely means of escape from the devil worshipers would be  the station wagon over there. The very one she’d been sitting in, not three minutes ago. I just desperately  wanted to be home with my Gabriel era Genesis:

Is there a tiny, remote spot in history where someone has not been a dick?

Cooking with greens

It’s raining and a little on the chilly side today, plus I seem to have fucked up my shoulder scything last week,  so I’m coasting today. We have enough chard in the garden, along with spinach , arugula, snow peas, lettuce, and new potatoes to open a roadside stand. I decided we’d make a dent in the chard today, so we’re having baby limas with chick-peas , chard and angel hair pasta soup, served with harissa and a potato boule. I should have started the dough last night, because a 24 hour rise works the best, especially in this weather, but we’ll see what happens.

not bad, but more of a round ciabatta than a boule

Soup. Needs more chard.