The dinner box project has been going in fits and starts. Today I made fourteen boxes, most with grilled lamb, the veggie ones with an onion tart. The side dishes are ratatouille and roasted red potatoes. Orders came in for only five people but I'm going to see what the walk-in sales are like.

( chef chat )

The past few days have been tremendously mellow.

Grunge was about the same as always, very laid back, lots of hot muddy men. I wasn't feeling especially frisky, mostly I soaked in the canal, drank beer, and smoked. There were a few guys I really had an eye for but nothing transpired. Amazing how easy it is to waste a whole day - and how delightful it is to do absolutely nothing. The theme this year seemed to be "new love" - several freshly formed couples were there, including one guy who I have shared much lust with in the past but who is now so enraptured with his new guy that you couldn't have kept them apart with a crowbar. Very sweet, actually, it's such a pleasure seeing men fall in love.

No pictures, I figure there is no way to top previous ones so no need to be a shutterbug.

Tacos on Saturday at this event remain one of my favorite cooking events of the year. It seemed really easy this time around, hardly any work at all. A well made taco is a fantastic thing. It requires a properly griddled tortilla that is simultaneously soft and crunchy, well-grilled meat that is chopped with cleavers, and lean, fresh condiments like queso seco and chopped chile. Basic, down-home ranch food, nothing manufactured or canned. Tim's place is perfectly set up for this, and the resulting tacos are positively radiant. Better yet, I could wear my special taco shirt while waving my knives around. ;-)

What really made the trip, though, was taking my newly relaxed and mellowed-out self over to Berry Creek to visit TC.



He lives way out there, at the end of about 3 miles of rather exciting dirt road. Not entirely coincidentally, he lives very close to Brush Creek, the town of media empire fame. For some reason, nobody has seen fit to erect an interactive tactile smell-o-vision interpretive center educating tourists about the history of this strangely influential place. And that seems like a glaring oversight.

[Seriously, there's nothing there, and very little about the town that relates to the company. I've got such a tortured sense of nostalgia about the whole bear era that simply driving past the sign throws me back two decades, to when the world depicted in his art looked to my young eyes like a vision of unattainable glory, something which I'd never be cool or manly enough to partake of. It was a real love-hate relationship. But this is a complicated subject that will have to wait for another time.]

After I arrived, we unwound with a drink and a toke, and switched to a more suitable form of transportation. I'd never driven an ATV before, and boy, was that an odd experience. (Also dipped for the first time, and had to laugh at my innocence - man, I'm never gonna get my redneck card at this rate!)

With his dog surfing bravely on the luggage rack, we headed another five miles down the road to Milsap Bar, at the confluence of two rivers. Now that was something else. I'm a connoisseur of fine swimming holes, and this is surely one of the best. ( More photos )

All told it was an absolutely magical day full of testosterone and adventure and manly affection in a stunning place with lots of red meat and beer thrown in for good measure. What more, really, could anyone ask for?

Off to the Grunge Guys weekend this morning - thought I'd get an early start and avoid the traffic.

The most notable news of late is that my pasta machine has died. It started jamming on the widest setting, so we opened it up and found the gears to be basically mangled. It still worked on finer settings but now the rollers are out of alignment so one side comes out thicker than the other and the pasta won't feed properly. This last batch got done but only barely, it took forever and was a real pain.

Sigh... I think it's time to shell out $1600 for this. There are fantastic looking machines in the $5K range but this one already costs more than my first motorcycle! It will take a lot of ravioli to pay for it, but this product seems to be a big hit and with the right equipment it could become quite lucrative. And after hand-cranking 4 kilos of dough yesterday I'm really sore, so I'm not anxious to do that again.

On that vein, do you chefs out there have any suggestions for making numerous 2-pound batches of different forcemeats without such a mess? The cuisinart is a real bottleneck, it's a huge pain cleaning out the results of one batch so as to get on to the next. Bonus if it works for mixing pasta dough as well. It's ironic that my shaping method is now so good that the most mundane parts of ravioli manufacture - mixing and schlepping - are what's dragging it down.

Yes, this is the Pasta That Ate My Life. I hope the Flying Spaghetti Monster looks favorably on my sacrifice. I'm really looking forward to a few days of absolutely nothing.

Very pleased with the results on these...

The new and improved ravioli. So pretty:



And the new dinner box format. I poured some scotch and spent some time with my Ekiben book, and came up with this. It's about 24 oz of food and makes for a fairly hearty dinner. Finally I feel like I have something worthy of $19 in a gourmet shop. And it doesn't take a nervous breakdown to make it happen.



Pictured is roast pork tenderloin, pickled baby vegetables (no, the white ones are not hemlock), potatoes au gratin with gruyere, and a tomato, parsley, and garlic salad. The trick to the perfect box is controlling the moisture in each ingredient so it isn't dry, but doesn't spew fluid all over the place. For example, the tomatoes are marinated first in salt, and drained, then in olive oil, then drained. So they are juicy but have no "extra" juice to drown the rest of the box. This is ready to eat from the fridge but is "best when gently warmed". A warm tomato salad is unconventional but actually quite delicious. It is surprisingly unlike a meal on an airplane.

It's harder than it looks. Even if this retail thing goes nowhere, getting these totally right was worth every bit of effort.

Is your contaminated food product causing you trouble because of pesky recalls? No problem! Just repackage it and redistribute it under a different name.

Seriously. This happened. Why is this not major news? This is WAY worse than a simple recall, it means that there is no basis for trusting the food safety system at all. This cannot be good for the industry.

En route back from Williams, I stopped by at Les Jardins du Bateau, a tiny organic farm just across the highway from Saratoga Springs. This was my excuse for making it all a "business trip". The Jardin is a U-pick-by-appointment establishment, they have no Web presence, and their address is not on the map. You just have to know - I met them at the Blue Lakes roundtable. Despite their complete obscurity and lack of marketing, they seem to get a lot of clients.

I had outfitted Sharkey for the occasion:



This is my new supply transport system. The top crate "breathes" so I can pack freshly picked produce in wet towels and have it still be cool and fresh when I get home. Seriously, I swaddle and coddle vegetables like they were the baby jesus, and it appears that this method works quite well. If the maintenance on the bike didn't cost more than gas it might even be a sensible approach. But for now, image is everything: nobody forgets the caterer on the weird bike.

On arrival, the owner greeted me at the locked gate. I was decisively out-vehicled, and cowered in the face of the overwhelming coolness of his ride:



Yeap, it's an old Mercedes, I think he said it was a model from 1929. (Might have misheard that, I know hardly anything about cars.) Just for toolin' around the ranch, I guess.

Anyway, this is Troll, the owner. What a spectacularly hard-working guy. A biker, too, with a nice custom Harley I didn't get a picture of.



Also not pictured: the Bateau itself, an old derelict yacht that they floated in during a flood and placed prominently in the garden. I guess it connects to Clear Lake when the water is really high. He said nobody wanted the property because of the flood problems, but he just lives with it.

I seem to fit in well in this area - like him, and so many people I meet, I live a life low on expenses, high on fabulousness, long on intellectual interest, and entirely devoted to a difficult and unprofitable business that nobody pays any attention to. LOL. Seriously, I don't know how this can possibly work, but so many people are doing it that there must be something going for it.

I bought a few pounds of gnarly little carrots for ten bucks. Not only do they look cool, but they're delicious. Very intense flavor. A few white roots landed in the pile, which Troll snatched up and tossed aside. I asked why, and he said they were "hemlock". And on looking this up on Wikipedia I see it does indeed look just like the poisonous plant of the same name. And this completely freaks me out, because I had assumed they were simply white carrots... EEEEEK!!!! Seriously, if he hadn't told me this would have ended up in somebody's dinner, I had NO FUCKING CLUE. Yeah, this organic gardening is really great for your health! Shit!

Great ride, beautiful day, all that stuff. I got orders for TWO whole box dinners this week, but I am obligated to pick up ten pounds of pork tenderloin this afternoon. Sigh... I sure hope it's all in cryovac or I'm gonna have pig coming out of my ears.

I had really admired the iPhone for its simple design, snappy performance, and resistance to feature creep. With version 3.0 of the software, this promising start seems to have gone off the rails.

The omission of cut and paste was among the most courageous decisions I'd seen in any software system, and as I had predicted, this new "feature" is intrusive and a general pain in the ass. All my reflexes have become wrong - any lingering finger brings up an unwanted selection box. The size of the screen makes it very hard to adjust the selection box with accuracy anyway. And the pop-up menus are always appearing when I don't want them. Verdict: Still better off without it.

The phone now has a habit of freezing at arbitrary moments. It NEVER did this before, and now it does it all the time. FAIL.

Sorry, Apple. You started out on the right foot. But this is a step backwards. The beginning of the end. And the performance problems seem very obviously a move to drive customers to newer, faster, more profitable hardware. All you have done is ensure that my next phone will be something else.

Is it too late to downgrade?

Williams is a fascinating little town. Surprisingly beautiful. Beautifully derelict. Went for an evening ride and admired the grandeur that is agriculture. Some of the orchards are ancient looking and spooky. Then there will be a square mile of sunflowers. Then a massive tangle of rusty iron. Just fucking amazing.

Ate alone in a lonely-male-friendly, surprisingly upscale steakhouse called Louis cairo's. Several tables of single men tapping on cell phones. I kinda like eating by myself though I must admit it looks kind of sad. Sad like bluegrass tunes are sad, that high lonely sound. What can I say, Deliverance changed my life.

Really needed a little getaway. Had no idea what I'd find here but it has been a feast for the senses. Plus: farm boys. I have to avert my eyes some times, those scruffy beards and tight jeans might make me blow a gasket somewhere.

Forgot to mention - after rhapsodizing about uni in a previous post, there was another sea urchin experience. While riding around a few weeks ago, I had dropped by the harbor at Point Arena to ogle the ab divers. Despite the low tide, there weren't any, just some fishermen. As I came buy, one of them reeled up a sea urchin he had snagged. Never seen that happen before! He placed it on the rail of the dock, and I couldn't help but stare. I was pretty sure he was just going to throw it back, and that would be terrible, so I wanted to at least ensure that it was not wasted. So I said "Hey, you know you can eat those, right?" He smiled and said "yeah". So I hope it was good.

(BTW, you have NOT seen hotness until you check out the abalone diving crowd. The legal harvest here is something like a quarter million per year, so there's lots of sportsmen going after them. It's the standard Mendocino County masculinity test, the canonical rite of passage, fodder for literally decades of lecking and bragging. Aside from the otter angle and the rubber fetish angle, it bears mentioning that these guys specialize in holding their breath for LONG periods of time. Unfortunately they also carry large iron bars, so I prefer to observe from a distance. ;-)

Well, it worked - for the first time in my life, I made six hundred of something!

It actually went very smoothly, although the main bottleneck surprised me - simply moving stuff from one container to another. I made the choux pastry in 3 kilogram batches, and had to split the batches in half to whip them up in the Kitchenaid. The batter is sticky and hard to manage. Getting stuff like that in and out of things like the kitchenaid and the cuisinart is really annoying.

The profiteroles were not ideal - they were kind of soft, rather than crunchy, and not especially light. But the crowd went nuts over them anyway. The tarragon chicken pate was really good. How can it not be, the whole thing was mostly butter and cream. LOL.

The table:



Shame the background is so cluttered, the flowers were really gorgeous.

Unfortunately my display was in the back of a shop (the Mendocino Barkery, which is owned by a hot guy with a big moustache - so I just can't say no to him) and it didn't get all that much traffic. He had wanted a local winery to set up back there and they refused, so he put me back there to draw people in as much as he could. Which is fine, but the result was that only about half the food got eaten. I can freeze or repurpose most of it, but as far as marketing opportunities go it could have been better.

Close-up of the pastries:



I've achieved really good penetration with my marketing program, and almost everyone in the arts-and-culture set now knows who I am and what I do, but one unfortunate result is that with all this great work I've gotten a reputation for being "unaffordable". Despite the fact that my current prices are insanely low by almost any standard. It's annoying, because judgments like that tend to stick regardless of the facts.

Monday, there's another small event, just appetizers for 15, but it's a very elite group - the board of directors for a local nonprofit. Should be easy and worthwhile. After that, who knows. If the phone doesn't start ringing after all this, I'm going to try another angle.

Eight pounds of ravioli, two pounds each of four kinds, done. I think I've got it nailed.



Actually, it's arguably agnolotti, but nobody knows what that is. And an actual Italian would probably quibble with the technique. I use a food processor and a roller, then do the shaping by hand, but mine are somewhat larger than the traditional version.

If I were making it for a client, that would give a margin of about a hundred bucks in four hours, which meets my $25/hr threshold for something being "worthwhile". I bet I can bring that time down a lot, too. Hard work, though, you really gotta move it.

As it happens, it's a "shopwarming" gift for the owner at the faboo new Westside Renaissance market, which is a very interesting shop that will only be open a few hours a day but will provide gourmet products to Ukiah's wealthiest neighborhood. Grand opening is tonight. I hope they make it, I can see lots of co-marketing opportunities here. The owner has already asked me about distributing ready-made dinners to his customers. Could be very lucrative!

The Larousse Gastronomique recipe worked just fine. The fluted pastry nozzle works much better than the plain one when it comes to loft and shape. Delicious with strawberry preserves and sweetened cream cheese:



Feeding creampuffs to rednecks is good for at least ten minutes of entertainment. They can neither admit to liking them, nor stop eating them. If only all forbidden pleasures could be packaged so attractively.

This week's goal is to get production up to the thousand-piece level for appetizers. I will probably only actually make 500 of two different things, but getting everything just-so at large scale is critical.

One of the appetizers will be the cucumber rounds with hummus. I score the cucumbers before slicing to get a flashy striped effect. Very attractive, quick to make, easy to eat, everyone likes them, they're vegan, and they're cheap. (The tahini is actually the most expensive part of them - at $10/lb it dominates their cost.) For the other, I'm learning to make profiteroles. Easy to spell, and it's amusing to find that the word is derived from "profit". No wonder caterers make them so often. I'm thinking of filling them with something like chicken tarragon mousse. What terrifies me is the process of mixing the dough - apparently beating air into it is important and I don't know how that's going to scale up in larger batches. I will probably have to do an initial test batch by hand, then an intermediate-sized batch which I can repeat several times to get to a thousand of them. I bet chefxh has some advice... ;-)

A small advance this morning - an improved ironing layout. It turns out that ironing cloth napkins is much faster and gets better results when done on a countertop on top of a towel. In fact, now that I think about it, this is something that ought to be done in the kitchen - where there are already large expanses of flat, clean, heat-resistant counters. Duh.

Of course most restaurant napkins don't need ironing, but the nature of my business is such that nothing so bourgeois as polyester would ever touch my clients' lips. So 100-percent cotton it is.

Here's a thought experiment that touches on a lot of different intuitions and assumptions. I'm curious to see how people answer:

You have two hockey-puck shaped permanent magnets, and you place one on each side of a thin sheet of plastic such that their mutual attraction clamps them strongly together. All surfaces are smooth and nearly frictionless (oil them if you like). If you hold the sheet stationary while rotating one of the magnets, does the other one rotate as well? Why or why not?

The appetizer table, sans food. By the time the food was ready I was too busy to be taking pictures.



Close up of the "marketing corner":



No, the Pomo indian in the painting is not smoking a giant doobie, it seems to be some sort of musical instrument. And no, they aren't postmodernists either. Just another mystery of life in the north counties...

Also, we had the "other" neighbors for pizza last night, the ones that Bill doesn't get along with. Bill himself decided to visit a friend in Redding. It was very pleasant but a number of the men-folk didn't appear with their wives. Not sure if it's Teh Ghey or what, but we had a good time regardless. Also met the two women next door for the first time, they were a lot of fun, as was their cousin who is an avid cook and mushroom hunter. Many happy returns, I hope.

John just brought this back from his doggie walk:



I mean, WTF? I've never seen anything like this before.

Update: it's a species of Dichelostemma , also known as "firecracker flower". Curiously, it is closely related to a little blue flower, Dichelostemma multiflorum , that is also currently blooming here, though they look so different I can hardly believe they're even in the same family.

A while back I came across the notion of "vicarious goal satisfaction", also known as the "remedy effect". This is the idea that you can cancel out the effects of a bad choice so long as you follow it up with something that promises redemption. As in, it's "OK" to eat a giant steak so long as you follow it up with a low-fat cookie. The most compelling demonstration of this was a study showing that the mere presence of a salad on a fast-food menu inspired people to eat more french fries.

This, of course, is magical thinking - that the effects of a low fat cookie will, through sympathetic magic, cancel out the effects of the steak. It also relies on the notion of sin, rather than simple cause and effect - the idea that eating the steak is essentially "bad" rather than merely fattening. Sin can be redeemed, but cholesterol cannot; the confusion between virtue and chemistry is at the root of this effect.

I was exposed to lots and lots of environmentalist thinking when I was younger, so I suffer from this effect myself. I think nothing of getting on the motorcycle and riding 30 miles into town and back for a bite of lunch, but I feel terrible guilt over using paper towels. (That, at a rate of about 1 roll every 2 weeks.) Of course, the environmental impact of those 30 miles could buy a whole case of paper towels, but something about using the towels casually still rubs me the wrong way. Call it brainwashing.

Conserving paper towels is my capitulation to vicarious satisfaction. I figure that by recycling the paper towels I use to dry my hands for cleaning up spills on the floor, I'm somehow mitigating the enormous cost to the environment of everything else in my life. Knowing that this is wrong on an intellectual level makes no difference - the emotional programming isn't worth the effort to overcome.

Americans use a LOT of energy - as I said before, our bodies need only 100 watts of power from food, but on average we use a hundred times that amount of energy to sustain our lifestyles. This is a LOT of energy with a BIG environmental impact and it is VERY HARD to cut it down to something sustainable. The impact of adapting a truly sustainable lifestyle, on a national level, would make the disruption of the current "economic crisis" look like a walk in the park - it would be much more difficult to adapt to than even the worst-case financial scenarios. Living an eco-friendly life is, by and large, a privilege of the wealthy, who pursue it for mostly emotional reasons. That some people are individually successful at this is, in my opinion, irrelevant to the larger problem - I don't see them as saints, but as dupes.

I am not a global-warming skeptic and my opinions on the subject are generally in accord with the IPCC reports. (Though, it bears mentioning that this position is often considered "skeptical" in comparison to journalistic hysteria on the subject.) However, just as with individual conservation, I do think that current efforts to cut down on CO2 emissions are a complete waste of time.

In fact, I have come to the exact opposite conclusion - that the only sensible course of action is to extract as much benefit from fossil fuels as we possibly can. This does not mean "wasting" them, but it does mean taking the opportunity to use petroleum while it's still available. Oil isn't going to last forever, and conservation on our part (whether on an individual or national level) means nothing more than giving those fossil fuels away to other parties.

An idealistic perspective imagines a world where, somehow, every country agrees to curtail use. The trouble is, the more countries that agree, the stronger the incentives are for the remaining countries to opt out. There has never been a successful international treaty of this type, and there probably never will be. The Kyoto protocol has been conspicuously unsuccessful, and I think it would be even less so if the United States had taken part. Countries don't cooperate on economically difficult tasks out of the goodness of their hearts, and neither do people; "morality" has always been founded in self-interest, and moral principles don't last when the parties involved individually benefit from ignoring them.

I could be proven wrong on this, and maybe there will be some exceptional and unprecedented new mechanism that will convince all the major powers to dial back on their fossil fuel use. The most rational and plausible mechanism is not conservation, but some sort of international tax on raw petroleum - say, a hundred dollars a barrel - with the money disbursed in a way that encourages every country to participate. And maybe instead of driving cars, we'll all be riding around on flying unicorns that fart rainbows.

In the meanwhile, the current cap-and-trade legislation is the low-fat cookie of our age. Maybe it's affordable, but it's almost certainly not effective. I am 99% certain that destructive levels of global warming are going to happen regardless of US actions or international treaties. The only question remaining is how we can adapt.

Well, it looks like the wilted trees are not going to die. Which pleases me greatly.

John came back yesterday and we had a little chat. Some things he'd said a while back had been causing me a lot of stress, particularly an offhand remark to the effect that he'd "like to see some income". I actually am generating some cash, though not very much, but it was more the sentiment that had gotten me uptight. The past year has seen a lot of uncertainty, but we agreed that things were basically stable now, and that it was OK to "coast" for a while. Our expenses are now so low, and so much of what we needed to spend money on is now taken care of, that his pension covers pretty much everything else.

This means a tremendous reduction in my stress level. There is no longer any time pressure for anything. I'm not sure why it's been so hard to get anything done lately, but I think it will be a whole lot easier if I can just forget about whatever I'm not doing at any given moment and focus on what is getting done. Never underestimate the value of being told what to do - in this sense, at least, regular employment is way easier than trying to make it on your own. The modernist separation of concerns between "deciding" and "doing" is a lot more important than I'd ever appreciated before.

Anyway, I took off this morning for a 200 mile ride, down the coast and through Sonoma County. I checked the weather in Gualala and it promised to be warm and sunny - which it was, in Gualala. Everywhere else on the coast was FREEZING! So I turned off at Stewarts Point and took a very interesting ride along Kings Ridge Road, which is 16 miles long and about as wide as a bicycle trail. It's really slow, but the pavement is unaccountably excellent. What an interesting route! It goes through areas so remote there aren't any fences, which makes the landscape so much more inviting. The endless barbed wire and "no trespassing" signs everywhere else are kind of a downer.

I was hugely excited to find a new wildflower along Skaggs Springs Road, in the redwoods:



Crappy photo, I know, all I had was my cell phone. Anyway, it's something in the lily family but I haven't been able to identify it. Very interesting leaves, unlike anything I've seen before.

One of the surprising pleasures of motorcycling is the smells. Pine trees, seaweed, skunks, flowers, fungi... it's almost as nice as the scenery itself. I find myself having really strong emotional responses to all of these, and they bring me tremendous pleasure.

After about five hours of riding (this was the extra-extra-scenic route, after all) I came into Guerneville and was surprised to discover that the Sonoma County Pride Festival was going on. Kind of interesting - just a few hundred people, as opposed to the few hundred thousand in SF, but it was much more my kind of event. Totally pleasant and enjoyable, I only wish I'd heard about it earlier so I could have spent more time there. It was held at the Resort Formerly Known As Fife's, in a beautifully landscaped garden along the river. (Why they renamed such a classic location, I have NO idea.) Being uncrowded, green, and quiet, it sure beat the hell out of Market Street.

There was only one guy I saw at the festival that struck my fancy, but boy was he hot. BIG belly, nice round butt, and a scruffy blond beard - just my type. Spoke to him briefly but he didn't seem all that interested. Too bad, he was a local, and I'd sure like to lick him all over. Maybe he'll call.

[What is it with guys these days? Straight men all over the country have started grooming themselves in ways that are totally hot, while what passes for "bear" in the gay world seems to have achieved the impossible task of separating hairiness from masculinity. The trend among the gay crowd seems to be short, perfectly cropped beards that just aren't sexy at all. And please, working out at the gym has NEVER been a substitute for hard labor - just stay home and keep eating those donuts, 'k?]

Got back home at about 6, and I'm bushed! I have no idea how I used to ride five or six hundred miles in a day, I must have been nuts.

I found this DVD last month while cleaning out the shack:



Ever fall in love with a photo? This has been obsessing me for a while now. I didn't know much about Lee Van Cleef, so I looked him up and have been unable to find any other pictures of him that turn me on like this one does (or at all for that matter). Which makes it kind of strange that this particular one pushes so many buttons. I think it has a lot to do with the stubble and bushy eyebrows. And the hint of fucked up teeth, and those fierce bedroom eyes... swoon! I just can't resist that steely tough-guy look.

Anyway, Bill said the film is "absolute crap" - he's a stickler for realism in military tales, and apparently on that count this fell on its face within the first five minutes. I skimmed through a few scenes, and it struck me as low-budget, high-camp brain candy, something hard to take with any seriousness.