Sprouts continued

I checked on my sprouts this morning, and I found that some piddly, but nevertheless annoying, fuzzy white mold had started growing on a couple of my sprouts.  A couple root hairs looked like they had gone home for Christmas and come back to town with white ermine boas.  I'm not the sort of person who loses sleep over mold—well, actually, I have lost sleep over mold.  I used to have really bad asthma, and mold made me wheeze like none other.  Riveting.

      
I think it's about time that I stop considering myself a good bowler.  I went bowling last night and I bowled atrociously.  Rather than publish one article in a food magazine, my New Year's resolution should have been, stop lying to yourself about your bowling prowess.  I threw one strike and four gutter balls.  I'm a terrible bowler.  

There isn't too much more to say this morning.  Still, though, I should leave you with something: You know those gambling machines that you pump quarters into in hopes that your quarter will be the one that causes all those other quarters to teeter over the edge of the shelf and dump into the metal cup below where you can scoop them up by the handful?  One time I robbed one of those machines.     

sprouts, le Bonheur

Just got back from Greenfield, Massachusetts, home to Wilson's department store, which hasn't changed one lick in thirty years, and Mohawk Office Equipment Co., where you can find Dick, who is very likely the only remaining master typewriter repairman in all of New England.  Dick tells good stories about his honesty and his 48 years repairing "machines."  I picked Emily up at Potpourri Plaza at noon in Northampton, and we drove through the unusually warm January rain while eating a Domino's pizza in the car.  If you are into typewriters and cluttered old shops, you should take a ride to Greenfield.  If you do go, be sure you get there early because Dick is semi-retired, and he goes home at one.  Here are some sprouts I started the other day.

   
Fuck.  Sorry.  Those are not the sprouts.  That is a screen shot I took the other night while watching Agnes Varda's film about adultery, le Bonheur.  A happily married man falls in love with a woman who works at a telegraph office, and then he proceeds to have a blissful and consequence-free affair with her until the very last moment of the film—spoiler alert—when the wife's empurpled body is dragged out of an otherwise bucolic little stream.  All of this, naturally, has nothing to do with sprouts.  Sprouts neither have affairs nor enjoy cinema, though they do enjoy sitting in the dark, if sprouts can be said to enjoy anything.  

      
You must pamper sprouts, but the pampering is worth it.  Twice a day you must carefully rinse them in room temperature water, taking care not to snap their delicate radicles in the process.  A snapped radicle can be an entryway for rot, though nothing is really so dire in the world of home sprouting.  The truth is the other way around: it's really nice to have such tender and springy little creatures—and in such abundance—growing inside of a jar within your home in January, especially when the world outside of your home is brown and dingy.  These particular sprouts are only about two days old.  They sleep in the dark, in a mock underground setting, for about seven days, at which time, if they are fully leafed out, the sprouter exposes them to an afternoon of sun so that their tiny, embryonic leaves can transform the sun's photons into chlorophyll.  Here is the cheating husband, watching his friend—not his mistress—nurse her youngest child while her other children watch greedily.  Note the very nice Dahlias and the bottle of lemon soda in the foreground.

It was completely by accident that sprouts and le Bonheur found their way into one unified post, though it was not by accident that I took fifty billion screenshots of le Bonheur.  I take screenshots while I watch compelling cinema.  In any case, one could argue that an infant is A LOT LIKE A SPROUT.  One could argue that, but I wouldn't want to hang out with that guy at a party.  At parties, it's much more interesting to gossip.  You know...who's fucking whom; who's been acting CRAZY lately; who's weird and getting weirder; and the ultra popular, who was seen drinking alone at the dark end of an even darker street.  Now that's entertainment.  Talk about sprouts and French movies, and someone is bound to hurl a basketball at you.  Here's a close-up of the little sprout suckers.

I suppose there isn't too much more to say.  Check back in another couple days to see the progress.  The people in le Bonheur will still be repeating their perpetual ritual, but the sprouts will have developed. 

mild weather, melt, compost, Stevens

I don't know what the winter has been like around you, but presumably it's been a lot like it's been around me: mild.  Then again, some of you are in Europe, and some of you are even further afield AND in the opposite hemisphere, so I suppose it doesn't make too much sense to conjecture about your weather.  Weather.  Men love to talk about the weather.  I get letters from Stan (and send him letters too), and nary a one of his closes without a mention of the weather in New Mexico.  The same is true for my letters.  Another great day here in Massachusetts.  Very blue skies.  And so forth.  We had some snow recently—"finally" is probably the more appropriate word—but the temperatures rose and the sun came out, and now most of that snow is gone.  My backyard was a swamp yesterday because the low-lying ground was frozen and the water from the melted snow had no place to run.  A drive through some farmland in nearby Hadley proved more of the same: pools of melted snow and dingy green fields.  And the gulls have come inland early this year—or do they just live here year round?  Whatever the case, you can find them in the fields in the early spring, especially after a tractor has come through and tilled. 

               
I woke up this morning and started crying over lost love.  What?  Come again?  But it's true.  Eight-thirty A.M. found me quietly sobbing, just a couple repressed sobs and then I sucked in a deep breath and sat down to write about compost.  I went out into the backyard yesterday to check on my compost piles—I have three different piles—and I was pleased to see that they'd shrunk, though "shrunk" is the wrong word.  Time and rain and gravity and snow have compacted them, have aided the process of their decomposition.  Compost matures as it shrinks.  It was late January, and as I stood there inspecting my piles, I was thinking about the future, how we really don't know what our futures hold, but even so we can be sure that our compost will ripen.  When nothing appears to be happening, something is still happening.  I went around front to have a look at my garden.  In August it looked like this...

but now it looks like this...

But "this" isn't such a terrible thing.  There is some beauty and hope in this.  And I do not mean that the weather has been mild and beautiful—that is actually somewhat disturbing—I mean that beauty is always happening, even when the opposite appears to be true.  All winter I have been thinking about this Wallace Stevens poem, The Snow Man.   

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

And that seems like a suitable place to end this post about the winter.  

   

the pizza industry and paper waste

When a good day ends with a bonus slice of pizza that would have otherwise been pitched into the trash along with crushed foam products, plastic forks, and disposable paper napkins, you enter into a kind of bonus land of consciousness, and the world stops, and pizza assumes total sovereignty.  Pizza by the slice is a good idea, but its practice comes with an unfortunate consequence.  The business produces a ton of waste paper.  How many single slices of pizza make short, five minute journeys inside of little, custom slice boxes each day?  I hate to estimate that quantity—it's a big number—but this is not an exhortation to slice shops everywhere.  I am complicit in the paper waste, too.  I have been house sitting in Amherst, and eating two pizza slice meals each day.  Tonight, when the cashier offered me a second free slice (a generous business practice), I dropped my plans to take out my slice on a paper plate and opted for the box.  One paper plate is a little small for two big slices.  But still...

  
I don't know a ton about recycling, but I do know that the recycling program in my city has started accepting modestly greasy old pizza boxes.  This is a good change.  It used to be that you got one pepperoni grease stain on your pizza box and that was it for that box.  It was headed to the trash can for sure.  Now at least the cautious consumer can mind how greasy the box is and attempt a recycle.  I am serious about this.  I hate the fact that something as beautiful as pizza is tied up with something as problematic as unnecessary waste.  If I was an enterprising businessman, I would come up with the solution and make bank.  I hope someone is hard at work on it.  There is a ton of fairly honest money to be made from solving the excess paper waste problem of the pizza industry. This problem has been on my mind for eight years.  How many paper boxes have I chucked in the interim?  

This pet rant of mine started at Penny's Pizza on the corner of Ashland and Jackson in Chicago, when, one night I showed up to work and found a several cases of low-quality promotional pizza boxes, shrink-wrapped in plastic, waiting for me on the prep table in the back room.  I think they were Comcast pizza boxes.  Someone at Comcast had the bold and bright idea that Comcast could get more customers by paying some pizza box printer to spangle the Comcast logo upon God knows how many cases of flimsy pizza boxes and then ship the "free boxes" at random to pizza shops everywhere; the assumption being that the pizza shop owners would jump for joy upon receiving free paper products and would happily send out their pizzas in boxes with the Comcast logo on them instead of in boxes with their own logo.  But at Penny's, we had our own boxes—they said "Penny's" on them—and so all of the Comcast boxes went into the trash—or the recycling—it makes little difference.  This, unfortunately, is how business often works.  This is the dominant paradigm.  Waste is factored into profit.  Comcast paid someone to carry out that misguided pizza box scheme, and the beauty of pizza had been besmirched.  But there is hope.  How could pizza not inspire hope?

   
I don't put my faith in product-based solutions—systemic solutions are the solutions we most need—otherwise it's Band-Aids on broken bones—but still I think that a product-based solution to the pizza industry paper waste problem is a solution worth pursuing.  If you know any enterprising young businessmen or businesswomen, please send them in my direction.  I will only charge them a modest consultancy fee of ten million dollars or enough money to pay off my student loans and put a down payment on a small farm somewhere, whichever sum is less. 

Linguine with Garlic Oil, Corporate Greed

If you don't want garlic breath to blow at you through the internet, you should close this tab now and move onto another, safer website.  Don't choose porn.  Overexposure to internet porn will turn your genitals into apricots, old popcorn, and wet celebrity rags.  You would be better off choosing something with cats.  Overexposure to internet cats has only been shown to make test subjects unbearably adorable and, in some rare cases, socially inept.  On the other hand, if you are stimulated by self-absorbed a-holes who take pictures of themselves stuffing their faces with linguine in garlic oil, perhaps you have found the right place after all.  If you detect that my attitude is jacked up right now, don't run and pin a medal onto yourself for being an astute reader.  This is a giant front.  What I write on here bears only the skimpiest relationship to reality.  Did I stuff my face with the most perfect pasta dinner on the planet?  Oh, yeah, I did.  And did it look just like this?  You bet it did.  But remember—I was hamming it up for the camera.  Non-fiction is a fiction too.

I teach freshman composition on the internet, and I also attract cops to my house once in a blue moon.  To make matters worse, I publicly write about it.  A concerned reader wrote me the other day and mentioned that I might exercise some professional decorum, re: writing about cops on my porch.  I appreciated her concern and replied like so: I don't get paid enough to bother about censoring myself on this blog.  I am not complaining about my pay, folks.  I am merely suggesting that one would need to pay me a hell of a lot of money before I would compromise my public self.  Furthermore, I am not even slightly interested in working for any employer who would turn down—or fire—a potential candidate for blogging with too much spunk.  It requires a small-minded person to say, Oh, I don't know about him.  He takes pictures of himself slurping spaghetti and publishes them on the internet!  Sounds far-fetched but there are people out there who think like that.  One time a co-worker scolded me because I tied a satchel of pizza to my belt—i.e. my lunch—while moving the company from one office to another.  He said it was not professional to have pizza hanging from my belt.  I said, Oh, come on, Russ!  But I digress.  Somewhat.    

I have been worried about money and jobs lately.  Not so worried that I can't still enjoy myself on a Friday night—it's Friday night right now—but worried enough to stop and think about how I present myself publicly.  Do I like like a lunatic?  A mad person?  Is my hairstyle unbecoming?  Would you want me to baby sit your kid?  Would you want this mug to do your books?  I would probably cook your books and pocket the difference.  I condone crime, and I think war is commendable.  I love bloodshed.  I am dishonest and I push old people onto the street.  If I had my way, I would completely re-design the entire world and force feed linguine with garlic oil to everyone.  If someone uttered a peep through a mouthful of food about the garlic being too strong, I would say, Shut up—there were starving people in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and the sub-continent of India before I took power.  Then, if they continued to moan about the pasta, I would lash them with a wet noodle the size of Tennessee.  I would do this because I am a ruthless person with no respect for anyone.  If you hired me to work in your office, I would probably vandalize the bathroom the first time I needed to take a sh**.  Don't I look like I would?

OK, rant done.  Let's talk some pasta!  I love linguine with garlic oil.  Love it more than casual sexual encounters and recreational drug use in dark alleys, both of which I do at every opportunity, and often times while main-lining cheap rum.  What this amounts to is a total and passionate love for linguine with garlic oil.  If I could have children by it, I would.  I would bang it for a fortnight straight and bury it deep.  If linguine had a condo with wall-to-wall carpet, I would vacuum its carpet with my nose.  Linguine with garlic oil is the world's greatest noodle dish.  It cooks up in a snap.  You want to cook it up in a snap?  Did you just say you wanted to cook it up in a snap?  You're in luck!  You can read how below the photograph of the degenerate, hate-ball.  

LINGUINE WITH GARLIC OIL

1) Peel about four, five, six cloves of garlic and give them a good whack with your knife; then dump them into some olive oil (about 3/4ths cup per pound of pasta) and heat the oil on a low flame for ten or twenty minutes.  DO NOT LET THE GARLIC BURN.  IF IT STARTS BURNING, TAKE IT OFF THE HEAT.  BURNED GARLIC IS BITTER.

2) Cook your pasta al dente.  Don't f**k that up.  And put A LOT OF SALT INTO THE WATER.  Your pasta will not be overly salty.  

3) Drain your pasta and give it a quick rinse in cold water, then return it to the pot.  Rinsing it gets some of the starch off.  

4) Finally, toss the pasta with all of the oil.  If it seems like a ton of oil, it is.  That's how it should be.  If you want to sprinkle some extra salt onto your noodles as you go, do it, but be careful.  

5) Finally finally, hit your pasta with some Parmesan cheese and some parsley.  I also like to hit it with some "cock sauce"—a.k.a "rooster sauce"—a.k.a. Sriracha.  I do this because FUCK CORPORATE GREED.     

New Year

It's a new year.  Probably fewer than two hours into it I scolded the police officer who thought he had some business on my front porch.  I'd ducked into my bedroom to take a quiet moment when a knock came on my door, Hey Jono, there are some cops on your porch.  Cops?  On my porch?  I immediately thought of my brother and my dad.  What would they do?  I went out in my suit and gold watch and asked the officer what business he had being on my front porch.  My friend was standing beside me in a dapper, all-white suit.  The cop pointed down at the spent fireworks he had gathered from the street and piled on my front steps.  He told me they were illegal.  He told me he would search my house for the rest of them.  I told him he had no business on my porch or searching my house.  A friend peeked out the window.  He said it looked like we had some underage drinking going on.  Everyone here is thirty, I said.  Please stop yelling at me, I said.  He was disrespecting me on my own front porch, only two hours into the new year, and I did not appreciate being yelled at.  Then four more squad cars rolled up with their lights flashing.  The cop I was dealing with was much younger than me.  He had something to prove.  Did he think he would get somewhere in the force by busting someone for fireworks?  I said, Just take them and leave.  There was a fair amount of unspent fireworks in a bag.  He wanted to know who had brought them.  No way, buster.  Not at my tamale party.  Oh right, the tamales.  We ate sixty-five of the seventy total tamales. The red chili sauce came out beautifully, too.  The house was really rocking when the police showed up.  Mayhem on the dance floor.  The old floorboards took the beating beautifully.  I love this house.  It can get through anything unscathed.  

    
   

Grapefruit vs. Pomegranate, Generous Fruits, Grapefruit Juice

I was a party recently, hanging out with some old friends from home, when the pomegranate came up.  We were munching on tacos, passing around the circa 1980s taco sauce, when I said something like, "The avocado is a totally asinine food."  Statements like that often come out of my mouth.  Last year I spent the better part of six months insisting that the avocado did not warrant its popularity, that it was flavorless and that the droves who adored it adored it for no other reason than its mysterious color, much as some birds are transfixed by shiny objects.  "What do you think about the pomegranate?" my friend asked.  "The pomegranate is a completely ridiculous food," another friend said.  "It basically just shoots red wine everywhere."  If I hadn't been clutching my taco, I would have applauded him.  I don't mean to turn the pomegranate into my new whipping boy, but I do think that there are other fruits out there who reward your effort to get at them a lot more handsomely than the pomegranate does. The pomegranate is basically just a cluster of stones with a tiny sack of fruit around each stone.  The grapefruit is a much more generous fruit.

                 
I like this idea of a generous fruit—what's a generous fruit and what's not?  Some of the things we eat avail themselves to us so reluctantly.  Have you ever purchased a whole artichoke?  The artichoke is basically a giant thistle, and the ratio of edible food to the amount of labor required to get that food is not one you would take to Vegas if you didn't want to loose all of your money.  But still, we eat them.  They are completely stingy with their flesh, but we persist.  And perhaps this is why we persist.  The over-difficult effort to get the choke makes the choke more delicious.  It's like courtship.  You fan out all of your most exciting feathers and when the fruit finally yields it yields in gleeful spades.  I am terribly mixing metaphors here, but I think the same can be said about the pomegranate, not that it mixes metaphors, but that the glee of its fruit comes in part from our effort to get at that fruit.  Its little fruit-encased stones are like rubies beneath the rubble of a demolished airport.  What does this say about the grapefruit?  That the grapefruit is promiscuous?  That it's easy?  That the grapefruit gives up its succulent abundance for little more than a squeeze?  Perhaps it does, but I love the grapefruit.  The grapefruit gives so much so easily.

                 
I don't need to point out how glistening and perfect a grapefruit can be in the morning sun.  Instead I want to encourage you to seize the day.  Seize the season, I should say, because it's grapefruit season, and it's only during grapefruit season that it makes economic sense to squeeze a bagful of fresh grapefruits in your kitchen.  I'm talking about grapefruit juice.  The holidays come with their holiday parties, and holiday parties sometimes come with their holiday hangovers, but a hard morning can be softened by a sweet and bitter glass of grapefruit juice.  If you don't have a juicer, don't run out and buy one.  It's just as easy (and almost as effective) to squeeze them by hand over a pot.  Both methods work, but one, I think, is sexier than the other.  Get your hands on those grapefruits and give them a good squeeze.  Wring them out good and get some of the juice on your hands.  Lick the juice off your hands etc.  Just as before, at least half the pleasure is the quest for the pleasure.  Your glass of grapefruit juice will be more delicious for your labor.  Make two glasses, and share one with someone you love.