Once a year leftover turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing hog up precious fridge real estate and combined throw an enormous and deep shadow onto every kind of sandwich but one, the turkey Manhattan. What? You don't know what a turkey Manhattan is? You've been living under a panini? It's been raining around your meatball sub? You've had your ear buds in for the last ten years, listening to the Dixie Chicks ad nauseum? Manhattan is only another word for open-faced sandwich, and the turkey Manhattan is the king of Manhattans. No sandwich compares to the heavily buttered slice of cheap white bread crowned by a pile of Thanksgiving leftovers that is the turkey Manhattan. I'm dead serious about this. The king of sandwiches lies flat upon its back. Here's one, glorious turkey Manhattan—yesterday's—the soft, mid-day light gleaming upon a little chunk of celery.
A lot of people would probably try to tell you that this sandwich could be bested by swapping out the cheap white bread for some fancy-pants slice of 59-grain this or that, but I disagree. I am rigidly traditional, and tradition demands the worst bread on the planet. The bread is the foundation of the sandwich. One doesn't go about swapping out foundations if one wants his house to stand. The turkey Manhattan is not a house, but I am firm in my conviction, especially when there is an entire loaf of this junk to be plowed through.
Once a year this bread comes home, the Prodigal Son of White Bread. What a dream! It's unsliced and of the lowest quality. I buy it for pure comedy value. It cracks me up. You could stuff a couch with it. In this rich country, this poor bread barely qualifies as food anymore, and for 360 days each year it hides itself. This, of course, is giving agency to a loaf of foam, but how boring would it be to say that the white bread manufacturers make this seasonal product? This bread pops onto the supermarket shelves, enters a million turkeys that have been raised in a manner that will make your stomach turn, and then it disappears again, gone for another year, just like me. I go home once a year to see my family—for Christmas—and then I leave again. I don't go home for Thanksgiving—I miss home on Thanksgiving. To respect my own nostalgia, I do not mess with the white bread tradition. Cheap white bread gives me comfort. I could use it for a pillow.
I lost my glasses at some point last night. Late. And I'm thankful for that. (You have no idea.) And I found them without too much trouble this morning. I'm thankful for that, too. Ray Charles? What is he thankful for? I don't mean to joke about glasses. Ray is on the turntable now, spinning deliciously. The record is called—lemme go find it—The Early Ray Charles. It was beat up when I bought it, probably ten years ago in Indiana. I paid $4.99 for it, which was a lot back then, and I probably balked at the price. I still balk at $4.99. I don't, however, balk at hosting Thanksgiving dinner for my friends. I feel remarkable this morning—and the house is not dirty either. To think I started yesterday on a melancholy foot! The sadness of the holidays, etc—but how can you be sad around a rutabaga?
The thing about rutabagas is that they're always covered in heinous wax. Why? Do they need to keep for so long? This waxing of rutabagas is not cool. If I was a root vegetable, I would not want to be waxed. I would have my own skin, and it would be good skin. It's like shrink-wrapped potatoes! Have you ever seen those? Have you ever understood the motivation to encase a thing in plastic? A living, breathing thing? I'm not making a total joke here. A root vegetable is its own storage organ. It is a food supply. I think the plant knows how to look after its own food source—but we think we know better, and so we wax them, but I've never enjoyed the wax on a rutabaga, and I've always wanted a naked one. Sometimes you don't know how much you love an un-waxed rutabaga until you peel it. I planted three of them last summer, a personal first, so that I could eat them on Thanksgiving. My own rutabagas, sans wax. What a delight. It doesn't matter that I screwed up the rutabaga mash. How could it matter with so much butter around?
Butter, naturally, means friends, but part of the pleasure of hosting is dipping away from the hubbub to do some dishes. Hosting, of course, is not as relaxing as being hosted; but if you stack the rewards side by side, there is no comparison. I love to hear my friends enjoying themselves in the adjoining room while I clear plates and towel dry pots, and if a couple friends remain for late night conversation after I've thrown off my host badge and relaxed, then that, my friends, is glory. That's bonus. This world is full of bonuses if you are open to them. Last night I was feeling so good, I threw a leaf of spinach onto the floor, knowing it would dry up and find its way into the dust pan one day. It was a triumph, one of the world's small but many triumphs, and small triumphs are what I grope for nowadays. Small triumphs and my black t-shirt on bright mornings when I've forgotten to ratchet down the mini blinds. I am up far earlier than I should be, and I feel ecstatic about that.
This blog has really turned into a diary! (Ah, bless.) But I have little else to write about. I could mention that I stand with the 99%, and not half-heartedly either, but you already know that. Instead I'm going to write about these bowls. They're great. I wish they were mine. I am borrowing them indefinitely. They can go in the oven. There is no home oven that is too hot for these pots. They're rugged pots and you don't have to walk on eggshells around them. They can take a tumble and be no worse for wear. I don't look down on people who have cheap, Chinese plates from CB2 or whatever—I have some myself. In fact, I knocked a small saucer off a table last night and it could not withstand the 18 inch drop. Busted into about twenty-five pieces. Not so with a sturdy pot. You can handle a sturdy pot with care and confidence. The world would definitely be a stronger place if there were more strong bowls around. I am totally convicted about that. I'm not hating on our world. I'm only saying. I'm also shying away from showing my friends that were seated around this table last night. Instead, here's me with the pumpkin lantern I made to spruce the place up and to match how I felt about my guests. I am particularly thankful for the friend who took this picture. What a guy. Which isn't to say I'm not thankful for everyone else who came...
How could I be thankless when a turkey like this one got plunked down on my stove? I have never seen such an art of turkey.
This turkey got its bones removed, got reshaped into a coil, stuffed, tied and roasted. The amount of food on the Thanksgiving table is often all the words we need. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and what pudding it can be sometimes. Thanks all. Thanks.
I'm putting my feet up, forgetting all about the chairs. The chairs are behind me now. They're done and recovered. Recovered is the word I've been looking for. I've been obsessed by these chairs and coming up with one-hundred-and-one reasons why. But it's totally obvious now: the chairs are recovered. They're cured. They're not lonely anymore. They're not sick anymore. They've been saved. They would have gone into the dump, but now they are beautiful again. They are about moving on in this life. Moving on is the most beautiful sorrow, but a good chair can see you through it. These chairs are really good. Here's me, sitting in my grandmother's old wooden chair, my feet up on the desk, looking at a picture of a chair I refurbished that I have not found the nerve to sit on yet. I have too many chairs on the mind. A chair is a thing you can think about forever.
But the chairs really did come out nicely. I have mixed feelings about a couple of them—one has already become the official ugly duckling—and the other one I just can't understand. It's the other one that I'm talking about here. My mind boggles over this chair. Do I like this chair? Do I dislike this chair? Do I even want to sit on this chair? It's a hideous chair. Still, though, it charms me. Here it is, the charmer.
This chair is the way this chair is for a good reason. In the end there was not quite enough of the blue paisley fabric to cover the seat. We'd prioritized covering the backs first. (Good advice.) The backs were in terrible shape, had been totally destroyed by a cat, foam bulging out of them like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium smoke blowing out of the crater hole in Mt. Vesuvius. These chairs were wasted. But getting back on track, it's the fact that this chair was the last one in the soup line that endears it so much to me. When this chair got to the pot, there were no more beans. So it had rice. With butter. Which was not too shabby, the chair's attitude was good. But here is the chair that the chair judges would choose:
There are actually two of these—in the sense that identical twins are two. It's hard to tell them apart unless you really know them, which you don't. So here's just one of them. I think the reason the judges would choose this model is obvious enough. This model just feels better. It feels more right than the others. But this is all so totally subjective, which is why these chairs beguile me. The fabric and the frame are a better match here. Everywhere I turn with these damn chairs, I find another convenient metaphor for togetherness and separation. I'm throwing all my questions onto these chairs—blah blah blah. Here's the perplexing chair.
I just took a piss, and I thought to myself, "break-up chairs." It was just some words that flashed through my head while I peed. "That'd be a good status update," I said to myself, peeing, but then I sat I back down at my desk and realized that it would not be a good status update, that I wanted to think about it more. "Would people like 'break-up chairs,'" I thought, poking around in the refrigerator. "Would people understand what I mean," I thought, thinking about sweeping the floor again. "People, Jono, are probably watching Youtube." I told myself this and decided against updating my status. But I have gone astray here. My point was that I cannot understand this chair. I look at this chair and I cannot understand it. I don't really like it this chair. This chair seems so alien and so cool to me. There are cheerful spots and question marks on it. And those are nice. "You can look forward to cheerful spots and questions marks." I tell myself this every morning. Most of them anyway.
It's been a day of staples, pliers, and blood blisters. A day of pocket knives, small mishaps, and irritating little screw-ups. It's also been a day of intentionally setting fabric on fire. Who doesn't love a day of intentional fabric burning?
I spent about an hour this morning, removing all the old seat covers. Then I went about my business, handing out grades to on-line students, sending text messages, and surfing the internet for images of the red-bearded cop who is now infamous for pepper spraying students and who has been photo-shopped into a dozen famous paintings, pepper spraying beauty. Spray your heart out, man. Your family is forever shamed. Anyway, eventually I got back around to finishing these chairs. If you are wondering about the burn holes, here's the scoop: on the bottom of the back of each chair there are three bolt holes into which go three big bolts. To affix the seats to the backs, the bolts must pass through the fabric. Here's a finished chair.
But about that cop who pepper sprayed those college students: I have mixed feelings about him. That photograph will be a mar on his soul forever. About that I feel badly. I mean, I wouldn't want a permanent mar on my soul. And what about his children? Does he have children? I hope he doesn't. No one wants an infamous asshole for a dad. Naturally, I dislike the man; I dislike him without even knowing him. The tide of public unrest swept me up and there you have it: negative feelings toward a man I don't even know. What I do know is that that man did not spend his Sunday reupholstering a chair. Poor confused man. Poor hate-filled man. You can never sit in my chair. You are unwanted here.
We reached the summit of the mountain around 6 P.M. In the valley below, four completely reupholstered, completely reassembled chairs stood among the wildflowers and caught the dying light. I pulled out my field glasses and trained them on the chairs. They were better than we'd imagined, crisp and alluring, and unlike any chairs on the planet. Lonely Planet had sold us on this lonely valley with its diminishing inhabitants and the towering, bizarre furniture that festoons its central green, but you never know with travel books. Sometimes the destination is not all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes imagination is sweeter than its result. We hiked for days with our gear in tow, but plunking our asses down on those chairs would not be a pleasure we'd know today. We eyed our rations: would the carnitas hold out for another week? And what about our anti-Giardia tablets and our powdered Gatorade? Would they hold out? They will hold out. It must be that way.
But enough of the hiker metaphor! This is one of the "bags" as we called them. Hannah sewed four bags today and batted four foam slips. Last week, when I was selecting the fabrics with Ehu, I told her that it would be a shame to spend the money on the fabrics if the workmanship was not up to par. Ehu grinned and rolled her eyes to remind me whom I'd recruited to do the brunt of the sewing. And what sewing! And what teamwork! The chairs are truly remarkable. That Hannah can sew with the best of them. If you have ever deconstructed a designer Italian chair and then reconstructed it, you will know that there is a ton of story in a chair. You will also know that there is a ton of foam. I got hosed on the foam. Foam, my friends, is more costly than fabric! Foam! Who'd have thunk it? Foam is just grocery bags in another form, and the world is littered with grocery bags. Sadly, the world is not littered with craftsmanship and teamwork. It is also not littered with stellar chairs. It's lightly dusted with awesome chairs, but most of them are sequestered among the homes of the ultra rich. The 1% if you will. But not here. As Hannah said when I misheard her, early in the day, and accidentally brought her a second glass of water: "That's okay; I am now rich with water." And so I am now rich with chairs. Here's Hannah doing her handiwork.
The sewing machine was manufactured by a company that manufactures chainsaws. The model is called the Viking. I don't know what kind of chairs Vikings sat their brutal asses upon, and I don't care. What astounds me is that for the price of an email, a pork taco lunch, and a box of dilly beans, shallots, rutabagas and tomato sauce, my vision and my need got fulfilled. I badly needed these chairs to happen, but they could not have happened without Hannah's skill—and her chainsaw sewing machine. But I should give myself some credit here: these chairs could not have happened without me either. I exist in this world, and it wasn't like I sat around on my duff all day doing jack shit. Reassembling the chairs proved trickier than one would have thought, and so Hannah sewed while I trouble shot. I sewed, too, but I sewed interior stuff, stuff that could be crude and hidden. It took two people—no, it took a lot people to make these chairs happen. It also took a brutal cat (now de-clawed) and some Italian women who burned holes into the original upholstery through which hidden bolts could be driven to affix the backs to the seats. Just like you and me, hidden bolts affix our spines to our asses. Here are the finished backs waiting for their seats.
I will recover the seats alone and alone reassemble the chairs. But will I be alone when the chairs are complete? Hell no. I will gather my closest friends around this table, and we will sit in this splendid valley, upon these radical chairs, and we will eat and drink our fill, and no bankers will be richer than us.
It has been reported to me, dear readers, that I'm a bona fide curmudgeon. I am thereby bound to spend my life alone, a cantankerous, bad-tempered man braising his curmudgeonly pork. A licensed therapist perused what I thought were the stately and often hilarious accounts of lentil soup and hot dogs, McDonald's Farm, A Conversation with Obama and his kids, basically all the sundry posts here at Oilchanges, and declared me a big fat curmudgeon. How did that make me feel? Defensive. To the messenger of the news I retorted: "I will accept curmudgeonly but not curmudgeon." I stand by that statement. Have you ever been around me? I can definitely be curmudgeonly. Make no bones about it, this anti-food blog food blogger can demonstrate sweeping arias of curmudgeonliness at the drop of a Fruit Loop or a hat. He can also braise the hell out of pork butt.
After about two hours of braising, the carnitas are coming along splendidly. One of the most absolutely annoying things about being a cantankerous blogger is the poor quality of indoor lighting. I often do not publish posts about dinner because I live in dastardly New England where half of the year we are denied sun on more than half of the days. I take one photograph of my soup under a 60 watt G.E. bulb and become monstrously grumpy, pounding my fist onto the table and stomping around the dining room. I am only happy when there is natural sunlight on my face, and when there is no sun, watch out! I become the Mount Everest of surliness and bad temper. I once threw a taco at someone for winking at me. Had it been a sunny day, however, I would have been most genial, probably offering up extensive, full-body massages and undying loyalty. Oh well. Being a curmudgeon sucks. I am planning on socializing in public this evening, and I expect to jab my sharp elbow unnecessarily into many kidneys. I'm a real shit head. Look at this beautiful meat!
That, my dears, is going to become pork tacos tomorrow afternoon. The genius of reupholstering is coming down to help me out with those chairs (from the previous post), and so I ran errands all afternoon, hunting down foam padding, upholstery thread, cinnamon sticks, and 4 lbs. of pork shoulder (AKA butt) with which I plan to say "thank you." Carnitas will make your kitchen smell like Christmas, which to me, of course, smells like Hell.
This is how you make carnitas:
1) Get yourself a big hunk of pork shoulder (about four or five pounds of it). Cut that pork shoulder into big chunks, about 5" chunks. Don't worry about perfection, just cut the pork into big chunks. They will not all be the same size. It doesn't really matter.
2) In a big oven-safe pot (iron pots are the best), pour in about 2 TBS of oil, and crank up the heat. If you cannot brown all the chunks at once, brown them in stages. You want to really caramelize the heck out of the pork, getting good crispy color on it.
3) Once all the pork chunks are browned, remove them and deglaze the pot by pouring about half a cup (or more) of water in it. Scrape up all the good brown bits, then return the pork to the pot along with enough water to almost cover the pork.
4) Add two bay leaves, three cloves of garlic (sliced thinly), one cinnamon stick, one teaspoon of chili powder, another teaspoon of a different kind of chili powder*, some cracked black pepper, and about a quarter teaspoon of ground cumin.
5) Pop this baby into a three hundred and fifty (350) degree oven, no lid, and braise for 3.5 hours, turning the chunks of pork periodically (about every half hour), and adding more water as needed.
Finally) shred the pork and cook it in another pan until it gets a bit crispy. Then, stuff tacos.
I have become obsessed with a reupholstering project. Long story short: I acquired four expensive ($250 each) Italian dining room chairs—more or less through a break-up. They are sturdy, excellent chairs with chromium-plated metal frames. They're structurally brilliant with elegant lines—and they're cat wasted. Cat's don't know a five dollar scratch pad from a two hundred and fifty dollar designer chair. Such is what happens when scratching posts don't match your decor. There is more to this.
Today the svelte Ehu accompanied me on a fabric hunting trip. "Hunting" is the right AND the wrong word to use here: right because it's so right, and wrong because we didn't do any hunting. We had one destination and we went there in a roundabout way. It's not like we waited in a tree-stand all night for a six-point buck. It was more like, "Six-point buck on a shelf in Turner's Falls! Go there with your rifle and shoot it down." And so I aimed my wallet at the bottom two sheets of fabric pictured above. I'd had my wallet pointed at some other fabrics, but Ehu rolled her eyes way back into her head and I conceded rapidly. (Who wants to shoot down a garden gnome?) Ah, but the trophy game is still amiss: Why has this become a do-or-die reupholstering project? The fabrics, again, from a slightly different angle.
The answer is that I have allowed this reupholstering project to assume tantamount symbolic gravity. I cannot replace these chairs with a credit card. I simply cannot bank-roll new furniture—sorry—but I can call upon my own resources (my friends), and for the price of one teardrop my vision can produce four stunningly original dining room chairs such as cannot be purchased in any catalog in our solar system ever. These chairs are cast-offs from the same place I am cast off from. We are kindred space travelers. My future is on a fucking chair.
I received my own social fabric! Two social fabrics now flap around in the Pioneer valley. There could be hundreds more of them. I have no idea. The words I need to talk about the social fabric are just beyond the little black keys through which I attempt to convert my electro-chemical brain impulses into meaning, but meaning is something that is not made alone in your bedroom, but rather is made when two or more more people congregate around a thing and say, "I agree, that is a social fabric." But it could be anything. It doesn't need to be a gorgeous sheet of Finnish fabric. It could be a Waring blender. A book of poetry that has come in and out of fashion for two-hundred and fifty years could be a social fabric. Meaning is something that changes as the circumstances that surround an object change. What does a piece of fabric mean to the rain or the rain to a piece of fabric? Here's mine, spread out in the sun.
"Mine" somehow seems wrong, though. The social fabric is not mine or yours, not when properly displayed and shared. When it's folded up and tucked into a drawer, it's only a piece of fabric, a piece of fabric that's about as social as the Mad Honeymooner in Marriage, who lives under the falls, "a scourge of bigamy, a saint of divorce." But when that fabric unfurls before the public eye, a beautiful curio for the weather to have its way with, then that fabric becomes something for men and women to reflect upon, to invest with ideas and meanings. It's like a national flag that represents no nation but the nation of community. There is no president standing behind it, thumping on a huge pork-barreled bill. On the contrary: when I set this social fabric out in the garden this morning, its first respondent was not even human!
Show me the congress that represents this grasshopper. Show me the congress that represents the racoons who forage around the skirt of a land-fill. Show me the congress that represents the fish who swim in the rivers that receive the run-off from the massive, chemical-input heavy farms where mountains of inedible corn are grown to be turned into the million-and-one unhealthy foods that dominate our supermarkets. RANT OVER. To refresh your memory, here's the social fabric that I wrote about on October 20th. Cheers. Peace. Etc.
People are abusing the word "occupy" these days, posting ridiculous pictures on facebook with captions that say things like, "Occupy the Gingerbread Man," or "Occupy My Empty Coffee Mug." Those people should stop doing that. Moving on now: lentil soup. My grandmother put chopped up hot dogs in hers. My mother did the same. Hot dogs and a splash of vinegar. When I learned how to make lentil soup I was a pretentious, budding chef, a purist of sorts, a food snob, and I was also responsible for feeding a small household of vegetarians, so it was goodbye hot dogs, hello straight-up lentil soup sans dogs. Well, times have changed since then, in my life and in our national life, and hot dogs have returned to my soup pot. I love the way they bloat when you cook them. I also love the way they augment the color scheme.
This is an interesting photograph to me because not every photograph shows you what cooked lentils look like in shadow and in full sun. Sometimes half the pleasure of eating really is in the eye. There is mystery in a good, chunky soup. Look at the way that one little lentil clings to that central piece of wiener! And those potatoes! Do you not absolutely love the way their rounded corners emerge from below the murky surface of the soup? And what about those bias-cut hot dogs? There may still be a thin slice of pretension in me after all. It's absolutely unnecessary to cut your dogs on the bias, unnecessary but also no more difficult than cutting them straight. It's one of those win-win situations: you get a more visually stunning chunk of hot dog without any extra effort. I would never julienne a hot dog—well, actually, I think that would be hilarious, and if the appropriate situation ever presents itself, I just may do that. It would be a scream to quarter a hot dog lengthwise.
As always, if you want to know how to make this lentil soup, you should email me. Or you can leave a comment with your email, requesting the recipe. Cheers. Happy souping.
Being broke and underemployed is good for two things: slow braised meat and ingenuity. You have plenty of time on your hands, but not much dough in your wallet. You also want beef stew because it's beef stew season. You want to make beef stew but you don't want to run out to purchase an oven-safe lid knob. What do you do? You run outside and grab a small hunk of wood. Then you run inside and drill a hole into the wood. Make sure you remove the bark from the hunk of wood. You can do it with a pocket knife. Then you want to oil the wood. If you have wood oil, great. If you don't, use canola oil or something. Once your wood is all oily, fashion the wood to the pot lid. Voilà. You now have an oven-safe pot lid knob. The lid knob doesn't have to look pretty at all. You only need to be able to hold it. Pretty is for when you have more time.
End of "Tiny Wood Note."
It turns out that I do have some pictures of downed trees. I had them all along. There are hundreds of downed trees in my phone. When the power is down and the cell service is down too, phones become little, portable light sources, and cameras. I confess that I was among those people who looked upon the wreckage from the storm with an enterprising eye. The day after the power went down was a beautiful day—the sky was blue, the air was warm—and it was difficult not to see opportunity in all the downed trees, an opportunity for work and an opportunity for garden stakes. New England is abundantly littered with garden stakes. You merely need to see them among all the piles of downed branches.
Yesterday I put my hand-saw into my car and headed into Hadley, Massachusetts, to forage for garden stakes. Like many New England towns, Hadley has enormous swaths of commons, town commons. Unlike some other towns, however, Hadley will haul off your downed branches for nothing. The result is that the commons are covered in branches and limbs that the residents who live near the commons have dragged there. I could hear chainsaws running everywhere as I picked through the piles for garden stakes. Perhaps I should have been thinking about the people who suffered real damages as I foraged for stakes. I am sure that many basements flooded when sump pumps everywhere went down with the power, and I'm sure that more than one roof took a severe beating, but these things were not on my mind. I had cast my mind into the future. I was picturing the spring that will follow this winter into which we've barely dipped a toe. I had garden stakes on the brain...
and on the roof of my car. If you know me well, you know that there are few things I love more than lashing items down to the roof of my car. I never go anywhere without rope.
