October 23, 2017
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The Comfort Food Diner: Roasted Green Tomatoes

On the weekend, I picked the remaining tomatoes from the 5 plants we have growing in containers up front. There are quite a few of them. All the plants decided to generate plenty more fruit last month. Most of these tomatoes are unripe, but I’m not concerned about that because I know a secret. I know that roasted green tomatoes are fantastically  delicious.IMG_7125.jpg

Tomorrow I’m going to cut them up, toss them with a bit of oil, salt and pepper, and roast them thoroughly. My plan is to have some for a pasta dinner and the rest to freeze in single-use containers for later. They’re excellent not just for pasta but also for cooking all kinds of things. They pack a lot of flavour. I still have some oregano growing the garden, so I might chop in some of that. There are no rules that say you can’t roast up a couple red peppers or some jalapenos or some garlic or an onion or two while you’re at it. I’m going to keep it simple for flexibility – I can enrich the flavour any way I want when I use them later.

October 22, 2017
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Running by Cara Hoffman

I just finished reading an excellent novel called Running, written by Cara Hoffman. The novel is set in Athens in the 80s where Bridey and a couple she befriends, Milo and Jasper (all in their late teens), are sharing a room in a shitty hotel in exchange for “running” – riding trains into Athens trying to convince marginal tourists that they too should stay at the Olympos.

To people in the so-called “normal world”, the workaday world, the tourist world, the runners are lost people. Living for the moment, drunk much of the time, they are outsiders. Milo is a poet, and we learn along the way he is a good one. Their relationships are complex, brutal, subtle, strange, tender. All of the above.

Hoffman drew me into her story from the first few pages. I loved the pace of the novel, its cadence, as she weaved around in time. I empathized with the characters and the paths they chose for themselves but at the same time  was saddened and frustrated by their dark and precarious lives.

Running is both a sad and beautiful work. I could not put it down. I feel as if I know the characters, and maybe along the way I’ve known people whose lives echo the lives of Bridey, Milo and Jasper in some way. It is these characters and their relationships with one another which drive this novel. The story is simple enough.

Running is the best novel I’ve read this year. Highly recommended.

 

October 21, 2017
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The Recipe Vault #6: Chicken and Dumplings

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For those who haven’t seen the earlier installments in this series, it’s all about an enormous collection of my mom’s recipes, which made its way to me after her death, many years ago now. This collection, mostly hand-written, has been sitting on some shelves waiting for someone to come along and do something with them.  I think Mom enjoyed collecting recipes as much as she enjoyed cooking them, and she had hoped to one day assemble them into a massive cookbook.

Chicken and dumplings is comfort food with a capital C in my mind. The recipe looks like it should be very tasty, although I’m going to change a few several things when I make some for dinner tonight. The recipe calls for 1 chicken cut in pieces. I think back in the day, starting with a whole chicken was the normal way to go. Today, I’m more likely to buy a package of 4 chicken thighs rather than use a whole chicken (and that’s exactly what I did, on the way home from tai chi class). I am going to use thighs with the bone in, although I’m sure you could add pretty much any chicken and this would be a delicious meal. One of the reasons I won’t use a whole chicken is that Tuffy P doesn’t eat poultry so I’ll be making chicken and dumplings for just me, enough for perhaps a dinner and a couple lunches. No need to go overboard.

Shortening? I don’t normally use shortening, so I’ll substitute a wee bit of vegetable oil. Also, I think potatoes are not really necessary if you’re going to have dumplings, are they? I suppose they would thicken things up a bit, but if I dredge my chicken in a bit of flour before frying, that should work too. Instead, I’ll use some shiitake mushrooms because I love shiitakes with chicken. I’ll also check out the depths of the fridge and see what veggies are hiding in there and use up some of those. Some carrots would be good. Maybe some frozen peas. Chopped up celery too. I also have a couple jalapenos in the kitchen so I’ll chop one up and add it in with the onions and other veggies. I have some home-made veggie stock in the freezer so I’ll include it instead of just water.

Looking through the recipe, I see Mom only used salt and pepper for seasoning. That’s ok but I likely won’t be able to resist a clove of garlic and maybe (ok, definitely) some herbs de Provence to add aroma and body. It’s looking like I’m going to change a lot from the original recipe for my own dinner, but I’ll likely keep the dumplings exactly as described.  Of course I’ve never been too good at exactly following recipes anyway.

Dumplings are the great extender, aren’t they? They’re also delicious. I think most cultures have some kind of dumplings and they’re all good, whether they’re steamed or boiled or served in soup of stew or fried up like pot-stickers, or boiled and fried they way a lot of people make pierogies. Looking forward to dinner.

 

October 20, 2017
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Police!

We were in dreamland, way down in deep sleep when the doorbell rang. It was followed by a loud, insistent knock. I staggered out of bed pulled on a bathrobe and started down the stairs. Whoever was outside had a flashlight and was shining it all around. Halfway down the stairs I heard, POLICE.

Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. I was still half asleep. The dogs were hiding in the kitchen. They wanted no part of this action. I opened the door.

Do you have a small girls bike on your lawn?

No.

Oh, he’s been going down the street with it then.

What’s going on? What time is it?

It’s about 1:00

Oh.

They’re filming on your street and their trucks are parked out here (one of our neighbours rents out his house for commercial and tv shoots and the crews invade the neighbourhood the night before). Some guy’s been going down the street trying to get into open vehicle doors. Did you lock your car?

Um, yeah I think so. I stepped outside in bathrobe and bare feet and double-checked, making sure nothing was amiss.

Another guy walked across the street. He wasn’t in uniform.

He took off down that way on the bike. I couldn’t catch him.

Do any of your neighbours have cameras?

I’m not sure. The guy across the street had one on the hydro pole for a while. I don’t know if he has one now.

The officer shined his light into the window of the Subaru. I see there’s glasses in there and a bit of change. That may be nothing to you but it’s a lottery for these guys.

Oh, ok. Glad to see you’re out here. Good night.

The dogs were already fast asleep when I came back in. I wish it was so easy for us.

 

October 19, 2017
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Tomorrow and Saturday

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Summer Days, 2017 acrylic on masonite

I’ll be at yumart gallery Friday between about noon and 2:30 and Saturday between 4 and 6. If you’re planning on coming by to see my exhibition, Shapeworks, I’d be happy to chat with you about the work.

Filed under: Art
October 18, 2017
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AlphaGo Zero

The folks at Deep Mind are at it again. From their website:

Artificial intelligence research has made rapid progress in a wide variety of domains from speech recognition and image classification to genomics and drug discovery. In many cases, these are specialist systems that leverage enormous amounts of human expertise and data.

However, for some problems this human knowledge may be too expensive, too unreliable or simply unavailable. As a result, a long-standing ambition of AI research is to bypass this step, creating algorithms that achieve superhuman performance in the most challenging domains with no human input.

They have come up with a new version of AlphaGo but this one learned to play Go entirely by playing against itself beginning with random play. In 40 days of self-training, it became stronger than the previous version of AlphaGo, the one that beat up on Ke Jie. This is kind of scary, don’t you think?

While it is still early days, AlphaGo Zero constitutes a critical step towards this goal. If similar techniques can be applied to other structured problems, such as protein folding, reducing energy consumption or searching for revolutionary new materials, the resulting breakthroughs have the potential to positively impact society.

Filed under: Go
October 18, 2017
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Goin’ Down to Cairo – Goodbye Liza Jane

There are two Cairos. One of course is in Egypt. The other (the one referred to in the song) is at the southern end of Illinois in the United States, the place where the Ohio River spills into the Mississippi. This is an old tune. I’ve read it might be a Civil War tune or might be older still. Cairo was the location of a Union fort during the war called Fort Defiance.

Curiously, Southern Illinois is known as Little Egypt, but Cairo is pronounced Kay-roe. I read that southern Illinois was a source of corn for residents from the northern part of the state during bad weather years. As the story goes, farmers remembered the Book of Genesis and joked “behold there is corn in Egypt.” I don’t know if that is truth of folk tale.

The tune has lyrics, but I mostly avoid singing so I’ll leave that to you. There are various versions of the lyrics. Here is one set:

Goin’ down to Cairo, good-bye and a good-bye
Goin’ down to Cairo, good-bye Liza Jane

Black them boots and make ’em shine, good-bye and a good-bye
Black them boots and make ’em shine, good-bye Liza Jane

Goin’ away to leave you, good-bye and a good-bye
Goin’ away to leave you, good-bye Liza Jane

Promenade on the inside ring, good-bye and a good-bye
Promenade on the inside ring, good-bye Liza Jane

Had no hat, had no rim, good-bye and a good-bye
Had no hat, had no rim, good-bye Liza Jane

The old cow died and how I cried, good-bye and a good-bye
The old cow dies and how I cried, good-bye Liza Jane.

 

October 17, 2017
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Department of Stuff that Bugs my Butt

You’re in your local grocery story, and for many things it’s a good grocery store and you shop there all the time and you like the cashiers, many of whom live in the neighbourhood. You’re shopping for some chicken for dinner and you pick up a package of drumsticks or thighs or whatever, and………you realize instantly this was a bad idea.

You’re now covered with raw chicken juice and plenty of it because the packages are poorly wrapped and dripping wet. This was me this afternoon and it’s the second time in two weeks it’s happened. I really dislike getting chicken goo all over me. You’d think I’d learn to arm myself with a bag from the vegetable department before shopping for chicken.

Today there happened to be an employee around, who kindly found me a piece of paper towel so I could at least wipe off most of it. He said they don’t even wrap the stuff in the store, that it comes in like this. I wanted to scream, wrapping the chicken well is not a FRILL, (damn it all to Hell). It is not even close to safe and sanitary having chicken goo booby-traps in the store.

I asked a cashier as pleasantly as I was able, to please talk to the folks who run the joint, and pass on the message that dripping chicken goo wouldn’t go over well should a food inspector stumble upon the mess.

They can do better.