Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: Believe in the me that believes in you, you had the power within you the whole time, the real treasure is the meals you made along the way, etc etc. For everyone who's ever claimed they can't cook while holding a sandwich they made, and everyone whose life would be improved by a move away from girldinner and boyslop and gender-inclusive Huel.)    Learned helplessness is a strange thing. Have you ever met someone who didn't even realize that they were lying to you, who claimed incapacity in one breath and in the next, undercut their own statement with an object-level display of competence? Possibly you've overheard someone singing serviceable counterpoint with their shower speaker and then, clad in terrycloth and embarrassment, express hope that they didn't bother you with their awful singing voice; or sat patiently tutoring someone who claimed they can't code or do math and then, as you return from getting a glass of water, quickly tab away fr...

(With thanks to JM, who kicked off this discussion on the summer solstice, and some apologies to MC-M.)     This is a picture of an oak tree, or at least it would be if the artist, MC-M, weren't a coward. In 1973, he created one of the foundational pieces of conceptual art:  an oak tree. Not a picture of an oak tree, but an oak tree. It consists of metal brackets, a glass shelf, a glass of water, and the ineffable act of having transformed a glass of water into an oak tree. "How long will it continue to be an oak tree?" an interviewer once asked him. "Until I change it," he replied. Tread carefully before you reject the whole premise as nonsense. I ask: would you be just as pleased to march into your nearest cathedral one fine Sunday morning, stroll down the aisle as the choir boys sing Mass, and unceremoniously knock the wafers and wine out of the bishop's hands as bullshit? If you'll bite that bullet, that transubstantiation is actually completely fake...

(Epistemic status: A hill I'll happily die on, but also will own as the kind of subjective hot take where my own taste is load-bearing for its validity. For everyone with a sweet tooth I've split a bottle of something nice with, and everyone embarrassed of liking fruity drinks.) How can you tell an eternal aesthetic truth from the vagaries of fashion and signaling? One of them holds up under comparative historical analysis, and the other has a start date. Alcoholic drinks - especially wine - have been getting drier for the last century, and prestige taste has shamed us into calling this progress. It's not: it's fashion masquerading as quality, and the slightest bit of modern archaeology wears that facade away like cheap  gold plating from copper. And just as with such faked gold, to be beholden to modern fashions is to spend more money than you should spend on less enjoyment than you might secure.   In 1916,  a Swedish schooner named  the Jönköping was transporting a...

If only things worked properly.  If only there was a simple straightforward way to tell if something or someone were worth the effort to interact with.  If only people and institutions and shops could be trusted to be honest. They cannot. That is the simple truth, and it is there to be lived. So how do we deal with that painful truth? There's a class of test I sometimes run, and that I recommend that you run, when I want to evaluate an eatery of some kind. For any given class of eatery, there's a fairly standard menu item or three that you can pick to evaluate the quality of the establishment as a whole. For ice cream shops, it's three things: vanilla ice cream, strawberry ice cream, and lemon sorbet. Vanilla ice cream tells you about the quality of their ice cream base and whether they skimp on pricier ingredients, lemon sorbet is simple and clean and hard to hide anything behind, and strawberry is delicate and complex, easy to spot artificiality in. For breakfast-type pla...

  (Epistemic status: what, you thought that this somehow wasn't a recipe blog?)   This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant. You ever think about lost recipes? They're a tragic microcosm of lost information in greater generality. There's lost plays like Love's Labours Won, lost books like the second volume of the Poetics, lost music like Karelia Music, and lost film like Bulgasari. Each one is a wound in human culture that will never heal. There's entire lost libraries, too - the House of Wisdom during the sack after the Sack of Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria (whose books fell apart - they largely weren't bu...

(Epistemic status: project idea that I am reasonably confident is actually achievable. Feedback, independent experimentation with shared results, and especially alpha-testers all decidedly welcome. There's someone who this post would have been for, in a brighter kinder universe, but this is not that possible world and he will never read this. It's not for him and he will never get to eat anything I make. So it's for MEG, IL, and TT instead, and all my other friends who appreciate good experimental desserts. And also the Philly Pies. Go birds; eat your batteries; third championship fornever.)    I can't remember quite when I first came up with this idea. Maybe it was after reading up on the Tree of 40 Fruits pictured above. Maybe it was after reading that passage about kitchen trees producing different kind of snackable fruit year-round in Too Like The Lightning. Maybe the seed of it was planted in me while wandering through a farmer's market one afternoon.  I had a ...

If you hang out with me for long enough, you'll see me pause before a meal every now and again. I put my closed fists gently together, with thumbs touching, and I bow my head a bit, usually with eyes open. I'm not saying grace, or at least not any kind of grace I've ever heard of. I'm not praying, to any god or spirit, but I am still giving thanks. "Praise the Unknown Quechuan", you might hear me softly say. But who am I directing that gratitude towards? Consider the miracle of the modern food supply chain. You can have winter wheat and garlic in the heat of summer; you can have autumn's crisp apples in the springtime; you can feast on summer tomatoes and berries in the dead chill. You can drink milk without worrying about it having gone bad or being contaminated with borax. You can have meat year-round, and reasonably cheaply, too. You can enjoy corned beef and pickles just because you feel like it and you like the taste, and not because you needed to sto...

Here's a thought that's been rattling around my head for the last decade or so: leftovers - as in, leftover food - obey chain complex rules. Let me explain. One thing you can do with leftover food rather than just eat it is to use it as an ingredient - the base for a new meal, remixing it to some extent. Turn a hamburger patty into ground meat for a casserole, or use the carrots and celery from a crudite tray as the start of a mirepoix. There's numerous patterns and a whole art to it - for one, fried rice, French toast, and Spanish omelettes are all exemplars of one excellent pattern: "take slightly stale starch, apply some egg, some seasoning, and maybe some fresh produce". (It's no accident that the French for "French toast" literally translates as "lost bread".) There's only a few techniques, and you can learn most of them and start experimenting if you care about avoiding food waste as much as I do: a few others include "use ad...

Here are a few more delicious and mostly scalable recipes that I’ve made repeatedly with great results which I mostly haven't committed to text. Unfortunately, it's still true that none of them are vegan, though the desserts at least are vegetarian. This is a recipe blog now, I guess. (It’s not. Don’t worry. Or do; I’m not your parent.) No pictures this time, as I'm travelling; maybe I'll add some later. Roman Showup Stew: An excellent lentil-based stew of the kind that ancient Romans might recognize, except for the part where it's got a bunch of unfamiliar but superior ingredients in it, was cooked using exceptionally fine tools, has a few absurdly expensive (for the time) spices and ingredients in it, and also it'd be too spicy for them to eat. Take that! 1 can lentil soup (I favor Progresso) 3 large slices of Spam or equivalent mass of bacon (optional but highly recommended) 1/2 a large red onion 8-12 cloves garlic  1 large russet potato (opt) 1 medium carrot...