Nano-opera: Rake's Progress

Another nano-synopsis, this time for Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress," on a libretto by Auden and some other dude: Boy gets rich, abandons girl, abandons virtue, abandons reality. It's yet another twist on the Faust tale, where boy sells soul to devil, only this time he finds out the terms of the deal after the fact, and then weasels out of it by getting lucky at cards, but loses his mind, so spurned girl gets to be dumped one more time, this time by the harsh reality that boy is not just a jerk but also bonkers. Yet another misogynist libretto with a likable woman who's too spineless, stupid, or both to dump the jerk from the outset or at several more intervals in the plot--yeah, right.

And fabulous music. SFOpera's production was quite wonderful, with lots of movie-like devices and references, goofy stagecraft, wacky costumes, and clever comic touches.

Nano-opera: La Rondine

La Rondine is your basic "girl meets guy, blows off icky rich husband, runs off with guy, wimps out, returns to rich husband, blows off and breaks heart of good guy" story set to equally boring music. 

So, yet another misogynist libretto and forgettable music, performed well by the San Francisco Opera, conducted adequately by some dude with regrettable Kent Nagano hair. A violinist friend in the opera orchestra (nameless here for reasons about to become obvious) said his hair was the only reason they could follow him: he attempted to give beats 1, 2, and 3 with his stick and did give a really clear beat 4 by running his other hand through his hair. The violinist mentioned that it's a good thing his hair is long, or else beat 4 would have been only an eighth note. 

Victoria pointed out that the lead diva had nice breasts. (She sang well, too.) A backstage friend in the opera company (nameless here for reasons about to become obvious) replied that it was no accident that only she had low-cut costumes, and then admitted that it was probably just as well given most of the figures in the chorus. 

How could I have forgotten the wine?

Well, we didn't--I just forgot to write about it. 

We repeated something fun from last year's Thanksgiving, was that we had an informal contest to see who could come up with the best wine pairing for the meal. The prize is bragging rights, and the fact that all the dishes were departures from tradition made this year's contest extra challenging. 

Pretty much everything we had was really good, but one wine did eke out a victory--the Navarro pinot noir that Noel and Ayse brought. David the Violinist brought a wonderful New Zealand sauvignon blanc by Isabel, along with a late harvest sauvignon blanc that we enjoyed with dessert. David the Bassist also went white, with two bottles of Chateau St. Michelle riesling. Victoria and I served two champagnes, one a yummy Scharffenberger and the other an even yummier Dampierre that Katja had given us at last year's smørgåsbord. We also entered a white table wine from Hagafen called "Don Ernesto's Collage" and a Tayerle pinot noir. 

They were all good, and most of us agreed that each wine was optimal with a certain dish, but the Navarro pinot noir won as the best overall match for the meal.  

A radical take on Thanksgiving menu traditions

I inherited a gluten intolerance from my mom, which means I'm not supposed to eat bread or anything else made from wheat, rye, oats, barley, or malt. Fortunately, I don't have celiac disease, the most extreme form of gluten intolerance where consuming gluten slowly destroys your intestines, so when I cheat, the immediate suffering is the only consequence. I am generally willing to cheat if it's for a good enough reason; the bread Hayes Street Grill served with our pre-opera dinner on Wednesday night, for example. My mom's Thanksgiving stuffing is another worthy exception, and I probably would have been willing to cheat for it again this year--since Ayse was making dessert, we knew to expect baking miracles, so I knew I was going to be eating some gluten anyway, and she didn't disappoint us. Still, I decided to make a breadless stuffing.

Let me back up.

We'd decided that this year's potluck Thanksgiving should have radical takes on all the classic menu items.

Dessert

Starting from the end of the dinner and working backwards, Ayse came up with a brilliant replacement for the traditional pumpkin pie: an amazing peanut butter pound cake baked in the shape of a turkey (who knew that turkey-shaped cake pans even exist?), surrounded by an assortment of cookies, including crunchy-gooey meringues and an absolutely brilliant update of the classic peanut butter with chocolate kiss cookie: peanut butter cookies with integrated Reese's peanut butter cups! We served this with espressos and lattes. Noel gave me a much-needed refresher lesson in making espresso and got me back on my espresso game.

Potatoes

Instead of mashed potatoes, we had Noel's scalloped potatoes, which featured a secret. They were incredible, and nobody could guess the secret: he'd deep-fried the thin potato slices before assembling the casserole, which he finished under the broiler. I have no idea what else was in them. Radical and fabulous.

Vegetable

Instead of some traditional gloppy cooked vegetables, David brought a tossed salad with goat cheese, cherry tomatoes, microgreens, a classic vinaigrette, and a surprising key ingredient: figs! Wonderful, and the acid/sweet contrast was a welcome palate-cleanser in such a rich meal.

Cranberries

Victoria wouldn't let Thanksgiving go by without her favorite cranberry sauce, so I did make a batch of cranberries according to what I think of as Mom's recipe (the one from the back of the bag where you run cranberries and whole oranges through a Cuisinart, then stir in a pile of sugar, a couple slugs of Triple Sec, and a dut of Kirschwasser), except that I had run out of sugar and substituted 1/4 C of Splenda where I was supposed to use 2 C of sugar. That turned out well. The key to working with Splenda seems to be to use about an eighth of the sugar amount--or at least start with that, taste, and increase slowly until you're satisfied. Remember that anything served cold needs to be a little sweeter than you want it to be while it's still warm. I couldn't find my Kirschwasser, so I used some German apple-pear brandy that was right in the front of the liquor cabinet instead, and that added a nice, subtle extra dimension. Serve cold. 

To keep the radical rule, though, I also made the most unconventional cranberry sauce recipe I know of, which is the classic Mama Stamberg recipe that Susan Stamberg has recited on NPR every year since the beginning of NPR. As she admits, it sounds disgusting--cranberries, sour cream, onions, horseradish, and sugar?! in the freezer?!--but it's actually quite good. Kind of a Jewish chutney, if you will. 

I guess if horseradish is good on a Hillel sandwich (matzoh crackers, the chopped-apples-and-walnuts mixture called charoset, and fresh grated horseradish), why not in cranberry sauce? Our next door neighbor, Jaryn, serves horseradish with just about everything, including her St. Patrick's Day corned beef, and I have to admit it's what corned beef has always needed.

Yams

Okay, I broke the rule with the yams and made the same yams I've made just about every year since Josie first brought them to my Thanksgiving back in the 90s: they're her mashup of two different recipes, and my version of them is basically to roast and peel a mess of yams, then pour a mixture of melted butter, orange juice, and bourbon over them, add pinches of your basic sweet spices, and bake. This year I made a slight twist by adding cardamom to my usual choices of cinnamon and mace. However, we did do something a little bit radical when it came to serving them: the pot was really hot, and we were out of room on the table for anything requiring a trivet, so I set them up on the window ledge instead. And there they sat, forgotten, until we were clearing for dessert. Can you believe nobody had yams with Thanksgiving, and nobody noticed they were missing? We all had a token serving as a separate pre-dessert course.

Turkey

I'd tried to talk folks into having a goose instead of a turkey (the ultimate radical menu change!), but everybody insisted we had to have turkey. Victoria especially insisted, and I know better than to disappoint her on something fundamental. 

Our turkey was pretty straight-ahead. It was your basic bargain-basement non-orgasmic cage-raised boringly-fed bird, seventeen pounds, brined since Monday in Emeril Lagasse's brine (at John Watkins' suggestion), but with the addition of juniper berries (from Barbara Kafka's brine). As usual, I followed Barbara Kafka's instructions for roasting at 500 degrees (actually I set the oven for 450 with the convection fan on) for only two hours. This method puts out a lot of smoke, so we had the hood running pretty much the whole time. It also results in a very darkly-browned skin with some crunchy bits.

Another twist was that this year, instead of attempting to carve the bird the way my dad does, I decided to try the method recommended in a New York Times' article I'd read the day before, "The Butcher Carves a Turkey," which was accompanied by a helpful video demonstration. The basic idea is to part the roasted bird off its carcass first, then slice it, and to arrange it all on the platter a certain way that keeps the white and dark meat separated but still looks attractive. I did this for two reasons. One, even though he's tried to teach me several times, I suck at trying to do it Dad's way, but I'm pretty good at butchering raw birds, so I figured I'd be better at butchering and then slicing a roasted bird than I've ever been at trying to carve the traditional way. Two, I agree with all the points the butcher makes about why it's a better way. Dad manages to make the traditional way work out really well, but as the butcher points out, the big problem with the traditional way--besides that it's difficult--is that you end up slicing with the grain of the meat instead of across it.

I'm completely sold. I had the entire thing neatly sliced and plattered in the time it would usually take me to make a mess of half the bird. I knew what I was doing. I wasn't trying to carve around all the weird shapes; I was just slicing hunks on a board. The slices were coherent and tidy. The light and dark were nicely separated. The platter looked good. I could throw all the weird bits into my gravy pan, which was simmering away while I was slaughtering. We had a platterful of sliced meat to put away after dinner instead of a big, messy carcass. It was easy to pack our guests off with leftovers. Noel had a tidy carcass to take home for making stock, something I won't be having time for this weekend, since I'm making a mileage run to Frankfurt and back, Saturday-Monday.

However, I would add two tips to the butcher's instructions: one, wear a full-length apron, not a waist-down one like I did; two, if you have two boning knives, use the one you don't like to get the chunks off, then use the one you do like to do the slicing. That way, you can save the good knife's slicing edge for slicing after the dirty work is done by the more expendable knife, and if you're working one hunk at a time, you simply switch knives instead of having to steel your knife repeatedly.

Gravy

My gravy was only a little off from tradition. I always make a stock from the odd bits of the turkey, celery, onion, and herbs. This year I used the spent herbs from my unstuffing custard (see below), cream and all, along with chicken stock (since our bird had almost nothing on the way of odd bits), onions, garlic, and celery. That simmered away all afternoon. After pouring off the turkey fat from the roasting pan, I deglazed it with the strained stock, then kept tossing in the weird and fatty bits from my carving process as it simmered away on the burner, reducing to about half while I carved, and then straining out the chunks before thickening. As usual, I added several slugs of marsala and a bunch of salt and pepper, then thickened it with a gluten-free cornstarch slurry, and I broke with tradition by adding a dash of Pernod pastis to finish it. I don't think you could quite taste the pastis's anise in the gravy, but it did have a more complex flavor. Also, since I'd roasted the bird at 500 degrees, the pan drippings were nearly scorched, resulting in a wicked-dark brown gravy that miraculously didn't taste burnt.

Stuffing

Which brings me to the main point of this blog post: my "unstuffing custard." The goal was to make something that would be as satisfying and delicious as my mom's classic breadcumb stuffing, without the bread or any other gluten. Since I'm better off with low-carb eating, it ideally wouldn't have carbs at all, but I wasn't going to be stubborn about that in a meal that's already hopelessly carby. 

My version of Mom's stuffing is to make a huge bowl of bread cubes from at least three kinds of bread--usually a dark pumpernickel, white sourdough, and something medium-brownish like a whole-wheat. Saute onions and celery in a lot of butter. Drizzle over the bread cubes. Add salt, pepper, and a ton of crumbled sage leaves--enough to make Dad sneeze, and then a little bit more. Moisten with boiling water, stuff into bird, roast, extricate, and serve with a ton of gravy.

The miracle of Moms' stuffing is the wonderful, overpowering sage flavor. I figured the key to my unstuffing would be to do something with enough fat to draw out the celery and sage flavors, and I'd need to come up with some kind of base that would have the rich, puddingy texture of a traditional breadcumb stuffing. I thought maybe some kind of savory custard recipe would be the starting point, so I googled a bit and found this one from the New York Times: Baked Savory Custard with Cheese. This looked close to what I was hoping for, so I decided to use it as the skeleton of my new recipe. Since I haven't made a lot of custards but know that they can be tricky to get right, I also did some reading on the science of custards from both Cookwise and Harold McGee's latest book. My particular question was whether adding a lot of fat, such as butter or olive oil, would interfere with the thing setting up. I couldn't find any commentary on that, so I just decided to plunge in. What else is new? I'll cut to the chase and tell you that it all worked out, and if I say so myself, it was pretty fabulous. So, here's the recipe that I developed and why I did things the way I did. Most of the measurements are approximations from memory, because I'm really not a measurer, and somehow I seem to get away with that.

Unstuffing Custard

• 2 C cream
• several springs fresh thyme, oregano, rosemary
• almost a whole bunch of sage sprigs
• 3 large cloves of garlic
• 4 stalks celery
• 1/2 stick salted butter
• 1 medium onion
• 1 shallot
• 1 C dried shiitakes, rehydrated with boiling water
• pinch of cayenne
• 1/3 package of cream cheese
• salt and pepper
• 4 C finely-grated Emmenthaler, parmesan reggiano, pecorino romano
• 3 eggs plus 2 yolks

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F and put a kettle of water on to boil.

Put all the herb sprigs and the cream in a small saucepan and bringly slowly up to a simmer. The original recipe just wants you to scald the cream, but I wanted to simmer it for a while to extract as much herb flavor as possible, so I let it "simmer" just below a simmer the whole time I was doing everything else. At some point it did start to boil because of my inattention, but I got it off the heat right away and then continued with the sub-simmer simmer. 

Pour boiling water over the dried, sliced shiitake mushrooms to rehydrate them. (Or use fresh.)

Chop the onion and celery into hunks and run them through the Cuisinart, not quite to a puree but close. (It's about juice, as I'll explain in a bit.) Melt half a stick of butter in a small saute pan, then add the onion-celery glop and let simmer over medium heat--just high enough that you're not sweating the vegetables, just low enough that you're not browning them much, either. Run several large cloves of garlic and a shallot through the Cuisinart and add those to the pan. Add a pinch of cayenne (a few taps-worth from the shaker jar), kosher salt, and freshly ground black telicherry pepper. You want all this to cook gently for quite a while, so that as much juice as possible steams off. I think adding the salt to this part of the recipe also helps with the water-dispersal, but I'm not certain about that. The kitchen scientists warn about the danger of water from vegetables seeping out and making the custard have runny bits, so that's why I took all these juice-minimizing precautions.

Crack three eggs into a medium casserole (I used a deep souffle dish). The original recipe has you use ramekins, but that didn't seem right for a Thanksgiving stuffing. Crack two more eggs over the dog's food dish, separating the whites into her food dish and the yolks into your casserole. The dog also gets the egg shells, and if you're lucky, she sticks around to clean up any other little messes that arrive on the floor. Back to cooking, lightly beat your share of the eggs.

Strain the shiitake juice into the stockpot that's going to end up in the gravy (see "Gravy" above). Just about wring those suckers out--get all the extra moisture out, as explained earlier. Buzz the cream cheese up with the shiitakes in the Cuisinart, then stir this mixture into the eggs. I don't think the cream cheese ended up being very important, especially given the next step, but we had some sitting around, and I wanted to give my custard every chance of setting up. I was worried that all the water in the celery, onion, and mushrooms would make my custard a watery mess, as the scientists had warned, but as it turned out, my custard set up quite well, so I probably could have skipped the cream cheese. 

Grate about 4 cups of semi-hard or hard cheeses. We had a hunk of Emmenthaler, a smaller hunk of parmesan reggiano, and a tiny hunklet of pecorino romano, so that's what I used. Stir about two-thirds of this into the egg mixture, and reserve the rest.

Slowly stir the sauteed vegetables into the egg mixture. Strain the cream slowly into the egg mixture while stirring constantly. Toss the used herbs into the stockpot, cream-coating and all. (Why not?) I had Victoria pour the cream slowly through a mesh strainer into my mixing bowl, while I was folding the mixture with a silicone scraper. I'm not sure how you'd accomplish this without a Victoria; I suppose you'd have to pre-strain the cream into a convenient pouring container and then pour with one hand while stirring with the other. The key in this step (and the steps above) is that you're never shocking the eggs with a sudden influx of heat, which would cook and curdle them; instead, you're first diluting them with all the other cold ingredients, and then you're slowly stirring in the hot veggies and finally the hot cream.

Place the souffle dish in a somewhat larger pan that's at least as deep and at least half an inch wider--an inch all the way around would be better still. Fill the larger pan up to the level of the glop in the souffle dish with boiling water. Try not to splash water into the custard as I did, but if you do, use a paper towel to soak it up and out. Baked custards need to bake in a water bath, so that the heat is gentle and consistent, and the custard can set up slowly. Too hot, and you get scrambled eggs in runny slop; too cool, and you get wobbly goop. At least that's what the kitchen scientists say. I decided not to use the convection fan on my oven, reasoning that it would make the top of the custard cook too quickly.

Bake uncovered until it's almost done, then scatter the reserved grated cheese over the top and let that melt and brown while the custard finishes. "Done" is defined as the point where most of it has set up, but the center is still a bit wet and wobbly. The center will finish setting up from carryover heat while it rests and cools. The kitchen scientists say to have courage about taking it out before you're convinced it's done, because if it cooks any longer, the eggs will curdle and the fluids will weep out and form runny rivulets. Ish kabibble, as my great-gramma would have said. I had mine in about half an hour, plus ten more minutes with the cheese, but apparently the shape of the dish and its bain marie (hot water bath) can both affect cooking time, as well as all the usual variables that affect cooking times for anything you bake. (My ex the chef pointed out that any good pastry chef will tell you the temperature but not the time for baking anything, because you can never count on the time, no matter how much you try to control all the variables. Therefore, the correct time for any baking recipe is always "until it's done.")

The original recipe said to serve it warm, at room temperature, or cold a few hours after baking. I made it just before putting the turkey in to roast, so two hours later it wasn't very warm, and I think stuffing ought to be warm or even hot. So, while the turkey rested, I threw the yams in to bake (about 30 minutes), and I put the custard in for the last fifteen minutes or so, covered, just long enough to warm it through but not long enough to risk more cooking.  

Serve with lots of gravy, just like a real stuffing. 

That's the recipe, best I can recall. Please leave a comment or email a question if you think I've missed something important in there--I might have, and I don't want to be one of those people who publishes recipes that haven't been tested and don't work.

Our guests loved it. We did, too! I think it was a success. The cheeses were a great addition to Mom's stuffing's flavor profile, but I think it would have tasted good without the cheese, too, or with about half as much cheese. The catch is, I'm not sure what would happen with the custard if you changed the cheese factor in the recipe; I just don't have enough experience with custards to guess. If anyone experiments with that, please report your results in the comments! 

Nano-opera: More on Flute and Butterfly

Dad commented:

Great opera review. I had never thought of Lady of the Night as Cruella DeVille. Now I'll never be able to think of her as other than Cruella.

I'm not sure I would make the comparison normally, but in this production it was hard not to. Take a look at the "Inside The Magic Flute" video at San Francisco Opera's website and get a load of the costumes and sets! You can also get a taste of the Queen's phenomenal pipes--Erika Miklósa was unbelievably good in the role. I can die now.

He continued:

Re Butterfly, your version might make more sense but it would certainly detract from the tragic drama. I find it difficult to not break down in tears throughout the second and third acts because I know how it ends.

Knowing that the story ends in a slapstick brawl would ruin the effect, though springing an alternate ending as a surprise might certainly be a pleasant surprise--once.

Who said it would be slapstick? I think those women would be pretty serious in their passionate dispatch of the assholes who ruined their lives, don't you? And would it be any less tragic with the right characters dying?

Nano-opera: Magic Flute and Madame Butterfly

Magic Flute

Another opera nano-synopsis, this time for Magic Flute, in particular San Francisco Opera's 2007 production, which seems to take place on a Batman set and features characters and costumes from a bunch of other movies: Big chested ladies with scary bras headed by Cruella de Ville from 101 Dalmatians, aka the Queen of the Night, battle with the Planet of the Apes headed by the knight from The Seventh Seal, aka Sarastro, for the hearts of Tamino, Birdman, and Birdmanina.

For benefit of those who didn't see it, Sarastro's gang gave "helmet hair" a whole new meaning, and Sarastro himself was a dead ringer for Max von Sydow's knight (the one who plays chess with Death) in The Seventh Seal. Nearly every character besides a few of the leads wore costumes that in some odd way or another drew attention to their breasts or man-breasts, particularly the Three Ladies and their über-Lady, Cruella de Ville. If the ladies and their queen had managed to triumph, we might have called it bra-us ex machina.

In any production, Magic Flute is yet another opera that has real problems when viewed from a feminist or vaguely enlightened perspective. The Queen of the Night is your typical mother spurned and scorned and bears a not unreasonable grudge against Sarastro, the man who stole her daughter from her after her husband died, but somehow the librettist finds a way to make everything her fault and cast Sarastro as the good guy. One wonders if Mozart perhaps saw a little more gray between the black-and-white lines of the libretto, though, given that the Queen and the other women have all the best arias and most powerful singing. Sarastro gets to make various heartfelt, sincere, warm-fuzzy "love makes the world go round" points, and sure enough he does seem to be a bit of a natural facilitator, but he always does so impotently--the arias are set in the basement of the bass range where even the best singers struggle to project. Even this production's costumer also seemed to give the ladies some benefit of the doubt--they got all the best costumes and hair!

Librettists seem to find heartbreak to be just and reasonable grounds for women to commit suicide. Perhaps this is wishful misogynist thinking, as many of opera's heroines would seem to me to be justified in killing off the men rather than offing themselves. I've already made the case for the Queen of the Night above, and it's not hard to extend this argument to the rest of opera's greatest hits.

Madame Butterfly

Take Madame Butterfly for example: impregnated and then abandoned by a lying ne'er-do-well Pinkerton, who's enabled by a regretful but spineless Sharpless, Cio-Cio San offs herself in despair, but wouldn't it be more satisfying and considerably more realistic for Cio-Cio San, Suzuki, and Kate to whack Pinkerton and Sharpless instead, and then continue on about their business of raising the brat together?

Wow

That a Republican mayor is the one saying it is encouraging. What he has to say is great. How hard it is for him to say it has me puzzled a bit. I can make some guesses but can't convince myself that one is better than another. http://cbs5.com/video/?id=26888@kpix.dayport.com

Deutscher, Deutscherinnen überalles!

Is this some massive German holiday I don't know about? Everywhere I go I'm surrounded by people speaking German. I catch only enough fragments to be curious. I startle some of them by expressing my pleasantries auf Deutsch; they all have me pegged for American, and then they notice that although I'm dressed in Gap, I look like them.

I'm on the weirdest sleep schedule--perhaps it's a good thing I ended up traveling here alone. The first day I slept until 4:30pm, then got to bed at a normal time and up at 7am Saturday. By 10:30 last night I was falling asleep, but I woke up at 2am and stayed awake until 4:30, drinking wine, eating cheddar, and reading; then I slept past 11.

By 1 I was heading out on my day, from my fleabag at Paddington by the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines to Covent Garden (I thought I'd fill in the Tube coordinates, since anyone who's ever visited London will recognize them), where I grabbed a falafel for breakfast and ate that while wandering through the stalls of junk crafts. Everything available with your name on it, £2 extra. Do people have extra rooms in their houses for storing objects with their names? Have I erred by filling mine with musical instruments instead?

From there I proceeded to change my mind three times about whether I was headed to the Design Museum (further downriver from Tate Modern) or Museum of London. I thought I'd decided on London based on relative simplicity of train travel (Circle line from Embankment all the way to Barbican), but the Tube Diagram misled me on the length of that journey, and meanwhile I realized I was at the Tower Bridge stop for walking across and down the Thames to Design Museum, so that settled it. They had two main exhibitions, one of really out there but compellingly organic architecture by Zaha Habib and another of typography of dissent. Both were mixed bags--about half I'd stare at, fascinated, and the other half I'd glide past. (http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions).

Thus committed to a theme, I hiked back up- and across-river and got back on the Circle line to Embankment and Piccadilly to Charing Cross, then marched through St James Park to the Institute for Contemporary Art, which was showing a documentary film "Helvetica" (yes, about the typeface) that was surprisingly good. I continued my march (meine Füße tut mir weh) up Waterloo and Regent to Ran, the Korean restaurant near Liberty, where I had a subtle warm tofu dish, good kimchi, and an acceptable bowl of "gyoza and rice cake" soup. Why not dumpling and rice cake, or gyoza and mochi? Why not man du gook and whatever? After dinner, I caught Bakerloo from Oxford Circus (this time surrounded by Indians instead of Germans) back to Paddington, and here I sit on my wee balcony facing the fleabag across the street that has free wifi, my hot aching feet enjoying the cold, dirty asphalt, sipping an overly cold (just pulled it out of the refrigerator) bottle of Le Freak, an aptly named Shiraz with a touch of Viognier).

I wish Blogger's edit box weren't in Helvetica.

The pleasures of a Frankfurt connection

The Lufthansa Senator Lounge (the first class lounge, open to Star Alliance Gold members) is a fairly ordinary lounge, except that they have outstanding food and drink. The arrival breakfast on my flight from San Francisco was the usual cup of grapes, cantaloupe, and watermelon along with something revolting: a croissant with 2 slices of indifferent ham, a slice of unnaturally orange American cheese, and (wait for it) strawberry cream cheese.

WTF?

I couldn't believe my eyes, and a tentative taste to determine what it was (Leberkäse, vielleicht?) was not enlightening, so finally I asked the flight attendant who was trying to offer me a beverage what the mystery food was. I did so with a conspiratorial grin, to make clear that I wasn't trying to be difficult, I was just puzzled. She answered, "It's a ham and cheese croissant." I pointed at the pink goo and asked more specifically what that was, and she said, "Oh, that's the stuff that shouldn't be there. It's strawberry cream cheese. They've been doing this for four weeks now, and I have no idea why. I keep calling it in." I asked what kind of drugs they're on and how I could help, and she encouraged me to complain to SkyNet. That I shall. I mean, really--I'm all in favor of experimental cuisine, but that's just weird, and it's a cruel thing to give someone whose stomach is already topsy-turvy from all the usual stresses of an overnight flight. Seasoned travelers know that the only way to handle massive time differences is to drink heavily and then try to sleep, and when you're lucky you nap for an hour or two and awaken groggy and queasy. This is when you want something warm, comforting, simple; preferably savory, but most importantly simple. This is NOT a time to eat a misguided attempt at creative breakfast cookery.

Fortunately, I was landing not in LAX, where I was supposed to connect, nor Heathrow, where there is no edible food to be found, but Frankfurt.

My Wednesday afternoon plane to LAX had had a mechanical problem, so after a 45 minute trip to the runway and back, we were informed the repair would take at least an hour and sent back into the SFO gate area to wait in line for customer service to figure out how we'd all get whither we were going. I got on the phone with the 1K desk and was given an option to leave really late, fly to Dulles, wait a long time, and then fly to Heathrow, arriving close to midnight Thursday. There's a slight mileage gain from that vs. a direct to London (this trip is, after all, all about racking up some elite qualifying miles), but not enough to be worth that kind of ordeal). I asked about the direct and was informed it was completely full and oversold with eight people on standby. I asked about connecting through Frankfurt and then getting a Lufthansa flight to London. She sounded puzzled but tapped away at her keyboard and told me I could take a 7pm United flight to Frankfurt, arriving 3pm, and then connect on a 4:20 Lufthansa to London arriving 5pm. This sounded a lot better than the Dulles option--faster, more miles, and a connection in Frankfurt!

Frankfurt is a huge, huge airport. I once had an hour and a half to connect from Vienna to SFO by way of Frankfurt, and to be on the safe side I decided not to pee until I got to my departure gate and had my walking behind me. I walked and walked and walked, as briskly as I could, which would be a fast trot to many people. And walked. And walked. I walked into my departure gate, onto my plane, and the door closed behind me. I peed in the plane's lavatory. It's that huge. But if you have a connection where you don't have to switch terminals, and you have time to visit a Lufthansa lounge, you're in luck. Fabulous food and drink await!

I've enjoyed a yummy, buttery carrot soup, a Frankfurter, a couple pretzels, and a glass of draft Beck's. I've found there's nothing quite like a good beer for settling a travel-jumpy stomach. I couldn't resist tasting the Viennese grüner Veltliner wine, too, but it's not sitting as well as the beer did, so I'm enjoying tiny sips with another pretzel. They have wifi here, but I'm too cheap to buy a T-Mobile Hotspot account (yet), so I'm just typing this into a file for now.

And now I see it's time to start ambling to my gate, but first I'll grab a few provisions for the rest of my day...

Benefits of carbophobia

Among the benefits of avoiding carbs (yes, the dreaded Atkins) are such discoveries as this eggplant recipe from the New York Times last week. Victoria loves eggplant in all forms discovered to date, so I know it would be a winner.

Eggplant, La Tavernetta Style
August 29, 2007
Time: About 30 minutes

• 2 pounds eggplant of any variety, the smallest you can find
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 3 cloves garlic, slivered
• 12 good cherry tomatoes, halved, or a couple plum or medium-size regular tomatoes, cored and chopped
• 1 cup roughly chopped basil leaves.

1. Cut eggplant into pieces about an inch or two long and no more than a half-inch wide; each piece should have a bit of skin and a bit of flesh. (If eggplant are small, cut them first in long strips, then cut them crosswise. If large, you may end up discarding or reserving the fleshy, seedy center.)
2. Put 1/3 cup oil in a skillet over medium heat; a minute later add eggplant. Cook, stirring occasionally, and seasoning with salt and pepper until very soft, about 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, put remaining oil in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add garlic and cook until it colors slightly. Add tomatoes and about 2/3 of the basil, raise heat to medium, and cook, stirring occasionally, until mixture is saucy, about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
4. When both sauce and eggplant are done, combine them. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature, or over pasta, garnished with remaining basil.

Yield: 2 to 4 servings.

Victoria was happy to pick up eggplants when I suggested it; unfortunately, I'd forgotten the bit about "the smallest you can find," so she brought us several big ones.



As a precaution, I did the slice, salt, rest, rinse, wipe trick for reducing the bitter oils that can lead to tingling tongue syndrome. Otherwise, I pretty much did as I was told. It's been forever since I've simmered garlic in oil on low heat, and doing so for this recipe was a good reminder that there are good reasons to do it that way--it puts off an incredible aroma and extracts the garlickiest of garlicky flavors. Probably gilding the lily, but I couldn't resist a grating of parmesan on top.

Since I'm gluten-intolerant (besides doing Atkins), serving over pasta wasn't an option. Instead, we roasted a spaghetti squash (halve, scoop out guts, roast inside-down at 375 for about 40 minutes, scoop out and fluff flesh with a fork, toss with butter and kosher salt) and of course also roasted the seeds (scatter with butter, salt, rescue from oven after about 10-15 minutes when lightly browned) as an appetizer.

To complete the menu, a little caprese (slice tomatoes, drizzle with olive oil, grind fresh black telicherry pepper, place fresh basil leaf, place slice of buffalo mozzarella, grind kosher salt). This is a bit redundant when you're having a tomato-based pasta sauce, really, but we had gorgeous fresh heirloom tomatoes and it's a crime to let them rot in neglect.

Mojito madness, or Evolution of a recipe

Seems like it must be time to post a recipe, so let's start with the it-drink of the day, the tall drink of water from Habana, the much-loved, often poorly-made Mojito.

I don't know if the claim is valid, but this one claims to be the ur-recipe, "the one Hemingway himself enjoyed at the Mojito's place of birth: La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, Cuba" (copied from http://www.tasteofcuba.com/mojito.html):

• 1 teaspoon powdered sugar
• Juice from 1 lime (2 ounces)
• 4 mint leaves
• 1 sprig of mint
• Havana Club white Rum (2 ounces)
• 2 ounces club soda

Place the mint leaves into a long mojito glass (often called a "collins" glass) and squeeze the juice from a cut lime over it. You'll want about two ounces of lime juice, so it may not require all of the juice from a single lime. Add the powdered sugar, then gently smash the mint into the lime juice and sugar with a muddler (a long wooden device pictured below, though you can also use the back of a fork or spoon if one isn't available). Add ice (preferably crushed) then add the rum and stir, and top off with the club soda (you can also mix the club soda in as per your taste). Garnish with a mint sprig.

** Optional ** While the following isn't the authentic original Bodeguita del Medio Cuban recipe for a mojito, some people will take half of the juiced lime and cut into into four wedges to add to the glass. Another variation is to add Angostura bitters to cut the mojito's sweetness, which is a popular version in Havana hotels although not the true Bodeguita recipe. Some Cubans also use "guarapo" in place of the powdered sugar, which is a sugar cane syrup available in some supermarkets or online Latin grocery stores.

So there's nothing particularly wrong with this recipe, but it doesn't work all that well, and I think the proportions are off. As with most drinks, you really want about a four-to-one ratio of booze to whatever (someday I'll post on my grand unifying theory of cocktails), so make that a whole lime to 4oz rum and figure it's a recipe for two drinks. Another problem is that even powdered or superfine sugar isn't easy to dissolve in cold liquid, so you'd be better off using simple syrup. I've never had Havana Club white rum, but I have found that--contrary to my usual principle that better (and darker) rum makes a better (if uglier) cocktail, in the case of a mojito you really do want the cheap white stuff, so let's assume that part is fine. But the real problem here is in the muddling: muddling is only so effective at drawing out mint flavors, and unless you muddle maniacally, this recipe is going to produce an insufficiently-minty mojito in my opinion.

Cut to the next candidate: the recipe I surreptitiously copied down while waiting for my to-go order at an estimable local Mexican restaurant when I spied it on the back wall, just barely legible thanks to some damn fine work by my ophthamalogist. This one is all about practicality: how do you make a muddling-intensive drink consistently good, quickly, on demand at a busy restaurant? Well, clearly you work ahead and make a mint simple syrup, of course! Here we go, and this one is for a pitcher, not just a wimpy pair. Since I didn't exactly have permission to copy it and I'm about to criticize it, I'm not giving away which restaurant it was, but if you own that restaurant and would like to claim and/or defend your work, use that Comments link down there at the bottom of the article!

A certain restaurant's mojito
Mint syrup

• 4C water
• 2C suqar
• half bunch mint

Mojito

• 9oz Bacardi
• 4.5oz mint syrup
• 4.5 oz sweet and sour mix
• 12 mint leaves
• ice, soda

Let's deconstruct this one. First, I should probably explain the method, which wasn't printed at the back of the bar but which is not hard to infer: boil water, sugar, and half a bunch of mint until mixture is reduced by approximately half. Cool and store, refrigerated, in a meticulously clean glass jar. To make the pitcher of mojitos, pull that jar out and dump a healthy dollop in the pitcher. Add an equal dollop of sweet and sour mix. Add a dollop of Bacardi twice as big (and here I can endorse the rum choice--Bacardi white is far from my favorite rum, but it's just the thing for a refreshing mojito). Mix. Add decorate mint leaves. Now fill almost the rest of the way with crushed ice and top with soda. Get a runner to rush it out to the table and turn your attention to the next customer's margarita needs.

This recipe is marginally better than the first one. Why? Several reasons. First, because making a mint simple syrup isn't just efficient, it's effective--it really does force the mint flavor out of the recalcitrant leaves and into the drink. It also gives you some cushion against out-of-season mint that looks nice but has no flavor. Second, it makes a pitcher instead of a lousy pair of high balls. Third, the booze-to-lime ratio is moving in the right direction.

However, it's not perfect. First, it's too sweet by far--rum is already a sweet booze, and that simple syrup adds a lot of sugar. Second, rushed bartenders don't get it mixed very well--they're just dumping liquids into a pitcher and hoping the addition of ice does the work, but some shaking or at least vigorous stirring is needed when you're blending such unlike viscosities as rum, lime, and simple syrup. Third, and this is really important, what on earth are they doing with sweet and sour mix instead of lime juice??? Well, okay, fresh-squeezed lime juice isn't the easiest thing to crank out in volume in a busy restaurant, so obviously that's why they're using sweet and sour, but sweet and sour is (a) too sweet and (b) not sour. And (c) not lime juice. Not even close. To be refreshing and brisk, this drink needs to bite of real, fresh-squeezed lime juice. Do not accept substitutes.

Enter the third candidate, my recipe, which I will put up against anyone's, for a batch of four high balls:

Erin's mojito

• several stems' worth of mint leaves, and then some
• 8oz Bacardi white rum
• very little superfine sugar
• juice of 2 limes
• crushed hard ice
• club soda

Vigorously muddle mint leaves in rum and sugar and let stand at least several hours if not overnight. Squeeze in lime juice using one of those brutally effective lime squeezers that are effectively a garlic press on steroids. Fill highballs almost full with crushed ice (not the warm, watery kind you get at a fast food joint, the colder, harder kind your refrigerator's ice-maker puts out). Add rum-sugar-lime mixture to the halfway point. Add decorative mint leaves, but tear them into little shreds with your hands while you're tossing them in. Top with club soda.

Why is this better? It's all in the details. First, when you muddle vigorously, I really mean it--vigorously. You might try adding a mortar-and-pestle round-the-sides swirling grind to your choreography. Mint leaves are thin and sturdy, so you really need to beat them up if you want them to release their flavor. Second, you leave it standing in the rum for a while, because the alcohol does the real work. Most flavors worth pursuing are fat- and alcohol-soluble, and you're taking advantage of that by letting the alcohol break down the mint and get its flavors into the liquid. I got this trick from an article (sorry, can't remember to cite) about mint julep recipes from all the bourbon distillers in Kentucky, and it's a great tip. Third, fresh lime in the right proportion. Fourth, tearing those decorative leaves before tossing them in ensures that you get that fresh, just-massacred mint oil hit, especially on the nose, which probably picks up the mint better than our palates do. Finally, cold, hard ice--wimpy wet stuff isn't cold enough, and it waters down your drink.

Finally, the lazy mixologist's Atkins-friendly variation. For this one, I credit my friend Sue's discovery that Fresca makes a good club soda alternative. I haven't actually tried that, because although I think its grapefruit flavor would probably be a pleasant addition, I'd rather not tamper with the genetics of the drink too much. However, her pointer inspired my experiment, which was a stunning success:

Erin's heretical diet mojito

• several stems' worth of mint leaves, and then some
• 8oz Bacardi white rum
• no sugar at all! none!
• juice of 2 limes
• crushed hard ice
• Sprite Zero

Same method. The madness is using Sprite Zero at the end instead of club soda. And why not? It's a sugarless lemon-lime carbonated beverage! Unlike Diet Coke, Diet 7-Up, and so on, Coke Zero and Sprite Zero have managed to minimize that nasty artificial sweetener taste to the point that even I, a die-hard saccharine and aspartame hater, consider them pretty darned drinkable. I'd rather have the real thing, but these are actually an acceptable substitute. Since the Sprite Zero is going to be adding plenty of sweetness, I forego the sugar in the muddling step, and the balance ends up being just right.

More travel wearies

About a year ago, I recounted a somewhat unusual version of my summer ritual: failing to fly out of the Southeast.

I call it a ritual because I fly in and out of RDU about once a month, year round, and during the summer months I've grown to expect that getting to RDU from SFO or OAK will be fraught with delays and headaches, and getting back home from RDU will be a hellish combination of delays, missed connections, exciting round-the-world trips for my baggage, and spontaneous weekends with my friends in the southeast. So often do I get stuck at IAD that I keep all the phone numbers I have for my friends Bruce and Kathy in Alexandria on speed dial on both my work and personal mobile phones (because you never know which one will have a dying battery). I also keep United, Avis, and Hilton's numbers on speed-dial, to help with all those emergency rearrangements. So a few weeks ago, when Kathy visited us out west, I warned her that at the end of my trip this week, I might be calling her.

The red-eye long haul out here on Sunday night was fine, the Monday-morning connection in Dulles was several hours late (gee, that's a surprise), it took forever for my bag to appear at RDU (gee that's a surprise), and Avis was a complete mess (gee, that's a surprise), so I had to spend over an hour queuing at the Preferred tend outside in the heat to get a decent car (while the hoi polloi were getting quick service in the short, air-conditioned indoor non-preferred building), but the real troubles began on Friday, when I tried to get back home to SFO.

I got up in the middle of the night for nothing. I'd had a feeling all along that I wouldn't get home on Friday, starting with my warning to Kathy a few weeks ago, and I wish there had been some way to take advantage of that insight to save myself all the trouble of pretending I'd be flying home on time.

My 6:20 flight was supposed to board at 6am, and sure enough at 6am they had us queue up for boarding. Twenty minutes go by and still no sign of an agent ready to scan us in, so I take a seat. Nothing happens for a long time, so I check the monitors to be sure we're still departing from gate 21A and then sit back down. They announce our flight is being delayed by paperwork (huh?) and start boarding the 7:20 Washington flight, and eventually tell us our flight is going to be another hour at least. It's 7am, and my connection to San Francisco is at 8:30, so I know I'm doomed, and sure enough they're announcing that we're unlikely to make our connections, and there's only two people working all of United, so we're better off calling the 800 number to take care of rebookings, etc. I call the 1K desk instead and find out I can be rebooked in the next IAD-SFO flight but definitely not upgraded, and meanwhile my RDU-IAD flight's delay of another hour is perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, because it's in fact more uncertain than that.

Meanwhile, connections out of IAD are also likely to be a big mess, because all the intense storms in the midwest mean that 500 flights yesterday were canceled out of O'Hare alone, and an awful lot of travelers are all screwed up, and basically the entire nation's air system is a total mess today because none of the metal is where it belongs for today's flights.

The prospect of waiting indefinitely for a flight that will probably miss my rebooked flight, and then I'll be stuck in Dulles for god knows how long waiting for the NEXT flight, which may or may not have a seat for me (let alone a decent one), and before you know it I'll have spent my entire day in airports and probably still won't be home. None of this seems fun. So I ask about better options, like say tomorrow. The 6:20am? No thanks, not again... I had her rebook me on an 2:48-15:57 RDU-IAD, 17:25-19:50 IAD-SFO itinerary tomorrow (Saturday), which does have room for me in first.

Still not free, though--because I've already checked in, I have to be "unchecked in," which requires speaking with an agent. I see that my gate agents are boarding two different flights and have a line of about 40 IAD passengers waiting to speak with them, so I slip to the head of the line to ask about that. When I'm told I have to go back out to the ticketing and bag-check desk to do that, I'm glad that I didn't wait politely in the big line with everybody else, and while I schlepp back to ticketing, I call Sue to make sure she can put up with me for another day. There I take my place at the head of the first/1K line but still have to wait about ten minutes, during which I call Avis to book another car. Finally one of the two beleaguered ticket counter agents approaches me. He "unchecks me in" (there has got to be a better way of expressing that thought, but apparently nobody at United has come up with it yet) and agrees to get my checked bag unchecked also. However, he looks pained as he tells me what I'd gathered already: that things are a total mess there right now and it will probably be a while before somebody can get it back to the terminal for me.

I head down to the bag claim area, take a seat, plug in my now-dead phone, and get comfortable. After about half an hour, Mr. Beleaguered appears and asks to see my bag claim ticket again, marches away, eventually returns, says something barely comprehensible about a radio not working and that he'll go back upstairs and use the phone to see what he can do. Another half hour passes and finally the "bags coming" alarm goes off, but only three bags (none mine) clunk onto the belt before it stops again. I finally decide to speak with someone at the baggage desk but find the desk unstaffed. After calling "excuse me!" out into the oblivion a few times, I notice that there are a few bags lurking behind the desk. One is mine. Seeing nobody to stop me and no reason not to help myself, I do so, and schlepp out to the Avis bus.

I get to Avis and am rewarded for my top-tier status with three blessings. I've gotten a ghastly American car (1), and it reaks of an ashtray (2). I decide to deal with it but am stopped at the exit gate. Because I don't have a contract. Because they hadn't bothered to put one in the car (3)! So now I have to U-turn back into the lot, return it to its parking spot, and get the contract. At this point I decide that since I have to go to the booth anyway, there's no reason to put up with an ashtray on wheels, so I haul my bags back out, schlepp to the booth, and am offered (oh, joy) the very same Pontiac G6 I had rejected on Monday morning for being a big-ass American car for knuckle-draggers (its seat puts my knees at my chin, my butt on the floor, and my eyes somewhere around the bottom of the windows, and there's just no way I'm going to drive anything like that). Next he tries to offer me an even bigger Pontiac, and I ask for a third time for "anything Asian--anything at all." He says he doesn't have anything in my reserved size or bigger, and I tell him something smaller would be just fine if it's Asian--say, a Hyundai Sonata, which is what I'd turned in three hours earlier, so I know he probably has one. He says his only Sonata has 33,000 miles on it. I have no idea why that could possibly matter to me, so I tell him I don't care, that will be just fine, thank you so very much for all your extra help, sir. With a look that seems to combine pity and confusion, he hands me keys and a contract.

I drive back to my friend Sue's house where I've been staying the week instead of spending yet another week in a hotel, retrieve the key from the dogfood bin, and here I am. I've been up over five hours, I've gone spectacularly nowhere, I'm still not napping in an airplane seat, so I decide to go back to bed, and later I put in some work time with the laptop while Sue's rat terriers bounce all over me. Besides being a software colleague, Sue's a dog trainer and breeder, and one spectacular benefit of staying with her has been getting all the fur fixes I can stand. Trust me, road-warrior-wannabes, you might think the hotel scene is glamorous and fun, but after you've been at it for ten years, you'll leap at kind offers from friends, and friends with sweet dogs are even better.

The troubles continue Saturday.

Both airports were relatively quiet, and things seemed to be going like clockwork until I boarded in Dulles. That's when thunderstorms hit, causing a cascading mess of ground stops, metered pushbacks, and ramp and pushback crews not being allowed to go out and play in the lightning. I'm sure glad I held out for an itinerary with room for me in Business, because I sat in that seat an extra three hours at Dulles, with a glass of wine of course.

For the first time in ages, I decided to listen to channel 9 (the cockpit radio), and it was fascinating to hear all the frustrated pilots and ground metering agents trying not to get testy with each other.

As a United bigot, I'm pleased to say that the United pilots were all comporting themselves with noticeably more class than the other airlines, perhaps because they know that they have some frequent-flyer-geek passengers listening in. Note to other airlines: you might not be putting your pilots' radio behavior on the air for your passengers to hear, but United is, and you might want to suggest that they display the same courtesy you expect your flight agents to display. (And for that matter, some of you airlines might want to talk to your flight attendants about courtesy...)

While I'm on the subject of United vs. other airlines, here's why I'm a United bigot. One big reason is that United Economy Plus seating means I can bring my kneecaps and both hips with me onboard when I travel. With those other airlines, coach seating means I need to check them. But the bigger reason is one that I've heard repeated many times by many others: stuff goes wrong in air travel--it just does--and what sets an airline apart is how they handle the problems. United has consistently demonstrated humanity and professionalism in this regard, and when I say this I'm referring not to some monolithic corporate values but rather the individual employees I've encountered, one after another. Many a United employee has knocked me out by going way beyond what I would have expected to take care of me. So take today's story in that context: yes, it was a pain, but it wasn't United's fault, and I'm pretty sure that on some other airline (a few in particular), my story would have been much more exasperating. Now, as a 1K (platinum butt) I undoubtedly get somewhat better service than any old passenger, but I've never seen any United employees treating any passengers or folks from competing airlines with less respect than they deserved, and I've usually seen them displaying considerably more. I wish I could say the same of other airlines.

The flight itself was humdrum, service was fine, there were a few good movies, and I got my bag promptly at the other end (another reason to like SFO). Unfortunately, I waited quite a while for the parking shuttle van, but fortunately I got the driver I'd had on the way in, a sweet Peruvian guy who's trying hard to learn conversational English, and doing pretty well--he's certainly way ahead of my Spanish and probably even my German and Norwegian. I bought my car back for the usual extortionary fee and then headed into messy traffic, finally arriving home around midnight, fourteen hours after I'd left Sue's house for the second time.

Grand total, 19 hours to go cross-country. Oy.

Iowa does good

A while back I posted on the subject of so-called "gay marriage." Shortly after posting that, I got involved in an email conversation with fellow St. Olaf College alumni in which I expanded on my thoughts. Today upon receiving a news alert from a friend that Iowa has joined the ranks of sensible states who are choosing to protect economic and legal fairness for all its citizens, I am prompted to post my email here:

14 November 2006

I agree with almost everything said so far, in particular the fact that it's heartening to be reading this conversation [on a St. Olaf College LISTSERV]. I found it especially heartening for it to have been started by Pastor Benson. The public perception of this issue seems to be far too slanted in the direction of "religious leaders object to gay marriage." It doesn't seem necessary rehearse the various reasons for that here; instead I'll add my thanks to him and all who have replied.

I'm not sure whether to be optimistic or not. Sometimes I'm optimistic; I think the fact that so many people are talking about it--and so many people, so reasonably--is a sign of tremendous progress since, for example, when I was at St Olaf in the 1980s. The fledgling GLBT community's hottest topic then was whether it was safe to be "out," at St Olaf or elsewhere. This feels like progress.

Sometimes I view it historically in a different way: the institution of marriage has hardly been static for more than a few generations, let alone throughout history, and I'm not sure that its present definition is one that's going to last much longer anyway. More than a few progressive thinkers have suggested that nontraditional couples are in fact privileged by lack of access to traditional marriage, because they are both free and obligated to explore for themselves what they mean by committing to each other. I'm not sure it's a fair trade, but it seems like a valid point.

Sometimes I'm pessimistic and think we're weaving our handbaskets with so much damage already done by the misguided fights going on at the constitutional level.

Most of the time, I take a pragmatic view, or maybe it's denial: I think it's an issue that's getting way too much airtime relative to more serious problems in our country and world, and I resent the fact that conservative extremists (read "bigots") are so happy to exploit this as a wedge issue, but I just don't see it as being nearly as pressing as the lack of universal health care, decent education, and a zillion other things that our politicians SHOULD be spending their time on first.

I wrote at greater length on the subject recently in a blog post, which you can find here:
http://erinvang.blogspot.com/2006/08/im-sick-of-so-called-gay-marriage.html

The gist of that post was to propose that we separate marriage and civil union into two separate institutions. What I didn't address is this: what are we all supposed to do in the meantime?

I have the great happiness of being "engaged" (or whatever) to a wonderful woman, and we plan to be "married" (or whatever) in January 2008, but I'll be darned if I know how we're going to do it.

We set a distant date in part so that we have time to talk to lawyers and financial planners and whoever else about how to go about creating a partnership with as many of the dimensions currently available to "married" couples as possible, given the patchwork of simple and domestic partnership options available to us. And then there's all the questions around which laws will end up taking precedence over the others. Any legal experts out there want to help us? [Followup: we didn't get any offers from lawyers, but I did receive an astonishing number of thoughtful, supportive replies from friends and strangers alike.]

We also have a pile of questions about what kind of ceremony to create with what kind of officiant(s), since the traditional options aren't available to us, but none of that seems as important as figuring out how to protect each other and make ourselves accountable to each other financially and legally in all the myriad ways that straight couples get for the price of a marriage license.

MacArthur Maze fallout

As threatened in earlier posts about the collapse of the MacArthur Maze, I did indeed get back into the motorcycling game, so here is an overdue picture of the new baby, a 2002 Honda VFR 800FIA. Candy was reluctant to pose with me, perhaps miffed that we can't seem to find her a helmet that fits.

In lay terms, it's an 800cc Interceptor sportbike with fuel injection and antilock brakes. It's by far the most modern bike I've ever ridden. No choke! A fuel gauge! A clock! ABS! VTEC! What do all these things mean in practical terms?

No choke means one less step while starting the bike. It means no hassles with having to fiddle with the choke level until you can coax the bike into starting. It means not having to remember to turn the choke back down after the bike has warmed up (about a mile from home). It means not having to fiddle with the choke during the first mile to get the mixture just rich enough but not too rich. It means a little lever isn't in the way of your left thumb when you're whacking the headlights' low/high beam switch.

A fuel guage means that you can keep track of how much fuel you have. Big deal? Well, in all the other bikes I've had, there was no fuel gauge. Instead, you had a two-part fuel intake from the tank. Most of the time, you operate the bike with the fuel dial in the main position, and fuel ran into a hose positioned too high to catch the bottom 1/8th of the tank. At some point, the fuel fell below this intake, the engine started to sputter, the rider started to panic (especially if executing traffic maneuvers), and the rider eventually recognized the behavior as a symptom of low fuel, took her left hand off the grip and clutch lever (after completing a shift, if applicable), grabbed for the dial under her left knee, tried to move it to the bottom "reserve" position while wearing gloves and continuing to maneuver in traffic, and then waited for fuel to make its way from the secondary intake at the lowest point of the tankbottom, down the hose, and into the engine, which would then give one last sputter and start running smoothly again. That's if all went well. If instead you were confused or clumsy too long, the engine killed, and you had to restart it (perhaps after pulling over, figuring out what just happened, and then waiting for gravity to draw fuel through the hose since the killed engine wasn't exerting any suck). You then knew you had about 15 miles (more or less, depending on the bike, the slope, etc.) to get to a gas station, fill the tank, and if you're smart, return the fuel dial to the regular position. If you forgot and left it on "reserve," you were at risk of running out of gas with no warning, no reserve, and no hope of getting to a gas station. Ask me how I know. Ask any rider how she knows. Having a fuel gauge is so much nicer! Now I just need to remember to glance at it now and again. Ask Mom how I forgot to do that in North Dakota in my rental car a few months ago and she had to drive five miles from her hotel with a red plastic tank of gas to get me going again. Ask me how embarrassing it is to have to ask your senior citizen mother to rescue you five miles from town. No, don't.

A clock means you actually know what time it is while you're riding, without having to pull over or else attempt to shove your zipped-tight leather jacket sleeve up, your long leather glove gauntlet down, and look at a wrist watch while riding. It's sort of a two-handed operation, and for the most part you only have half a hand available for ancillary tasks while riding. You can get little throttle clamps, which are a sort of lame substitute for cruise control, but the one I had didn't work very well, and it's not hard to think of why these devices aren't the safest things to be using. Suppose you have one, though. You can, in fact, ride no-handed, just like on a bicycle, but it doesn't feel good--at least not to this wimpy excuse for a motorcyclist.

ABS's benefits should be obvious to anyone who's ever used anti-lock brakes in any kind of vehicle. Basically, they're the difference between hitting something and stopping quickly enough to avoid hitting something, especially on wet, icy, or gravelly surfaces. In a car this means saving money by avoiding rear-end collisions. On a motorcycle, this means saving your ass by avoiding all kinds of collisions, spinouts, and lockups. The problem with braking (without ABS) on a motorcycle is that if you lock up a wheel, you have problems. If you lock up the rear wheel (easy to do, since the rear brake is operated by your right foot, and our legs are stronger than we usually realize), it fishtails behind you, and if you're skilled, you can ease up on it and recover; if you're not, you'll go down. If you lock up the front wheel, which is harder since you operate it with your right hand and because front brakes are ridiculously effective on bikes, then the rear part of the bike flips around or over the front part, the bike goes down, and you go flying. I've only done this once, on my old Hawk GT, while deciding to test full-effort braking at a stop sign, not realizing that it had started to mist, the pavement was wet, and I was approaching an oily spot. Everything was fine until the last inches (literally) of my stop, when the front wheel slipped, the brake locked it, and the bike ever so gently bucked me off. It wasn't a big deal of an accident at all--1 mph, no traffic around me, no damage to the bike--but I caught myself with my right hand, bent my fingers back HARD. I got back on, rode the rest of the way home, and then my hand started to throb. A lot of ice, vicodin, two doctors, an NP, and an X-ray later, I had a broken finger diagnosed. (The prescription? Use it as much as you can stand. Use ice and pain killers as needed.) Having ABS means this accident, minor though it was, wouldn't have happened. It shortens stopping distance by astonishing amounts (say 40%) on wet pavement. It can slightly lengthen stopping distance on ideal road conditions, but only if you're a much more skilled rider than I am. ABS is good. I'll never buy another vehicle of any kind without ABS, and I get annoyed when rental cars don't have it. It should be required by law, just like airbags and seatbelts.

VTEC's benefits are the most esoteric, but in the age of global warming, they're not trivial. (A motorcyclist getting green seems weird to you? C'mon--this bike gets 54 mpg, which is on average better than your Prius, took far less energy and resources to produce than your Prius, will last two or three times as long, will take far less energy and resources to destroy when it's dead, will consume far less parking space and the materials and energy it takes to create parking spaces, and will never need huge batteries replaced and the old ones destroyed like your Prius. And ALL of Honda's vehicles have the best fuel economy in their class, and they don't even make the most egregious monster vehicles. Your Prius might get great mileage, but when you buy a Toyota vehicle, you're underwriting all those massive SUVs and trucks that Toyota also sells. If you think I'm a Honda bigot, you're right.) VTEC means that of the four cylinders on this bike, only two of them are firing under light loads. When the load increases enough (around the speed limit or during wicked acceleration), the other two cylinders kick in. That's right--this is a four-cylinder bike, but most of the time it's acting like a two-cylinder bike. Pretty cool.

In addition to being an ecology nut, I'm a safety nut. That might seem weird, too, but as much as I like motorcycling, I like my life better. So here's my hi-viz puke-yellow Aerostich Roadcrafter suit. I suppose some people might like this color, but it's not my favorite, and it certainly doesn't coordinate all that well with my red bike. But did you know that red is almost invisible to people, especially at night? This color is wicked visible always. To make sure, I asked Victoria to take a few pictures of it at night.

In the first picture, I'm standing in the low light of a distant driveway light. In the next three, that light has gone off, and the flash is doing its best. Can you find the black lab in these three pictures? Probably not. But would you miss seeing me if we were out playing in traffic together? Not a chance.

More joys of working from home

The kitty-bjorn takes a new form, and my newest boss gives me my marching orders.

Unlikely friends?

Syltetøy, the young Siamese kitten we adopted in July, refuses to be intimidated by Candy, our ten-year-old black lab. In fact, they seem to be good friends. The other night, V and I were on the couch with Candy and Gjetost. Syltetøy wandered up, and I invited her to join us. She hopped up into the space in front of Candy and then settled down on her rear legs. Candy gave her a sniff, she sniffed back, and there they cuddled for the next ten minutes or so, until it was time for Syltetøy to get up and do some more of her important kitten work.

My favorite story, though, is from July, when we were staying with Jane. Syltetøy's first vet visit revealed a yeast infection in her right ear. Sound familiar? Perhaps because Candy gets aural yeast infections all the time. It's pretty routine for us to have to squirt Epi-Otic ear cleanser into Candy's ears, let her shake it out, and then swab out the goop with a cotton pad. She hates it, and she invariably splatters us with the "fresh green apple!"-scented stuff, so we hate it, too. Imagine my joy when I learned I'd have to be doing the same thing to the wee kitty! It quickly became a favorite activity, though. See, Candy is so familiar with this procedure that when she smells Epi-Otic, she has a reflexive licking reaction; her job is to get rid of the stuff, after all! So after I squirted the stuff into the squirt's ear, the squirt shook furiously to get it out, spattering me even more efficiently than Candy does, and then Candy kicked into action licking it off Syltetøy's head. At first, the kitty was too startled to defend herself; then, she realized it was kind of nice, and she relaxed in my arms and enjoyed the maternal ministrations of the enormous black mama-kitty. Over the next couple days, she bonded even more with Candy, and eventually made her her plaything. Now sometimes Candy's wagging tail is Syltetøy's favorite toy--she bats at it just like a cat-dancer (those floppy wire thingies with the wad of cardboard that twitches spasmodically when whapped).

Recently I drained the juice from a can of tuna into Candy's food dish, and Syltetøy was determined to get her share. This time I had a camera ready to capture the fun!

So you think you want hardwood?

We made that mistake, too, and here's the first installment of pictures and a heap of words to document the drama.

We've been wanting to get rid of the beaten-to-crap, never-was-very-good-in-the-first-place carpeting in our house for a long time, and this summer we finally decided to do it. We got quotes for putting in more white oak hardwood flooring (to match what Jon put in the music room, to match what was already there in the dining room) in the living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway. After that we planned to replace the carpeting in the three bedrooms. As much as we like hardwood, we both liked the idea of carpeting in the bedroom, mainly because putting bare feet down on kitty litter crumbs in the middle of the night is nobody's idea of a good time.

About a month later, we decided to go with the bid from Victoria's friend's company, and we scheduled the job. It was to start Wednesday, 11 July 2007, and finish up sometime around the next weekend, 21-22Jul. We were pretty much going to have to move out of the house once the finishing work began, since we wouldn't be able to walk on anything between our bedroom and the front door. The first step was to take delivery of the wood on Monday, 9 July.

On Sunday, 8 July, we were reading the New York Times and drinking (apparently way too much) coffee when we realized we were being idiots. We're replacing carpeting that's less than ten years old not just because we like hardwood better (who doesn't?), but because our carpeting looked like hell. Eight years of hairballs, boy cat expressions of antisocial sentiment through the urethra, puppy incontinence, dog barf, wine spills, food spills, and all manner of whatever comes into the house on the undersides of paws, shoes, and boots had pretty much trashed our carpeting--which, again, had never looked too great to begin with.

Also, a few months ago, we'd begun sliding down that slippery slope known as Oriental Rugs. Our friends Jon and Kyla (yes, Jon the artist behind my kitchen) threw a "rug party," where a friend of his from Turkey was showing literally hundreds of Turkish rugs of all styles, eras, sizes, and prices. They live in the Russian River now, in the tiny village of Monte Rio, and Victoria and I went up for the weekend. It was a chance to catch up with friends over great wine and food, and the next day on the way back, we'd pick up a mess of oysters in Tomales Bay and fresh cider in Graton. Our black lab, Candy, would have a chance to cavort with their labradoodle, Sam. I'd play a kiddie concert with the Marin Symphony on the way home. We'd have big fun. We'd do everything but buy rugs.

Right.

We forgot that part.

We drove home with four new (to us) Turkish rugs. One huge one had particularly caught both our eyes as being a good candidate for the living room--it was the usually hodgepodge of a million colors, especially reddish ones, that you expect, but its background was sort of pistachioesque somehow. We also liked a slightly smaller one that came off as purplish, and similar purplish medium one. Then we noticed a runner of unusual design that would be good for the hallway to our office after we do that remodeling job (which will be a subject for a future blogging, once we get around to doing it). While we were taking a closer look at these, trying to decide whether we'd buy any, Candy plopped herself resolutely down on the mediumish purplish one and refused to budge, clearly expressing her wish that we purchase it for her. (She was to have a tumor surgically removed the following week, and Dad speculated that she was picking out her own get well present.)

We left with all four.

So, back to our coffee that fine Sunday morning... We were having to completely move out of our house anyway, and did we really want to move out of each of the bedrooms AGAIN to have carpeting put in? Our hardwood and tiled floors all look fine. Our carpeted floors all look horrible. Why, exactly, did we think that the prosective new carpeting in the bedrooms was going to fare any better? Wouldn't those nice, cleanable Turkish rugs be a better idea? Wouldn't it be better to do the whole darned house while we were at it?

Well, of course it would be!

So we call our friend Jane to announce that we're moving in for at least two weeks ("Is Tuesday good for you?"), we do what we can that day to finish moving out of the living room, boxing up all our books and CDs and so on. Monday, Erin welcomes the first big load of wood, which the guys load into the music room. Victoria calls Allison at The Floor Show to ask if she can deal with our sudden scope creep. After work, Erin goes off to play chamber music for four hours (octets featuring a clarinetist who's visiting from Italy). V hears back from Allison: the answer is "probably... I'll look at it first thing tomorrow... and can we start tomorrow instead of Wednesday?"

Yipes! V goes off to get another heap of boxes, including five wardrobe boxes for the three huge closets we suddenly might need to empty out. We meet back at the house to panic. Who wouldn't? It's Monday night. I prepare the stereo/TV cart for moving, which is to say I unplug about a thousand cables and jam them all into a box, and then I get Victoria to help me move the BATV (which stands for Big Ass TV, of course) down to the office where it will be least vulnerable to clumsy movers and floor workers. Except that when we get to the top of the little living room staircase, V trips on the hardwood that's stacked in the music room, falls, lands on her wrist, and (we learn Wednesday) breaks it. We leave the TV there at the top of the stairs for the movers to deal with tomorrow.

Now we're panicked and half crippled. Great. We have to move everything we own by tomorrow, maybe, we've barely started, and I've broken my girlfriend?! Not good.

V takes half a pound of ibuprofen, straps on an icepack, and soldiers on. We jam clothes into the wardrobe boxes. The nice guy at U-Haul has kindly sent closet rod thingies that are about half as wide as the boxes, so I improvise and use the dowels from our closets instead. We set out the stuff we think we need to take with us to Jane's house, and then we collapse in bed.

Tuesday dawns early, with Allison arriving at 9 to look over the new turf. Tim arrives shortly after that and starts demoing the living room, and our mover guys Manuel and Juan arrive a few minutes later and just barely get our furniture out of the living room before Tim starts wailing on the carpet. V and I are simultaneously directing the movers ("Your mission is to fit everything we own into the dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and maybe a deck or two. Go!"), answering Allison's questions, jamming more of our bedroom stuff into boxes, and continuing to panic. Allison sees that we're both wrecks and advises waiting with the bedrooms. I propose that we move everything we can fit into the space available, prioritizing the master bedroom, and if we have to, we'll have the rest done after we move back in. Allison shrugs and agrees, asks us to let her know how far we get, and flees to safety. We put the cats in the safety of their carriers, and we usher Candy into the office so she won't help quite so much.

About four hours later, V and I have somehow boxed everything in the entire upstairs, and Manuel and Juan have somehow crammed it all into the bathroms, the tiny deck off the master bathroom, the larger deck in front of the master bedroom, the hallway leading to the office, and the dining room. Well, heck! We didn't even start using the kitchen! We could have done the office, too! (But that's to be another story for the future.) We call Allison and declare victory, run out for burritos, and then move to Jane's in Sausalito. Since V's wrist is throbbing, she can't drive, so we have to cram two adults, four critters, and everything we need into my car.

As soon as we've unpacked for our two (or will it be three now?) weeks at Jane's, I need to put on pit black, grab my horn, and turn right back around for the night's opera. I drive to Oakland, buy self-adhesive wrapping tape for V's wrist, grab something to eat, and meet my carpool to Walnut Creek. After the opera, I drop off my carpool, drive up to the house, and get my office stuff. I work from home, and for the next few weeks I'll be working from Jane's home, which means I need to take everything I need to her house. Fortunately, I travel so much that packing for a few weeks of work from a remote location isn't much harder than unplugging my laptop and throwing it into a briefcase that already has everything else I need. I also take a few minutes to wander through the freakishly empty house and take pictures of all our worldly goods crammed into bathrooms.

The rest of that week is surreal. V can't drive, so she can't get to work in Berkeley, and she's pretty much at my mercy. Wednesday morning I worked in the morning, and that afternoon, we drove to Berkeley so V could go to the ER to get her wrist checked out, and I went to buy groceries and check on things at the house. She learns that she's broken it, and she emerges from the hospital with her arm splinted and in a sling. We stop by a medical supply place to get a wrist-shaped ice pack and drive "home." Thursday I have an all-day business trip to San Jose, returning home at 9pm to a very frustrated V--my poor extravert has been home all day with nothing but furry critters for company. Friday, we make a trip to an orthopedist, where she's put in a cast; happily, though, now she can drive, so we go to the house to look around and get her car, and she drives "home." I plug my laptop in at my home office and work for the afternoon, amidst the chaos of sawing and banging, and that night I play another opera. Somewhere in all that, we also measured our closets and got to work figuring out how we'd refit them after we move back in: the stupid planks that currently support the shelving and rods will need to be removed to put the hardwood in, and we see no point in putting them back.

We recover over the weekend. Jane has fled to Seattle for a family baby shower. We spend Saturday touring closet stores, settle on an Elfa system from The Container Store, and spend a bunch of the day designing it, and then our friend Rhett comes over for a dog walk and dinner. Sunday I run off to yet another opera while V holds down the home front.

Week 2 is a little less surreal. Able to drive again, V returns to her usual work schedule. I play the last of the operas on Tuesday night. Jane is home and we start hanging out together and getting into the rhythm of our temporary large family. Tranquility is disturbed Wednesday: Gjetost has some kind of horrible mouth infection and needs to see the vet; fortunately, she responds well to a ton of meds (if not to the twice-daily ritual of slurping down more meds).

Weeekend 2, I have a flurry of Saturday errands in the East Bay, including hauling a car full of Elfa closet stuff up into my office; back in Sausalito, Candy takes V on several walks between loads of laundry; Jane is off in Berkeley doing dancerly stuff. Sunday we're the picture of domesticity: the three of us go off to a farmer's market and trap all kinds of great stuff for dinner and come back to work the Sunday NYT crossword. At some point I start getting antsy and make Jane unpack her living room; working together, we managed to complete that job in about an hour, and now it's time to make dinner.

Here we are on Wednesday of Week 3. I'm on day 3 of a nasty cold and feel like crap, but that pales next to our having just resolved a tricky problem: we can't move back in until Saturday. Or maybe Friday. Jane has only one guestroom, and she has a houseguest coming Thursday night, who may or may not be able to deal with cats. Jon and Kyla have invited us to the Monte Rio, but Jon's deathly allergic to our cats. Jane thinks about sending her guest to a hotel, but everything in the area costs a fortune, so we look at moving ourselves into a hotel back in Berkeley. Those cost a fortune, too, of course, and only the really icky ones will take our four critters. Fortunately, Allison decides we can move back Friday, Jane's guest says she loves cats, and we have a Goldbergian itinerary of a solution: Candy and Victoria and I pack up, clean up, and move out to Jon and Kyla's on Thursday afternoon; we stay there Thursday night; Friday morning, we come back for the cats and the rest of our stuff; finally, the whole menagerie drives home to meet the movers Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile back in Oakland, things are looking pretty good! V took some pictures of the floors after their first two coats of polyurethane on Monday night, and they're gorgeous. Even though we have no baseboards and its becoming increasingly clear that we're going to need to paint soon, the house is immeasurably improved by the hardwood. The floor guys were to have put the fourth and final coat of finish on Tuesday, and today and tomorrow they're installing the baseboards, which they had been pre-finishing down on the driveway starting last Friday.

Once our furniture is back in place and all the boxes are sitting in the rooms where they'll need to be unpacked, I'll need to start demoing our closets and installing the Elfa system, so that Victoria can move our clothes back in. I hope we can manage most of this on Friday, because on Saturday I need to pack for a flight Sunday to Salt Lake City. With any luck, my one-armed V will unpack and put away some of our boxes while I'm gone. I'll get home late Thursday night, and Friday we'll welcome a house guest! Fortunately Kathy has been through some remodeling herself, so we think she'll be patient with the boxes and general disorder she's likely to confront.

When we move back in Friday afternoon, the polyurethane will have been curing for only three days and will still be somewhat fragile. This means we need to put down a bunch of rugs to keep gritty shoes from damaging it, and for about seven more days, we have to be really careful. Candy will need to wear dog-boots when she's in the house, or else her claws would make little dents and scratches in the finish, so we've gotten her a spiffy quad of red dog boots at REI and have been having her practice in them on her walks. We think she looks fabulous in her sexy little red shoes, and so do all the neighbors. She's being a good sport about it--almost as good a sport as Jane has been, putting up with our sudden and prolonged invasion--but she has her doubts. Whenever we first put them on her, she doesn't seem to remember how to walk and instead prances uncertainly until she gets distracted by a retrieving dummy or tennis ball. This, of course, had to be captured on video!



All in all, we've had a pretty good experience, and we can't wait to see the results and take a mess of After pictures to post here, but it's been a whirlwind of an adventure, and we're not done yet.