THE GURGLING COD

A Stealthy Saturday Night Fish Fry?

It's been a little while, but madness is never far from the surface. Esp if it's your inbox, and you derive a sick fascination from seeing what the folks at Williams-Sonoma think you need to feed yourself and your family.* This time, it's a deep fryer. This is a pretty simple thing. You put a pot on the stove, fill it with oil, heat it up, and damn near anything you cook in it tastes good. Or, if you fry on the reg, a dedicated deep fryer makes dealing with the grease a bit easier. But now, the folks at Krup have addressed the biggest drawback to this approach -- that maddening thing where things that you fry create an odor that is discernable, and may even draw attention to your little project of frying something:

Krups’ patented ventilation technology uses an internal fan combined with a powerful carbon filter to reduce the oily smell of deep frying. A specially designed locking lid also seals in odors while allowing a clear view of what’s cooking through its fog-free window. Perfect for family meals, the fryer’s bowl holds 4.75 quarts of oil and can cook up to 2.2 pounds of food.

If only Louis Jordan had had one of these, he would not have had to follow his nose that fateful Saturday Night Fish Fry, and could have, instead, fried himself a single filet of tilapia, his neighbors none the wiser, avoided the scuffling and shuffling, and been in bed by ten, staring at the  ceiling and praying for either death or sleep to reprieve him from this isolation.

Or, not. It's kind of a drag to wake up in a house where there was food fried the night before, but it's a price worth paying. Somehow, this product suggests to me that we are days away from W-S suggesting that those silicone hot mats make great dental dams.

Mastering vs. Stephen Hawking vs. Sandra Lee

FOC Regina Schrambling has a contrarian (shocking, I know) take on the Mastering the Art of French Cooking sales renaissance. Fueled by the relentless tubthumping of the Times, among others, the summer's hottest movie (the hottest starring Meryl Streep, anyway) has led to an explosion of sales of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Schrambling is unwilling to pop the champagne, however:

The inconvenient truth is that although the country's best-loved "French chef" produced an unparalleled recipe collection in Mastering the Art, it has always been daunting. It was never meant for the frivolous or trendy. And it now seems even more overwhelming in a Rachael Ray world: Those thousands and thousands of cookbooks sold are very likely going to wind up where so many of the previous printings have—in pristine condition decorating a kitchen bookshelf or on a nightstand, handy for vicarious cooking and eating.

In this wise, it is the culinary version of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time, a book that many own, and few have actually read. MTAOFC has a totemic status as a symbol of Child's enormous contributions that one can keep reverently on a kitchen bookshelf. This NYT article does offer the useful reminder that MTAOFC aimed to translate French restaurant, rather than home cooking to American home cooks. I agree with Schrambling that Mastering... is more useful as a reference than as a playbook for actual cooking. Come to think of it I inherited my copy from FOC Rose's Lime's basement, where it was on its way to Lorem Ipsum. More than Stephen Hawking, what concerns me is something like this. More specifically, I would be sad if someone got inspired to cook, got Mastering, decided it was too much, and fled back to the waiting arms of Sandra Lee.

Calling Mr. Kennedy...

Here is a picture of two heroes:

And a song that is sort of about one of them, maybe.
The Soft Boys: "Mr. Kennedy"
My heart's broken, and on Columbia Point. Have a good weekend, and raise a glass to a great man, won't you?

Would Alanis be a good name for a hog?

Anchower, I know. My grueling new administrative chores exciting new professional challenges have had me back on my heels, and off the internets.
But I did not want to let too much time pass before sharing a vignette from the weekend -- a much anticipated wedding had us in the Triangle. In the interests of fortifying selves for the weekend, we stopped in for a Friday evening dinner at Watts Grocery, about which good things had been heard.
It's doing a Fresh & Local & Southern thing, which when done well, is real good eating. In this case, the inspiration did not extend past the  Hatch Show-manque looking menu w/ list of purveyors. It was as if they'd decided not to stock the resto from the Sysco truck, and then run out of ideas.
The choices were uninspiring, and I went against my inclination and ordered the pork tenderloin b/c the accompanying blackberry sage sauce sounded interesting. Turns out, it wasn't or there was not enough to taste either blackberries or sage, but the dish did point toward a larger irony of the resto, and of the local food movement in general. The Watts menu states "we work with local vendors and artisans as much as possible." When one thinks of the agricultural productions most associated with North Carolina, hogs are high on the list. Sadly, the kind of hogs farmed locally are not the kind Watts Grocery, (or the Cod) want to eat. So, for this "updated, distinctive take on North Carolina cuisine," the pork is Niman Ranch, AKA,  from Minnesota, Idaho, or Utah, or thereabouts.*
It's a shame, that either there is no a) local, sustanable non neo-Jungle pork production, or b) the Niman label trumps food mileage considerations in the eyes of Watts Grocery proprietors/customers.
*These are the states of the featured hog farmers. Niman HQ is in California. I have a query in to Niman as to the location of their pork farmers.  

I'm your ice cream man, just stop me when I'm passing by

In its tireless quest to raise awareness of the vagaries of white upper middle class parenting, DI/DO runs a piece on the menace of ice cream trucks. I would have bet a fin that this would be among the most emailed, but astonishingly, it is not. Perhaps Barney Frank got folks jazzed about this whole health care thing.  Being without spawn, The Cod is reluctant to tell others their business, but suggests that if more parents took the time to get to know their ice cream man, there might be a greater spirit of cooperation.
Van Halen,  "Ice Cream Man" Van Halen, 1978"

Oh, and btubs, can anyone explain where and when it went wrong for David Lee Roth?

The Paula Deen Fatwa file

I don't have time for commentary, but I am just posting this link to Deen's "why I love to cook for men" so that it will be handy when I put together the supporting materials for declaring a fatwa.*
*Yes, I am using it in the incorrect Western sense as synonym for "death sentence." However, excited about this:
A fatwā (Arabic: فتوى‎; plural fatāwā Arabic: فتاوى‎), in the Islamic faith is a religious opinion concerning Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar. In Sunni Islam any fatwa is non-binding, whereas in Shia Islam it could be binding, depending on the status of the scholar.
If I convert to Shiism, and get promoted to Associate, I could issue binding laws? Sweet!

Lefty waffles on waffles

What would have been the biggest golf news since Tiger Woods got his nipples pierced turns out to be a bridge too far:
Golfer Phil Mickelson and two other businessmen withdrew their offer to buy a Nashville-based Waffle House franchisee out of bankruptcy, according to a document filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Nashville.
Think of how exciting it would be to order waffles, at Wafle House, and know that the profit from your meal went to Phil Mickelson! Imagine! Actually, never mind.

Mackey Whacky: Eff Obamacare, this is Sparta Austin!

To my mind, the most surprising thing about the whole Whole Foods CEO w/ Ayn Rand health care outlook kerfuffle is that an op-ed ran at all. It is a publicly traded company, and one that depends heavily upon a brand aura. Whatever the WF brand is, most folks who shop there seem not to endorse a neo-liberal, neo-Hobbsean health care proposal that would run NICUs like they do in Sparta in 300.  As such, a CEO who goes off-message vis-a-vis the brand seems like a liability, and the kind of liability the board of directors might want to discourage in the future.

As a private citizen, Mackey has the right to opine whatever he wants about health care* and nobody is disputing that. However, the current WF situaion points to a peculiar inversion of the fiction of the corporation. The corporation, a device that exists to give a company a legal status like that of a person, but apart from a person, has any number of benefits, but in the case of a founder/CEO like Mackey, who is strongly identified w/ his company, the nature of the corporation shapes the nature of the CEO, or at least when it does not, folks get mad.

More generally, the fuss reveals two contradictions. First in the Whole Foods brand. People shop there, and feel good about shopping there, and pay extra to shop there, b/c it feels good, b/c of the recyclable bags, the waterless toilets, the green products, organic produce, etcetera, etcetera. However, for every compact fluorescent bulb or cage free egg in the WF shopper's  basket, there is something that is better, nicer, higher quality than what you get at the regular grocery store. In this light, advocating a pay-to-play health care system is absolutely consistent w/  the WF ethos -- pay more, you get better stuff, whether is lettuce or pharmaceuticals.

Pulling back further, this aspect of the WF ethos reveals a deeper contradiction in the culture of food in the United States, which is that heavily processed and engineered food is cheaper than the simpler and less processed stuff they sell at WF. Much of what one pays extra for at WF is an absence, rather than a presence, in the same way it usually costs more to drink in a bar that does not have ESPN on all 18 monitors.

When Web advertising goes wrong....

The Gurgling Cod wants to see The Awl flourish. Messrs Balk & Sicha are doing it right, trawling god knows what to produce the smartest and funniest general-interest site on the web these days. But if they dig up stories like this one about the reporters visiting Fiji Water bottling facilities being threatened with imprisonment and rape,* they might want to tweak their ad server:
 
*Comparatively, pretzels and 20 minutes of unlimited Anheuser-Busch products does not sound so bad.

Rest in peace, Jim Dickinson

Jim Dickinson left us. We are much poorer for his absence. Producing Big Star's Third would be enough to get a pretty good table in Asgard, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
"Thank You Friends" Big Star, Third.

Jim Dickison sired  2/3 of the North Mississippi All Stars, and  was also the presiding genius behind Pleased to Meet Me. You have that friend who insists it was all downhill after Sorry Ma..., but let's be honest -- is there a Replacements song you'd rather hear right now than Alex Chilton?
No.
And maybe this is what it will take for Jesus Christ to assume its rightful place as a Christmas staple.