Crispy Mister

When we visit my wife's family in Worthington, OH, I usually end up eating breakfast at La Chatelaine, a French bakery and cafe. They serve something called a Croque Monsieur, which is basically an open hot ham and cheese sandwich, with Bechamel sauce. 

The apocryphal origin of this sandwich goes like this. In the early 20th century, some Parisian workers accidentally left their lunch pails near a hot radiator, and they found their ham/cheese/butter sandwiches all crisped and delectable. Cafes started serving them with the name Croque Monsieur, or Crispy Mister.

A few weekends ago, I decided to make one of these suckers. The recipe called for a Swiss cheese, like Gruyere, to make a white cheese sauce. Which means you're basically making the Bechamel (a milk based sauce which uses flour as the thickening agent) and stirring in the grated Swiss cheese. So you toast some French bread, put a slice of ham on top, and pour the cheese sauce over it. Then broil. And, fearing this wouldn't be rich enough, I decided to add some extra cholesterol on top in the form of an over-medium fried egg.

It was deliciously messy.

Sub-sub-custodian: Automation

I've been ruined by automated faucets in the bathrooms where I work. Now, every time I use one of those antiquated handle doohickeys in another public restroom, I end up leaving the water running for a good 15 seconds before I realize it's not gonna shut off by itself.

And I've been known to stand with my hands underneath a paper towel dispenser, waiting for it to dispense already, before I realize I have to crank the damn thing.

I'm not even gonna get into the automatic toilet flushers. When they install the automatic ass wipers here at work, I'm in big trouble

Leaven Life: Sourdough

Yeast is familiar to us for a few reasons, the most appetizing being their critical role in making beer, wine, and bread. At some point, people discovered this cute little trick that yeast does. It eats sugar, shits alcohol, and farts COtwo. (Did I say this was appetizing?)

Yeast is in the air. Many moons ago, probably somewhere in Egypt or Mesopotamia, someone mixed ground wheat with water to bake over a fire. The paste was left out for a while, and when it came time to bake, they found the dough was like twice the size it was before. Yeast farts. When you bake the dough after yeast has done its thing, you get a lighter, spongy-er bread that’s pretty tasty.

The yeast/gas action is known as leavening, a word most of us were probably first exposed to in its negative form: unleavened bread. The Jews use unleavened bread for their Passover celebration. Maybe it was because of those Egyption bastards who had enslaved them. Leavening was probably all the rage along the Nile, and the Jews were like, look at those assholes with their asshole bread all ballooned out and stupid looking. What assholes. Hence, unleavened bread for the Passover.

You can do this today. Mix a cup of flour and a cup of water together in a container and let it sit in the open air for a few hours. Then put a loose-fitting lid on the container, let it sit for a few days, and watch what happens. It starts bubbling. This is COtwo. You have enslaved yeast to build your pyramids of French bread.

Now, it’s kind of hard to do this in Indiana. Some places are famous for the ease with which you can capture yeast out of the air and create a sourdough culture. San Francisco is one of these places. The Midwest is not. I’ve tried to do this several times, and have only been successful once.

[There are also people who think the "yeast in the air" theory is bullshit, and that the yeast is actually already in the flour when you mix it with water. I prefer the airborne yeast theory because it is demonstrably cooler.]

The recipe I used that worked (can't find it at the moment, but there are a bunch online, along with this great article on the topic) called for pineapple juice. This is supposed to create the optimal environment for yeast to survive in your petri dish. Specifically, it produces an acidic environment, which is good for yeast and apparently bad for bacteria. That’s what’s happening in your container there, a battle between yeast and bacteria, and you want the yeast to win. But there’ll always be a little bacteria in your starter, as you keep this bubbling goo going for years and years.

After 3 days or so, you start “feeding” the thing, which means you add equal parts water and flour and stir it up. You’re adding food (sugar) for the yeast to keep them alive, but as I said, some bacteria will stick around in small amounts. The buggers just won’t go away, and that’s what gives the sour flavor to sourdough bread.

Cloud Atlas

It's been a while since I've read a book as creatively structured and stylistically diverse as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

I'm putting a mild spoiler notification here...

The structure of the book could be compared to a mountain, with the first five chapters residing on different altitudes or clines. Each cline is a somewhat self-contained short story, and the sixth chapter is the summit of the mountain. Here are the titles of the first 6 chapters and the style they're written in:

1. "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing"--19th century travelogue at sea
2. "Letters From Zedelghem"--Modernist, set in the 1930s
3. "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery"--mystery novel set in the 1970s
4. "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish"--contemporary cockney gangster style a la a Guy Ritchie script
5. "An Orison of Somni~451"--Philip K. Dick-ish sci-fi future
6. "Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After"--sci-fi even further into the future with Clockwork Orange level invented language (actually, that far into the future, it would be like someone who spoke middle English reading modern English--so it's not an argot but a futuristic version or dialect of English)

These chapters, as I indicated, have nothing to do with each other, for the most part. Chapter 2 is not a continuation of chapter 1. But there is a connection between the two. The main character from chapter two, a young and wayward British musician who's sort of apprenticing with this old, half-blind composer in Bruges, ends up finding a copy of the travelogue that we have read in chapter 1. But that's the extent of the connection. There is no significant role that chapter 1 plays in chapter 2. Maybe all the chapters could be said to have a thematic connection, but the plot connections themselves are tangential.

The same kind of link is made between chapter 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and so on. The previous chapter is almost non-chalantly referenced. That's it.

So, you might be wondering, how many chapters are there? There are 11. And here's another thing I haven't mentioned. The first 5 chapters end in the middle of things. They're cliff-hangers. The sixth chapter is complete, but chapter 7 picks up where chapter 5 left off. Chapter 8 completes chapter 4, 9 completes 3, et cetera. Here's what it looks like using the mountain analogy:

6

5         7

4                  8

3                            9

2                                       10

1                                                11

You don't get the conclusion of chapter 1 until you travel up the mountain and come back down to the same cline at the end of the book, at chapter 11. In that way, the entire book is a kind of mystery, where threads are lost and picked up again, in a satisfying way. Or maybe I should say, they are unsatifisfying as a typical mystery. What I mean by that is, for the most part, I don't like mysteries. They usually get all neatly wrapped up in the end. Things are too tidy. Life isn't like that. Mitchell links his chapters and supports his themes (according to my reading they are slavery/colonialism/consumerism and human nature), but he leaves a lot unresolved. 

His next book is actually being released tomorrow. It's called The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Jesus' Son

Jesus' Son is a collection of short stories which are linked by common characters. They take place in Iowa or there'a'bouts, in the '70s as far as I can tell. The only other book I've read by Dennis Johnson is his Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke, which was a heck of a lot longer. Jesus' Son is basically a concentrated dose of what he seems to do best: show messed up people doing messed up things, using spare/raw language with flashes of religious imagery now and then. The characters have a  fuckall attitude and are very much in the moment. This is the sort of down-and-out-full-blooded life, sans sophisticated self-consciousness, that American poets have been writing about since Whitman.

It's also damn funny. Especially the story called "Emergency".

The title comes from Lou Reed's song, "Heroine":

--When I'm rushing on my run.
   And I feel just like Jesus' son...

At the Window

[Wrote this one a while ago.]

At the window I can see
that this is a good morning
to walk a dog.

Socks is rounding the corner,
high stepping it, his paws hopping
like popcorn in the pan.

And there's Buster and his
busy tail which regards no one
and no thing, whacking and
thumping up the sidewalk.

I wonder what their real names
are and if they just might be
the names my wife and I have
given them. We are dogless
and childless and nameless
for that.

I walk to the bathroom door
and ask if she's ready to
go yet, and then I'm back
at the window, watching
a dog I've never seen before,
a gaping mouth that curls
up at the corners, all teeth
and tongue and breath.

There goes Jester, I say to
myself and head over to the
front door when I hear the
roaring flush.

Leaven Life: Yeast

The first quantum revolution was in Biology.

Physicists first started using the word "quantum" in the early 20th century as a way to describe the basic make-up of our universe at the smallest scale.

There was a nagging unanswered question scientists and philosophers had been asking about physical reality for millennia. If you break matter down to smaller and smaller chunks, will you get to the smallest chunk possible, the basic building blocks of matter, or not? Is matter infinitely divisible? We are familiar with the answer to that question now. Matter is made of atoms, and smaller atom like particles, so yes, matter is made of building blocks.

And energy, it turns out, comes in small packages as well, called quanta (plural form of quantum). It is quantized. It all fits together with the e-equals-emcee-squared concept. Matter and energy are equivalent and ultimately grainy, pixelated and, at the smallest scale, freakin weird. We refer to this discovery about physical reality as the quantum revolution.

But the living world is also quantized. Everything that is alive is made up of a bunch of small building blocks called cells. Your cat, the tree in your lawn, the ants on your floor, the mold on your bread, they’re all made out of a bunch of little blocks, or sacks, with molecules inside. Cells can combine to form all kinds of shapes and sizes, organs and organisms, one of the most complicated being homo sapiens and their conscious brain.

If you chop up a living creature, you will eventually get to the smallest chunks they are composed of, the cells. Of course, you can chop up cells too and look at the molecular stew inside, but at that point we aren’t looking at the biological world anymore. The point is that plants and animals aren’t just homogenous bodies which can be divided in any old way. We are made of organs made of cells, which are then, yes, tiny bags of chemicals.

Robert Hooke discovered the first cell back in the 17th century, and the cell theory of life was first proposed in 1839 by a couple'a German guys. It seems like we don't hear as much about this revolution as we do about quantum physics, but it was just as epoch making. Our bodies are communities of trillions of tiny living blobs. Weird.

Life on earth began when the first cell came into existence. It took a while for single cells to start congregating to form multi-celled organisms, but there have always been single celled organisms hanging around since the big-biological-bang. One of them is bacteria. Another is yeast. And yeast, my friends, is what gives life to bread.