Prime Rib, with horrible tablecloth.

When you live in the upper Midwest, you quickly become steeped in the culinary tradition that is the Supper Club.  They’re peculiar places, usually on the outskirts of town or in rural areas, in somewhat unassuming and rather dated buildings, often near travelers motels advertising “free color TV.”  A brief revival has sent some of them into more upscale digs, and the nouveau supper club has become an entity of its own, usually offering fine-dining equivalents of the standard fare.  Sometimes, you will find one in a strange part of the city, nestled between warehouses or parked in the middle of an urban stripmall – these are places that doggedly hang on, that were there when the land was little more than trees and meadows, before urban sprawl built up around them.  They hang on either because of their reputations or because of a tenacious clientele, one that is progressively aging.  A supper club of that vintage rarely advertises, and if you visit one you’re unlikely to find anyone under the age of 70 at the bar.  You can count on such a place to have an inexpensive and at the very least serviceable menu.

And wood paneling.  These will always have wood paneling.

These menus are vast, and a tribute to culinary Americana.  While you may see an entry for “spaghetti and meatballs” or possibly some german specialty, this is not a place to go for ethnic or experimental food (although generally if you spot a northern European dish on the menu, it’s a recipe direct from someone’s grandmother and is likely to be good).  This is hearty, down-home fare, heavy on meat and every now and again some sort of cream sauce.  Roast (or sometimes broasted) chicken, steaks, and the less-adventurous fish.  Occasionally surf-n-turf.

However, one generally doesn’t go to order off the menu.  The nightly specials are the main reason one visits a supper club.  And these specials are nearly identical from restaurant to restaurant.

It is traditional, albeit not mandatory, to start the dining experience with a drink from the bar.  This is not a place to order a craft beer – although many places now stock them (especially if it’s local), most are purely decorative.  You get a can’s worth of an American lager, or if you’re lucky you have the availability of something from Leinenkugel’s.  Primarily, though, you order something in a martini or highball glass.  And if it’s in a martini glass, it’s a martini.  Not a cosmopolitan, not an appletini – just whatever you could picture Dean Martin downing in quantity on a Friday night.  Otherwise, you order an Old Fashioned.  Non-midwesterners will recognize this as a drink made generally with whiskey or rye and bitters.  This would be correct in about 90% of the country.  In Wisconsin, it’s similar, but made with the much-sweeter brandy, and usually garnished with a generous number of fluorescent-red maraschino cherries.  It’s a different beast, and an acquired taste.   In some areas you may find it called a “brandy old fashioned”, but if you order an “old fashioned” this is generally the default.

Anything you order will give you an option of a salad bar.  This is a nod to those iconoclastic individuals for whom french fries are not a sufficient serving of vegetables.  One should not approach a salad bar in a supper club expecting anything healthy.  They are all virtually identical – some iceberg-based mix of lettuce in a large bowl, shredded cheddar cheese, sliced cucumbers, sliced mushrooms, sliced red onions, a container of the world’s saddest store-bought tomatoes, an inexplicable container of large-curd cottage cheese, some distressingly uniformly-shaped croutons, and an enormous container of artificial bacon bits.  This is accompanied by several vats of creamy dressings, almost always including French, Ranch (or, for the older set, “house”)  and Blue Cheese, occasionally “creamy Italian”, and for the dietier an eye-hurtingly orange “lo-fat French.”  You will eat a salad, and it will be dressed in something artery-clogging, but this is only a formality.

Some of the more interesting supper clubs will have a large bowl of spinach, and near that a crock-pot of something.  This is the real salad bar gold.  The spinach serves as a carrier for the contents of the crock pot, a viscous, sweet, vinegary concoction referred to as “hot bacon dressing.”  It’s nominally a salad dressing but in reality it’s a small meal in itself.  This is possibly a reference to the traditional american “spinach salad” that originated in Pennsylvania Dutch country, but the resemblance is only superficial – it’s really just an excuse to eat loads of bacon wile convincing yourself you are eating greens.  It is rather brilliant in this fashion.

Friday night is a fish fry.  Despite Wisconsin being settled primarily by German and Scandinavian Lutherans, the fish-on-Friday rule still has a powerful grip on the collective Midwestern psyche.  Battered, deep fried cod or haddock, some sort of potato, and a trip to the salad bar.  This is what you get.  Often a bowl of coleslaw or something will be delivered to the table, but this is just to compete with local church suppers that serve additional foodstuffs.  Some rural places will also sell a fried version of whatever fish is popular in the area – lake perch, walleye, bass.  This is a trick.  Most times the fish is not caught locally, and simply imported with the supply of cod.  It’s usually good, but rarely is it as good as it could be, nor is it usually “all you can eat” as the cod usually is.  There is also often a “baked fish” option, for the health-conscious.  This is also a trick.  It may cost the same or even also be all-you-can-eat, but it is rarely healthy by any definition of the word, since it is invariably served in a deep pool of drawn butter.  It too is delicious, but ordering it will get you either a pitying look (since you are clearly not eating the fried fish becasue of some terrible heart condition) or a mistrustful glance (since you are clearly from out of town).

Often other seafood specials are available on fridays.  The very best will give you a dearly-priced crab leg or lobster tail as a seafood special with or without a steak the size of your face.  This is usually not the highest-quality seafood, but after a few brandy old fashioneds, you will not care and will readily spend the extra $20.

Stick with the cod.  You won’t regret it.  If they know what they’re doing it will be encased in a crispy batter, usually something beer-based, deep-fried, and served with a wedge of lemon and a substantial helping of tartar sauce.  On rare occasions the fish will be breaded.  These establishments are not to be patronized for their fish.

Saturday is, inevitably, Prime Rib.  This is the best reason to go to a supper club.

Often not actually prime, but always a rib roast, slow-roasted, usually served anywhere from blood-red rare to slightly less than rare, you order a cut and just pray you can eat all of it without going into cardiac arrest.  Usually there are two to three cuts – a “petite cut”, which is roughly 12 ozs, a “Queen cut” which is a barely-manageable 14ozs but named such that no truly masculine individual would ever order it, and a “King cut” which can be anywhere from 16ozs to roughly the size of a german luxury car.  Your choice of sides is a potato – baked, French fries, or hash browns – or a “steamed vegetable.”  The steamed vegetable is usually a somewhat sad-looking recently-unfrozen broccoli or green beans, and they are rarely appealing, so the best option is the potato.  If you order hashbrowns you will have the option of the addition of cheese and fried onions.  This addition is delicious, and would be perfect for anyone who has excellent health insurance and/or nothing left to live for.  The fries are usually large, fluffy steak fries, which serve to compliment the basket of rolls on your table as a method of mopping up meat juice.

The meat arrives, a juicy red slab roughly the thickness of a rural phone directory.  Your first instinct will be to search for a garnish or perhaps a side of something green.  This is a typical newbie mistake.  Parsley is superfluous at best, and an affectation of one of those fancy city places at worst.  A request for vegetables would be a suspicious sign that you are not a true, red-blooded American.  Your choice of condiments is usually horseradish sauce (either creamy, or sometimes just plain grated horseradish), something like A-1 or Heinz57 (although these are generally frowned upon), or you may be asked if you want your steak “with au jus.”  Linguistic purists may be quick to point out that this is a redundant phrase, since “au jus” already means “with juice” in French – in this case they would be incorrect, as this is not actually the raw juice, but some sort of brown clear sauce made from meat drippings, water, and the contents of a dry envelope clearly labeled “Au Jus.”

Not that it really needs any of this.  A properly done prime rib roast is a thing of beauty.  Despite the large quantites of fat on the cap and the line of gristle through the middle.  Simply seasoned, the crust is salty and occasionally laced with a few inoffensive spices, and beyond that the meat is generally simply meat-flavored.  It may need salt or the horseradish as a slight accent but not much else.

You will want to eat this slowly.  This is the sort of quantity of meat that would make even an Argentinian pause, and rushing said consumption can lead to a vicious protein hangover.  The potato serves as a nice buffer to the system, and the old fashioned will help give you the courage to face this epic slab of beef.

If you survive, the waitstaff will offer you dessert.  Accepting this offer is usually ill-advised, unless it’s homemade pie.  There’s nothing much wrong with a supper-club dessert, it’s usually a substantial slab of cake or an ice cream sundae, it’s merely that if you wish to remain ambulatory to return to your car, adding a few thousand more calories to your meal is not the best course of action.

This might lead you to believe I’m some sort of an Apple fanboy.  This isn’t strictly accurate. The fact is, I’m an Apple Fanboy the way I’m an Indoor Plumbing Fanboy – it’s simply something that’s been an omnipresent part of my life for so long that it almost doesn’t register anymore.

I learned how to use and program computers in 1980 on an Apple ][+, and ever since then, I’ve used and/or owned a variety of Apple products almost continuously, from the first golden era, through the dark Scully/Amelio times when even “The Simpsons” mocked their near-demise, through their second renaissance to today. Without the Apple II, I wouldn’t’ve discovered that I love programming, which led to many opportunities for me down the line. Without the Mac, it’d be a lot harder for me to write the music I do. Without the iPod, it’d be a lot harder to distribute the music I make. None of it would be impossible, but all of it would be a lot harder.

So to say Steve Jobs has had some impact on my life is pretty much a large understatement.

I’ve never aspired to be like Steve. He’s not really a personal hero to me. But then, neither is Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. They’re each guys who had many personal quirks that made them disliked or even feared, and they probably aren’t necessarily personalities to model oneself after. Nonetheless they each made huge contributions to the shape of modern technology and industry. They may not always have personally been the innovators coming up with the great ideas themselves, but they knew how to pick and choose ideas (and pick and choose colleagues and employees to develope those ideas) and bring them to the masses in a way that made the ideas seem self-evident, the resulting products ubiquitous, and their own names immediately recognizable. There were cars before the Model T; there were mp3 players before the iPod. The singular vision was not to respond to the needs of the market, but to anticipate them; to take “niche” ideas and use them to transform society as a whole.

One of Steve’s peculiar gifts was to not merely make these products, but make people excited about them.  What other company gets major-network news coverage from a new phone rollout?  When was the last time CNN speculated on a new laptop that wasn’t an Apple?  Somehow, he could make the ordinary seem extraordinary.  His much-ridiculed “reality distortion field”, that strange mix of charisma, geekish enthusiasm, and laser-like intensity, attracted interest in ways no mere list of product features ever could.

I cannot deny, ever, the profound effect Steve Jobs and his company have had on my life in particular. I owe a lot to Jobs (and Woz, too.  And Linus and Bill and Dennis and Bjarne, and…). Love him or hate him, cast him as angel or devil in the silicon valley story, nobody can deny the fact that Steve Jobs managed to make profound changes to the way we think about computers, helping transform them from intimidating beasts in the domain of eggheads in the back room to friendly appliances we hold in our hands.

Goodbye, Steve. It’s been Insanely Great.

This is especially relevant if you’re the kind of guy that buys a smoked hog jowl on a whim. Which I am. So I was forced to ask myself this question.

I’d originally considered using it to make a pasta carbonara, but guanciale this was not -  it had too much of a strong bacony aroma and would overpower basically anything that was served with it. However, after a delightful meal at 43North the answer came to me, presented on a white plate with a side of pickled vegetables: rillette!

Yes, that most old-school of charcuteries, that delightful rustic pate of pork. Seemed perfect.

Now, a classic way to make a rillette is similar to making a confit – a long slow cook of meat in fat, with a few flavorings. Since a) I previously had used Tony Bourdain’s recipe which simmers the pork in water and mashes it with cooked porkfat to great success b) the jowl itself really needs no fat added since it’s very fatty on its own and c) I am impatient, I fired up the pressure cooker, chopped my jowl into large chunks, and tossed it in with just some water.

It’s basically a bacon-style hunk of meat, so it didn’t need any additonal salt. I did, however, toss in a healthy sprig of fresh rosemary, some peppercorns, and some fresh thyme from the garden, just to broaden the flavor profile a bit (in theory, anyway. Smoked jowl sort of takes over).  I didn’t need to add much more – I’ve seen recipes with cognac or juniper or other manner of rustic seasonings, but I really didn’t feel I needed it.

After about an hour of simmering, I opened the cooker. Some fo the fat had rendered off into the water, sure, but I was still left with large, tender, disturbingly-quivering chunks of smoked pork and porkfat.

(in retrospect, doing this sous vide would be pretty awesome. But that’s another experiment)

I lifted those into a large bowl, grabbed some forks and got to mashing. It mashed sort of brilliantly. The fat pureed itself nearly instantly, and the meat fell apart. Deciding I wanted something a little smoother than my normal “almost pulled pork” version of this recipe, I hit the contents with a few blasts from my immersion blender, blending things into a nice, creamy-but-not-homogenized pate.  Maybe not completely traditional for a rillette, but hey, I’m already a bit off the reservation here, so I might as well keep going.

Next step was to pack everything into ramekins. This actually took a while, since I wanted to wrap every ramekin in cling wrap, but my cling-wrap box was missing the cutting edge and I had to try and portion out sticky cellophane film with a chef’s knife. This is more difficult than it sounds.

After a few hours of setting up in the fridge, I removed a lovely, smoky pate. The flavor lands somewhere between bacon and deviled ham, and the texture is rich and creamy, with a nice hit of meatiness in there.

I think perhaps there was a bit too much porkfat (Crazy, I know!) in the pate, and I could maybe alleviate that with some additional pork shoulder in future. Also, a pretty hefty jowl yields quite a lot of rillette, more than I’ll be able to eat without inducing some sort of tragic cardiac event. Perhaps I can freeze it.

This rillette really screams for a good crusty bread, and maybe a grainy mustard. Or perhaps a hit of something with chile pepper to cut through all that richness.

(the smoked hog jowl came from my friends at Fountain Prairie, who, while being best known for their grass-fed highland beef, also raise very delicious berkshire pork. And they also run a great B&B)

I think I had too much coffee.

I asked a friend, and I can’t remember which one, who this was. “Oh, this is Nine Inch Nails” she said. Huh, I thought. I vowed to remember the name.

And then I promptly forgot about it for about a year.

Luckily, by the time I got to college, “Pretty Hate Machine” was pretty omnipresent, and I rapidly accumulated NIN singles , remixes and imports, and bootlegs (including the occasionally-hilarious “Purest Feeling” demos); I was going to NIN shows and wearing Head Like a Hole tshirts.

Trent was, like me, a scrawny little nerd who liked synthesizers, had a lot of welled-up teenage angst, and wore a lot of black. I could associate. I could get behind it.

20-odd years have gone by, and Trent Reznor is a muscle-y Oscar-winner who married a Filipino supermodel and still likes synthesizers. Yeah, okay, so maybe Trent and I have drifted apart a bit. He still writes sort of whiny lyrics, though.

Last year, Pretty Hate Machine got a remaster and re-release. The remaster is nice. Very clean, adds a lot of clarity and depth to the mix without changing much of it.

So, now that I can hear everything clearly, how has the intervening two decades treated PHM?

“Head Like a Hole” gets off to a good start, although the drum machines have a bit of that late-80′s “sampled drum machine” flair to them, although that seems to be making a bit of a comeback itself, so while maybe that SP-series grittiness isn’t exactly timeless, it’s at least “retro-cool”. The instrumental hooks are strong, particularly that bass synth riff. It doesn’t sound like much of what’s going on in music today, but it also doesn’t sound like what was going on in pop music back in 1989, either. Where it starts to break down a bit is in the chorus – it’s recorded fine, but the guitar sound chosen is very much the late-80′s “roll-off-all-the-low-end”, solid-state rectifier sound. It fits in with the song, sure, not taking up too much sonic space, but it immediately marks the track as being produced in the late 80′s.

After a brief sample-loop interlude, which has since been aped by every neophyte electro band ever since at some point (“yeah! Gunshots as snare drums! Nobody’s thought of that before!”), we get “Terrible Lie.” In a lot of ways, this one track presaged much of what NIN was going to do over the next decade. Teen-angsty, almost balladic lyrics making some stab at religion, lots of loud/quiet contrast, an infectious but dissonant hook that doesn’t come in until near the end – this is basically the model for many of NIN’s subsequent singles. This one works fairly well, although the lyrics seem even more goofily overwrought now than they did in the 90′s.

“Down In It” was a single that, when it came out, I really liked. “Hey! A nerdy white boy doing hip hop!” I thought. Now, I think “oooh, a nerdy white boy doing hip hop.” While the attempt is admirable, this particular flavor of industrial hip hop had already been executed better (although when I first heard the song, I didn’t know it) by contemporaries like Meat Beat Manifesto, and the song is a pretty direct crib of Skinny Puppy’s “Dig It.” It’s not.bad, exactly.but at this point Trent wasn’t really Chuck D and The Bomb Squad, so it comes off a little stilted and, dare I say it, quaint. I think it’s the bassline, primarily – there’s the urge to add “in West Philadelphia, born and raised.” to the lyrics.

“Sanctified” doesn’t get off to a much more auspicious start. The sampled slap-bass didn’t sound great in 1989, and doesn’t sound better now. The programming of the percussion is surprisingly detailed, though, and the whole song makes really nice use of stereo pan. There’s a lot of fiddly sonic programming going on here, unfortunately overshadowed by that insistent slap-bass loop.

“Something I Can Never Have” is teenage therapy-poetry of the most overwrought sort. I admit to writing stuff like this on the back of my 10th grade chemistry notebook. It’s silly now, but man, when I was 18, Trent was speaking to my deepest soul – and he dropped the f-bomb so you knew it was really edgy and tormented. There’s not a huge amount of complexity to this song, but what there is is quite well-executed. The piano samples are a little clangy, but basically if you added a few Christian overtones to this song it’d be a chart-topping Evanescence track now. I expected this one to age poorly, but conversely it’s sort of surprised me.

We get back into a strange area with “Kinda I Want To.” The bassline is very late 80′s, and sounds a lot like the infamous “LatelyBass” preset from the TX81Z. But then again, that late 80′s FM sound is drifting in and out of vogue again, so while this doesn’t sound current, again we get this sort of retro thing going on. We also get a snatch of an alternate “Down In It” that amps up the aggression. And we get a lot of knob-twirly tweaking of effects – the lead line gets the ever-living crap ring-modulated out of it. In the end we get a song that didn’t resemble much of what was going on in late 80′s music (Skinny Puppy and company notwithstanding) and while imitators have come along since then, they’ve sort of vanished since. NIN basically stands alone in that regard.

When it came out as a single, I liked “Sin” enough to design a font honoring it. After 20 years, it’s really not emblematic of Trent’s best work, but it basically serves as the template for a lot of the more popular “industrial rock” of the next decade or so. The chugging, percussive bass, the buzzsaw guitars, the slightly off-putting vinyl-scratch samples, the frenetic dance drums.it draws a lot from EBM and a squeezes it in with some noisy alt-rock. By 1995 it seemed like there were a dozen bands on pop radio doing stuff like this.

“That’s What I Get” takes us back into more familiar territory, with the cold digital percussive synth (PPG Wave, I think?) and the now-familiar detuned hook lead. Chuggy FM bass, woozy synth strings, effectron-style shifting echoes.basically, this sounds like a song off of Skinny Puppy’s “Too Dark Park” with all the distortion effects turned off. Another case where we didn’t really hear another track like this again but it clearly influenced things for a while.

The regrettable slap bass sample resurfaces on “The Only Time” and while it’s not as irritating as on Sanctified, probably because it seems to be layered with something punchier. The squashed snare drum now reminds me of the similar snare from NIN’s later mega-hit “Closer”, and “The Only Time” structurally sets the template for that track – in fact the detuned hook isn’t too far off from the one that closes “Closer.” Huh.

Everything wraps up with “Ringfinger.” I remember at first not being impressed with this track, then being really impressed and then settling back into a sort of mild appreciation tempered by the fact that every DJ I heard kept playing the demo “Twist” to show how cool they were. This one is well-programmed, but I can’t shake the fact that a lot of sounds on it scream early 90′s. Sure, this was one of the first songs to use some of them, but a cadre of imitators in the interim have fixed the track to a certain period. Structurally the song is pretty decent – a nice buildup/breakdown sequence, to a final climax that caps off the album (with a similar riff to the one from “Kinda.” There’s a lot of little fiddly bits going on in the background that I hadn’t really noticed until doing some closer listening on it, and that helps the song a lot.

The remaster adds the B-side cover of “Get Down Make Love” to the album, which unfortunately doesn’t add much. It’s a decent enough cover, but it feels tacked on to the album (because, well, it is). It sounds like what you’d expect NIN covering Queen to sound like – noisy, distorted, dancy, with lots of little weird sounds thrown in. The chunkier guitars in the chorus are a bit of a switch up, and demonstrate that maybe his subsequent material is going to have a little more heft (which it did, but we didn’t know that at the time).

Overall, one thing I don’t think I’d really noticed about Pretty Hate Machine at the time, was just how melodic and “poppy” it was. It was abrasive and scary in 1989 but it had a very solid pop/rock structure at the core of every song. There are very clear vocal melodies and hooks, the lack of which had really prevented “industrial” music from crossing over into the mainstream until that point. It bridged a lot of worlds. A lot of the sounds sound sort of dated now, but that’s always a downside of being on the bleeding edge – once everyone else catches on it becomes a cliché of the era or the genre, like the Alpha-Juno “Hoover” sound for rave or the dubstep wobble. Pretty Hate Machine, on further review, may never sound as fresh and exciting as it did to me in 1990, and certainly years in now I can recognize the spectre of Trent’s influences looming over the album much more strongly than I ever did then, but I can also recognize just how important and influential this album actually was to subsequent artists. Certainly, it influenced me strongly for years.

In retrospect, I probably overengineered it.  It’s a heavy, rolling clay oven that I likely could’ve accomplished almost as well with a Weber kettle and a little cleverness.  But still, having a nice, big, bespoke “oven” for making kebobs and naan is pretty neat.  A bit of a unitasker but hey, I’ve always wanted one, and this turned out to be pretty cheap by the time I was done.

The first step was to find a container.  A little poking around on the internet led me to believe that the best container was a 55-gallon drum.

Turns out it’s pretty hard around here to find a used, metal 55-gallon drum.  Plastic?  Sure.  $5.  But I’m not building a grill out of plastic.  A metal one that used to contain something highly toxic?  Yeah.  Sure, $10 from a scrapyard.  But I don’t’ want to hang edible materials in anything that sued to contain used transmission fluid.  Brand new one that costs about $130?  Sure.

But a cheap used one?  Not so much.

I set aside my plans to build a dual-use 55-gallon tandoor/drum smoker, because…well, it probably wouldn’t’ve worked anyway.

Second choice for some people on the intertubes was a beer keg.  This was also too daunting to find.  Nobody who owns one wants to part with it, if only for legal reasons.  I guess both the breweries and law enforcement are not fond of people owning their own kegs.

So this left me with a quandary.  What to encase this in?

Firebrick in the Barrel

Whilst I was at home depot buying lightbulbs, I noted that their summer stock of grills was marked down. Way down. I ended up buying a cheap charcoal barrel smoker.  It wasn’t huge, but it was about $30, metal, had a nice window carved out of the side for airflow, and was already painted a not-terrifying color (unlike a 55-gallon drum came with no “DANGER” labels, and unlike a keg had no advertisements for Miller-Coors). And I knew it was going to be safe on the interior. And it came with a lid! This would work well.

The only downside is that being a smoker, it had a removable firebowl in the bottom and not any sort of solid surface.  I would deal with this later.Next, I needed a clay cooking vessel and a firebox.  Conceivably I could use one thing for both, but I wanted a little extra height and a little more insulation for the firebox.  So I purchased two sixpacks of firebrick – which were deceptively heavy – and a 15” terracotta flowerpot, and a few masonry wheels for my angle grinder.Using some scrap lumber I had at home and a couple of cheap metal casters, I built a wheeled cart to set the thing on.  I was a little concerned about using wood in a grilling rig, but I figured I was going to insulate this thing well enough that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

Also, I knew it’d be far too heavy for the measly aluminum legs it came with.

Next, using my angle grinder, I trimmed the firebrick so I could line the “bottom” of my barrel with them.  I then sliced the bottom off the flowerpot, creating a conical “chimney.”

Aside: I love my angle grinder.  It’s loud, dangerous, makes a terrible mess, and I’m ridiculously inaccurate with it, but, man, I carved bricks with it.  Bricks!

Anyway.

The firebrick "firebox." Note: I am inartful with caulk.

I poured an awful lot of sand into the barrel (now conveniently mounted on the cart) to both insulate the firebox from the bottom, and to raise the level of the firebrick to be even with the “window.”  I lined the firebox with the brick, and then with some stove/fireplace caulk, sealed them in place.  With my remaining bricks, I built “walls” for the firebox.  I upended the flowerpot over the walls, caulked that in place, sealed any remaining gaps with chips of firebrick and caulk, insulated the whole thing with sand, and then I was ready to go.

Laboriously, I pushed it out into the driveway.  It’s still heavy, remember.

I wiped down the inside of the pot with cooking oil.  I wasn’t sure if this was necessary, but why not season the thing, right?  Some nice hardwood lump charcoal went into the firebox, and I lit it.

And waited.

And waited.

Okay, I’d forgotten how long it takes to get charcoal started.  I’m spoiled by my instant-on propane grill.  And hardwood doesn’t have the chemicals one finds in your average briquette, so it takes even longer.

Tandoorinferno!

I soon discovered that in order to heat a lot of ceramic up to a good radiant temperature, you need a fair amount of fuel.  And a fair amount of time.  And a fair amount of air.  Once I figure all that out, I was able to get a pretty hot fire going.  I jumpstarted the process a bit with a hairdryer.  I think a good forced-air system will be the next addition to this project.  Once that happened the tandoor turned from a “reasonably hot ceramic grill” to “raging tandoori inferno”, as I hoped it would.

And it stayed hot for a loooong time.  The outside remained relatively cool – it heated up, but it wasn’t accidental-second-degree-burn hot, just “don’t hold your hand there for too long” hot.  Well, the bits of ceramic sticking out the top were really hot, but I’m not in the habit of touching a stovetop either so I doubt this will be a problem.

First up, my favorite tandoori dish: boti kebab.

A pound of cubed lamb
Two tablespoons of ginger-garlic paste
1c of drained yogurt (I like a good whole-milk greek, but that’s just me)
1tsp turmeric
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp coriander
chili pepper to taste
Squeeze of lemon
Salt to taste.

Boti kebab hanging in the tandoor

Toss everything but the lamb together in a bowl, forming a nice coating.  Add the lamb and marinate for an hour or two.  (You can cook this on a grill or under a broiler, I suppose, but where’s the fun in that?  Go build your own tandoor.)

I bought some cheap BBQ skewers, $4 at my local hardware store, and bent the tips so they were slightly J-shaped.  Threading the lamb cubes on, I made sure they wouldn’t slide off.  Using another skewer as a crossbar, I hung them in the tandoor and let them cook for about 3 minutes.

The result was pretty danged good for a first try.  The lamb was moist and done perfectly…except on the top two cubes of each skewer, where the tandoor hadn’t gotten hot yet.  This was my own fault – not enough patience and not enough charcoal.  But the parts that weren’t up at the top were juicy and delicious, stained a lovely orange by the turmeric.  Not quite the quality of my local Indian restaurant, but pretty damn close and pretty damn good for a first try.

More experiments forthcoming.

This is gunna be a repeater.  I have this sneaking suspicion that it might be even better when the meat is freshly off-the-grill (although it’s a zillion times easier to slice when it’s been in the fridge for a day).

I basically just ate all the other leftovers as they were.  I considered using the gazpacho as a sauce for something, but it was just too tasty on its own, so it became lunch.  And then I made another giant bowl of it, which became a few more lunches.

We have a tradition of a the “BandBQ” – sometime in mid-summer, when possible, I like to fire up the grill, invite the bandmates and their significant others over, and chow down. This time around I got a little more ambitious than my usual brats-n-beer affair.

So I figured what better excuse do I have to resume food-blogging?

(is it weird that I’m food-blogging on a music site? Maybe, but if a fiction writer can turn his site into my favorite food/booze blog, then I figure I can indulge in a periodic recipe or restaurant review)

Grilled Flank Steak, “anticucho” flavor

It’s an understatement to say that I enjoy my plate cuts of beef. So much so that for a while the band’s motto could’ve been “you know, flank is a very underrated cut of beef.” I’m also a huge fan of the brisket and the skirt steak as well, but the brisket requires a long slow cook and skirts tend to be too small to make a good buffet meal. (that said, my favorite meat purveyors at Fountain Prairie have the best skirt steaks I’ve ever had, and I horde them for myself now). Flank used to be my go-to steak, but its recent surge in popularity has meant an increase in prices. It’s still cheaper than buying a ribeye, but the days of the $5 mega-flank are gone, alas. Still, I love ‘em, they take marinade like a champ, they’re chewy without being stringy when cut against the grain, and for my money have some of the best flavor you can find on a cow.

I also love Peruvian food, and while I’m a neophyte at Peruvian cooking, I yanked some of the ingredients used to season those tasty little grilled meat-on-a-stick brochettes to use as a marinade, and served it with a fresh herb chimichurri.

Marinade (amounts are approximate, since I winged it):
3 tbsps powdered Aji Amarillo
2 tbsps granulated garlic
2 tsp salt
Fresh ground black pepper
2 tbsps white vinegar
Olive oil.

Mix the dry ingredients together and add the vinegar to moisten (you may need a little more or less). Drizzle in olive oil and blend with a fork until you have thick paste.

Slather that on a flank steak, seal in a plastic bag and try and squeeze the air out, and let marinade for a few hours. (I marinated it overnight)

I’ll assume that you know how to grill a flank steak at this point. Hot grill or broiler, get it to about medium, let it rest, slice against the grain, done.

Chimichurri
1/4c mint (or, um, “one handful”)
1/4c cilantro
14/c parsley
4 cloves garlic
Pinch salt
Wine vinegar

Blend in food processor until it’s roughly sauce-like. I like a good amount of vinegar kick so I added probably close to a 1/2c, but some people like theirs a little more “rustic” and a little more tart and go heavier on the herbs.

Grilled Corn
Corn

Grill it.

This is not hard.

Compound Butter That Tastes Awesome On Grilled Corn
1 stick of butter
A few leaves of cilantro
Some parsley
¼ lime

Soften the butter slightly, then beat in finely chopped cilantro and parsley, and add lime juice. If the butter is unsalted, salt to taste. I use a food processor for this process.

Heirloom Tomato Gazpacho

I love gazpachos of various stripes. From the traditional ones made with stale bread to the more nouveau styles that are basically chopped vegetables, I’m a sucker for that mix of sweet fresh veggies and tart vinegar. And now that tomato season is underway, I’m more than happy to go back to the basic ingredients. You just can’t make this with crappy store-bought tomatoes.

About 5 cups of mixed good heirloom tomatoes, finely chopped. (I used a combination of Brandywines, Cherokee purples, sungold cherries, and a few others that were available at the local farmers market. Basically they just have to be good, sweet tomatoes)
1 bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped
1c of peeled, seeded chopped cucumber
3 cloves garlic
1/4c chopped onion
4 tbsp sherry vinegar (good sherry vinegar is a lovely thing. You can use a good wine vinegar here but…but it’s just not the same)
A sprig fresh thyme (bit of a callback to Thomas Keller’s gazpacho recipe)
A solid drizzle of a good, fruity extra virgin olive oil (a piqual is lovely here)
Salt to taste.

Toss all ingredients together. Let macerate overnight.

Watermelon-Cardamom Limeade

I first read this recipe at the “Okay, Check it Out” blog, which is always a good and tasty read. The sweet-tart mixture appealed to me, and the complexity and aromatics of cardamom seemed like a great addition. However, I made a couple of alterations. First, I wanted a stronger watermelon flavor. Second, I was lazy and didn’t feel like squeezing 75 limes. So this is both a shortcut (and one I’m mildly ashamed of, because ordinarily I’m a believer in the purity of lemon and limeade, so I tend to stay away from anything with HFCS in it. But alas.) and it’s an alteration.

This also seems like it’d make a rather tasty granita for a hot day.

1 can (sigh) frozen limeade concentrate
1 watermelon
5-10 small cardamom pods

Juice the watermelon. This is easier than it sounds. I scopped out the meat, tossed it in a blender and whizzed it until it was a pulpy liquid. I then drained through a sieve into a bowl, collecting the juice (and smaller bits of pulp). A whole watermelon should provide enough juice to completely reconstitute the limeade. So, reconstitute the limeade.

Crush the cardamom pods and toss them in. Let the whole mixture sit overnight. If you’re so inclined, fish the cardamom out before serving.

So that is, in fact, what we ate. It seems like an awflu lot of work, but I did most of the prep work in about a half hour the night before, and even that was mostly “whizzing things in the blender and food processor.” The hardest part was carrying bowls and plates out to the back deck. Throwing meat and corn on a hot grill? A dawdle.

Better yet, I have leftovers. Lots of leftovers. I’ve got gazpacho for lunch today, and about half a flank steak in the fridge at home, waiting to be carved up into dinner.

“The politics of failure have failed; we need to make them work again.”
- Kang

This being a music blog, I don’t normally talk politics (At least not American politics).

I’m going to make an exception here.

This is because for the first time in my now-middle-aged life, I’m terrified of what could result. Even during the much-loathed Bush II years, with his neo-con posturing and fundamentalist approach to social issues, and, well, Cheney.I still had some hope, because there were people like Russ Feingold in the Senate, a dwindling few principled civil servants dedicated to doing what they thought was right for their constituents. Maybe not necessarily what their constituents wanted, exactly, but what was right.

In my reasonably-short working life, I’ve seen bubbles, bursts, some boom times, some bust times. I’ve watched my own industry rise to soaring peaks of prosperity and then gouge a deep crater into the economic landscape. I always figured we’d bounce back. Now, I’m not so sure.

I’m not entirely certain what’s changed – maybe it’s the fact that opinions that 10 years ago I would’ve called “moderate” are now hysterically being branded “far-left socialist.” Maybe it’s the fact that the current crop of anti-incumbent zeal has produced a number of leading candidates whose sole qualifications are their lack of qualifications. Maybe it’s that the current political force dominating the news cycle is one that glorifies ignorance and wraps it in a flag. Maybe it’s the growing xenophobia.

I’ll admit – we live in complicated and occasionally scary times. The government isn’t working for the people the way it should, the class divide is widening, social relationships are changing at ridiculous speeds, and we exist in a geopolitical landscape in which fear is a more potent weapon than any bomb. Therein lies a big problem – most of the current crop of incumbents or their opposition simply do not seem to understand that the world is different, that the solutions that worked for their predecessors may simply not work ever again.

In Wisconsin I hear candidates pledging to bring manufacturing jobs back to the state. I boggle at this, because it seems to me to be naïve. These jobs are gone and are unlikely to ever come back, as long as it’s orders of magnitude cheaper to have goods manufactured in Asia. No amount of local tax incentives or import tariffs are going to coerce any company to work differently, at least not without raising prices so far that the incentive to produce the goods entirely leaves.  It’s a reality that I don’t think most politicians understand, or if they do, they’d rather cynically pander and say otherwise.

Speaking as a guy in the tech industry, based on what I’ve seen, few in the congress or  the new candidates for major high office really understands the current state of technology. I lack any confidence that a group of people who clearly don’t understand how technology is used every day by your average person will be able to properly legislate on important technological issues that affect the way we communicate and do business. The late Sen. Stevens’ “Series of Tubes” rant was both an hilarious internet meme, but it also underscored an important problem – this guy had the power to change the laws governing internet infrastructure, and yet he barely could even grasp what it was.

In a lot of ways, this mid-term election is more important than the presidential was two years ago, because of what it represents. Sure, a bit of the schaudenfreude-lover in me says “yeah, okay, let’s elect these know-nothings, let’s give them a chance to make spectacular fools of themselves in front of the world.” But I also fear terribly what will happen if they do. They have the capacity to make such a mess of things that we may never be able to crawl out of the hole. Additionally, once we’ve given in to the forces of ignorance, pettiness, and greed, there’s little way to put that genie back in the bottle.

I’m rarely an alarmist. I was not one of those guys standing on the corner downtown yelling “police state! Fascism!” After the Bush swept into office – I’m more fond of rational discourse. Nor was I weeping with joy at Obama’s election – while I think he’s a great guy with strong principles, he’s neither magic nor were his policies especially radically progressive. I tend to believe that the ship of state, for better or for worse, tends to stay afloat pretty much regardless of who’s on board. However, I’m starting to think that the rise of the “idiot candidate”, these outsiders who glorify the fact that they’re not experts in anything, not “elite” in any way, could eventually sink it.

I’m urging people to get out and vote Tuesday, and I’m urging them to vote for smart, principled people.  There are some on both sides of the aisle, and I respect them despite their being “career politicians.”  Don’t be fooled by the faux-populism of the Tea Party favorites – they’ll abandon us for corporate interests in a heartbeat, and lack the knowledge or experience to handle the monumental tasks ahead. Things need to change, certainly – the government is in gridlock and the economy is sinking into a mire – but a change to ignorance is not a change in the right direction.

[Note: these are my (Eric O's) opinions and mine alone.  While other band members and associated fans, friends and hangers-on may agree with them - or not - I wouldn't deign to speak for them]

(psst!  Chuck!  We want pictures!)