Garbage Stew

I'm very behind on getting my new project started (9 months or so). Hopefully, a blog about 60s-era fine dining is coming. The following is a rough idea of how the structure of the food posts will look.

Anyway, I had a bunch of food in my fridge that I needed to use so it wouldn't go bad, and I dumped it all into a stew.

Here's what's inside:

A cup of Arugula
A can of black beans (rinsed)
An onion (roughly diced)
Trader Joe's Barbacoa (half of the package) (about 8-10oz)
The juice of four limes
5 sprigs of fresh cilantro
A couple of dashes of dried oregano
A couple of dashes of Cholula hot sauce (throw away your crappy Tabasco and buy this now!)
4 corn tortillas (torn up into little pieces)
Red River cereal (rye and flax seeds) (about 1/4 cup)
Balsamic vinegar (to taste, but I would guess 2-3 tBsp)
Sea Salt (to taste, but I would guess 1 tsp)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1 1/2 pint glasses of water

How did I cook it? Slowly on the stove top. There was so little liquid left by the end that I was able to eat it with a fork.

How does it smell? Like vinegar, citrus, pork, onions, cumin, and corn tortillas.

How does it taste? Like an unholy alliance of tortilla stew and brunswick stew. Tart and starchy with a meaty base and a hint of peppers.

How would I change it? Replace Arugula with Swiss Chard and add more of it; replace cilantro with dried coriander (similar flavors, obviously, but I believe that coriander is good for slow dishes, and cilantro is only good when super fresh and added at the last minute), and ditch the oregano (I can't taste or smell it in the dish). Also, the Red River cereal was just used as a thickening agent, so that could be ditched. Finally, any sort of pulled pork that is not sauced would do.

How could it be spruced up for serving? Garbage stew is a very ugly-looking dish. Here's where you could reintroduce fresh cilantro leaves in each serving, and add a small pile of pork rinds to give it crunch and sound effects.

All of the Kids Love the Robot Voice

A gem of an SNL sketch and a wonderful satire of pop music, auto-tune, guest spots, and white rappers. It features Ludacris, T-Pain, Andy Samburg, Tim McGraw (yes, really), and Keenan Thompson.

John McCain wrapped up the most important endorsement of all.

Congratulations, John! I hope that works for you.

Wow... just wow.

A little about Julia Child

A full profile of Julia Child is beyond my means, and the true impact of her cooking on our culture is handled well elsewhere. I lack a sufficient knowledge base to really give much insight into the full impact of her book, but it is evident that she did more than most to rescue the Yanks from our culinary backwater. The first edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961. It changed the world of the home kitchen.

The mystery work that will be my future source of inspiration was published in an edition date of 1960. When I begin to delve into its Grand Guignol horrors, I will fully cite it. There will be explicit food photography accompanying my entries. I will also attempt to provide an appropriate soundtrack for the various dishes.

I am not a talented chef. I do well at following recipes, and I do well at stir fry, and I am inexperienced at baking. I have employed some creativity in making dishes, and I have had successes and failures. Nevertheless, I will try my best to replicate the dishes in the mystery cookbook. I will seek to recreate the gellatins and salmon mousses and other disgusting relics. I will revel in their disgusting splendor. I will recall my mistake in buying and sampling head cheese. I will consume whiskey to forget. But most of all, I will be a blogger with a purpose.

Enough is Enough

Now that Barack Obama is the presidential candidate for the Democratic party, the rallied liberal blogosphere is doing a much better job of defending him than during the primaries. I firmly believe that a McCain/Palin administration would hurt the average American citizen even more than the past 7.5 years.

A good friend of mine has started a response blog that I think is worth reading:
http://enough2008.blogspot.com/

This may be fired up for real.

I just went to the Church Book Sale and purchased what may be the secret weapon of turning a crappy blog into one worth reading. The end result will be "inspired" by the nonfiction book, Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. The author recreated every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over a year's span. Let's say that the source of wisdom that I found for my potential future creations is of more dubious merit than the late master of home cooking.

That title will remain under wraps. Meanwhile, here are the other purchases, two of which I also plan to review:
North Dallas Forty by Peter Gent
Are Faith and Science Both Right? by Phillip T. Windolph
Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition by James F. White
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women by Alice Walker
Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform by Andrew Billingsley
The Rector and the Rogue by W.A. Swanberg
Labor Economics and Labor Relations by Lloyd G. Reynolds
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church by Uta Ranke-Heineman
Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny
Searoad by Ursula K. LeGuin
Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith
Voyage to the City of the Dead by Alan Dean Foster
Satan Stays by Sharon Olds
Moonraker by Ian Fleming
Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley
Solution T-25 by Theodora DuBois
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
A Certain Justice by P.D. James
Ark Baby by Liz Jensen

...and most notably:
The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance by Howard S. Becker (c. 1964)
and
Narcotics: Nature's Dangerous Gift by Norman Taylor (c. 1970)
...because there is nothing more shocking and unintentionally funny than bigoted and dubious psychology books from the '60s and '70s.