GRIZZLY PEAR
I spent all day Sunday editing a video on making sourdough bread.
It would be a little faster to read my blog posts on sourdough bread, but hopefully this is a good “snapshot” of how I currently make my bread and there are things that video conveys that cannot be described adequately with the 26 symbols of the alphabet.
After years of being properly frightened by scary stories of salmonella, I finally got around to cooking chicken. I’ve never really cooked chicken before. I’ve roasted a couple of birds, but never actually handled uncooked chicken meat in any earnest way.
Four weeks ago, I moved out of my in-laws house out of an abundance of COVID-19 caution. Among the few items I brought along with me was a pack of five frozen chicken legs.
This past weekend I finally thawed them out and started messing with them. The last leg (and a couple bones) are stewing on the stove as I write this up. And it made me think of a few things that have accrued over the my past life that led to this moment.
When I was in high school, I got really into listening to world music and Seamus Egan’s album A Week in January was in heavy rotation. I recently picked up his newest album, Early Bright, and it has been playing in repeat in the background this whole month. As with his earlier album from the 90’s, it is a lively work, terse and tight, but somehow mellowed with passing of two decades.
My map in this experiment was the poultry chapter in Mark Bittman’s classic, How to Cook Everything, a book that I’ve purchased twice. The first time, I had accidentally purchased it as a soft cover book, which I salvaged by selling it to the used book store when we left Houston. The second time, was at the friends of the library bookstore; I made sure this one was a hard cover. Even though we work in an internet age, it is good to have a curated tome that you can trust implicitly. It may not have the best recipes for everything, but if you were searching for that, you wouldn’t need a cookbook. This book is properly a primer for those (like me) who have spent decades scared of touching dead birds.
The friend who introduced me to Mark Bittman was Chris Leong. He was a couple years ahead of me at Berkeley while we were never close I still look up to him. He was (and is) a great cook along with being a great architect. I remember going to his place with a few guys while he cooked up an amazing meal of some meat wrapped in something else. It was both gorgeous and delicious. More than the meal itself, I remember watching him that night in the tiny apartment kitchen enraptured in the task, while the rest of us fools were dicking around in the living room. It was a quietly brilliant display of concentration and craft that has stuck with me over the past two decades.
The table upon all these meals have been consumed was picked up by my wife while she was was in college. Ikea still makes the Ingo table, if you want one for yourself. We used it as our dining table during the years in Houston, the legs have been chewed up when we had bunnies running wild in the house. It bears the marks and scars from that time with its burn rings and oil stains as a record of our lives together. It spent a while in the garage while we stayed with the in-laws, but hopefully it is now back in use, for good.
When we had moved into our Hassett house for a brief moment a couple years ago, I decided to get a wok. One morning I popped into Resco to pick up some other items and saw one selling for $10. What the heck, I bought it. It sat there unseasoned for a year and a half. Last summer, I finally seasoned it, only to not use it for another six months. However, I’m happy to say this fellow has now been pressed into service, obliterating napa cabbage to go with a little chicken.
And yes, I’m happy to report that I am no longer scared of poultry. It took forty years of eatin’ other people’s birds, but I’m finally here to try my hand at this game.
We bought a Vitamix during Black Friday and after a bit of experimentation we’ve settled into a very good routine with the bread.
The basic ratio for soaking the wheat berries is 160% water (for winter red wheat, less for white). I also learned that I need to let it soak for a while. Definitely more than a couple hours (learned that the hard way) but it seems to work pretty good by the time you hit twelve hours.
During Black Friday we also bought a cast iron loaf pan. That allowed us to play with much wetter mixes than I had previously done, since shaping was no longer a limiting factor, I believe that I may had gotten up to 110% hydration on one loaf.
After playing around with different ratios of wheat berries to white flour, we ultimately decided that a 50/50 split was the tastiest option.
150g wheat berries all purpose flour
240g water (soak)
150g flour
150g starter
±3g salt
This base recipe results in an 80% hydration loaf, which is well in line with my round loaves. However, we’ve stuck with the loaf pan, primarily because it has been nice to bake in the toaster oven, saving us the hassle of taking everything outside the big oven.
To minimize waste, I’ll rinse out the vitamix into the starter. And if I put in a little too much water, I’ll take some of that water and use it for the dough, up to about 100% hydration.
In general this is working wonderfully, I strongly recommend trying this wet grind method. No need for a dry grinder, and no dusty mess.
The next step is to start throwing some odd grains into the mix and see what happens!
I consider Carl Chudyk a minor diety in gaming. Of all his games, the one I have come to love the most is Innovation.
I had a rotten introduction to the game, a 2v2 team game where it just seemed utterly uncontrolled random and chaotic.
Which as any Chudyk enthusiast would recognize is pretty standard impression by the uninitiated.
The second time wasn’t much better, a 5 player game with one of the expansions. Even now I couldn’t recommend such an experience.
So I just ignored the game for a few years until I listened to an in-depth podcast extolling its virtues. I also had come to know too many respected gamers who spoke highly of the game. And by then, I had also finally come around to enjoying his other classic, Glory to Rome.
So I bought myself a copy and the third time was indeed the charm.
Chudyk excels at creating games with tight tactical play masked in a sea of seeming chaos. His games can require high skill to consistently play well, but the outrageousness of his card combos result the appearance of blind randomness.
There are a lot of moving part to keep track of. It is cards, but it isn’t random. Chudyk gives you a lot of levers to dance with the crazy. All this takes a moment to grok.
And when you do, it becomes beautiful.
Once you know the landscape, moments of brilliant tactical play reveal themselves. Surprise and delight await you around the corner.
Or sometimes you draw badly, and frustration gurgles in your chest as the draw hinder your progress.
But experienced Chudyk fans would note, somehow it is the n00bs who always end up in an extended run of useless cards.
There’s an awful lot of game here. You just need to learn to go with the flow. Of course, you will plan ahead. But the beauty of the game is found when you’re forced to change your plans. The fun starts when your well laid plan falls apart one turn later.
It is not easy to thrive in this chaos. But if you enjoy such a challenge, Innovation gives you both in spades.
Given the guests on the podcast with the same name, I went ahead and borrowed EntreLeadership from the library. The book is a simple, quick enjoyable read.
Admittedly, I’ve never run a business and have no intention to do so in the future. However the book seems like it could be a good primer spanning for a would be entrepreneur, even if much of the topics are covered elsewhere (such as Covey’s 4 quadrants, or Ziglar’s 7 spoke Wheel of life).
However there is one piece of advice that did not sit well with me. He proudly flaunts his “no gossip” policy, which is a fireable offense. It seemed odd to me, so I slipped onto the internet and came across the Daily Beast expose on his exceedingly heavy handed leadership practices.
Then it all snapped in focus. This is a man who has been the boss so long he has forgotten what it is like to be an employee. He has no idea that his position as the founder and owner is a singular one. His perspective is applicable only to himself.
Just flip one of his other exhortations around. He wants each of his employees to act like entrepreneurs. So if I’m running my own little freelance gig, shouldn’t I talk with my fellow freelancers about market conditions? Shouldn’t I make sure that my primary client is treating me fairly? Shouldn’t I “gossip”?
I get that employees should not waste their time bellyaching at the break room. It is better if they bring up concerns to their management so the problems can be fixed. However, that type of trust is earned, not demanded.
This writer has been boss so long, he has mistaken great culture with a populace that has been cowed into submission. And that too is a classic mistake entrepreneurs make.
I recently went on a Kaizen kick borrowing all the books on this subject from the library.
Most were straightforward business books from the mid to late 90’s, before the malaise that hit Japan and mad the subject less of a juicy marketable subject.
But One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Dr. Maurer, was an interesting self help book where the main premise is that very small steps can ultimately be very fruitful, hence the title. It is a very optimistic book, with quite a few examples from both business and historical lore as well as personal interactions by the author.
Like any self help book, it is a persuasive hamburger – it starts and ends by selling you on the effectiveness of of the topic with a multiple steps process in the body of the text.
In this case, you are given a primer on kaizen as a business practice and then some examples on how this approach can be applied to one’s personal life. This book’s six-point program consists of:
And then it closes with a reminder that kaizen is good for both for changing course on bad habits (or jumpstarting inactivity) as well as stacking gains on top of previous successes.
The basic premise is that sustainable change comes from small steps that are consistently applied over a long period of time. This stands in contrast to the “innovation” or bootcamp mentality – which are banking on shocks to the system to make lasting change.
The issue with the drastic change approach is that sometimes the system will often bend but snap back into place – the inertia is too much. Kaizen is small so it is immediately actionable, and it entails such small steps that the recalcitrant system doesn’t know what hit it.
Coincidentally, I listened to a podcast about meditation and one of the suggestions for creating a practice is to just aim to meditate for 1- minute every day. While such a goal may seem ridiculously paltry, it creates a habit and it creates opportunities where you decide to meditate for more than a minute. While the decision to go an extra minute may also seem miniscule, the podcaster noted this choice was actually quite momentous. That first minute is motivated by an extrinsic factor (your previous commitment to meditate for a minute every day) but the second minute is voluntary and motivated by intrinsic factors now that your obligation has been satisfied.
This seems to me to encapsulate the spirit of this book. Make a small step and the ride the wave to continuous improvement.
I’ve been playing with rising the dough in the fridge, and aside from the lost space in the box, it has worked out really well. The main thing is that the timing is much more forgiving.
400g all purpose flour
300g water
200g starter
4g salt
The only change from typical recipe is adding a lot more starter (and of course throwing the dough in the fridge for 2-3 days after the autolyse and mix).
Along with proofing in the fridge, we are now playing with using fresh wheat berries in the bread. I soak the 100g of berries in 200g water overnight and then process it in the vitamix (using the last 100g of water to wash out the container into the dough).
400g all purpose flour
300g water
200g starter
4g salt
This system is proving pretty promising, getting the flavors of whole wheat bread without concerns about the oils in the flour going rancid.
And now that we’ve gotten into the soaking business…next step, sprouted grains!
This morning I slammed together a DIY set of MaNiKi (also called Jungle Smart and Crazy Circus) using Duplo Blocks.
I made three different colored cars (green, blue, and yellow) and put them on red and orange Duplo Houses. I wrote up a cheat sheet using the MaNiKi commands.
So the only thing that didn’t match the published game was determining the goal for the round. Instead of having the 24 cards as in the published game, I took 5 pieces and put them in a bag, green, blue, yellow for each car with red and orange for each of the houses.
To set the goal, I draw one piece at a time. All of the car color tiles are stacked in order and then placed on the first house tile that came up. After the second house tile comes up, any further car tiles (if any) are placed on that second house.
This system worked well enough, though the cards in the published game make for better gameplay, since the goal is immediately revealed and the game can proceed without the drawing process.
That said, this makeshift set worked quite well in teaching my five year old the game. She’s not ready to play competitively since she can’t work out the order of operations in her head, but she caught on surprisingly fast.
It’s definitely a sharp little game, one worth trying, and possibly buying as well!
One last note. In the photo, you will see a little tower to the right. I used that tower to keep track of the starting setup for a round. If there were any mistakes we could easily go back to the beginning to work out the correct answer. It’s not necessary for the rules as written, but a nice accessory for beginner games.
With the two little ones, I haven’t been gaming much. In this time away, I’ve allowed theories kind of harden into preferences, and one of my favorite things to hate is multi-player solitaire.
So let’s say you make a game of four people building their own little board with zero interaction outside of drafting tiles.
Yeah f’ that…and the committee who gave this game THE award.
But Kingdomino is an SDJ and it was being sold at half off at Target.
So I picked it up.
And damn, it’s a nifty little game.
I still doubt I would enjoy its more complicated sibling Queendomino, but the committee still knows what it’s doing.
My sister and brother-in-law visited Vegas this week so it gave me a chance to play some games between chasing the kids around.
Innovation (twice)
Circus Flohcati
Aton
No Thanks (twice)
Times Square
When you have a limited time budget, it’s interesting what came out to be played.
I’ve always acclaimed Carl Chudyk, the designer of Innovation, as a “minor deity”. And this assessment hasn’t changed. His ability to have a completely chaotic game result in a memorable gameplay experience, is really something to behold.
As for the other games, Aton and Times Square are both excellent, albeit slightly 2 player fussy games. Aron is a gridded area control game and Times Square is a linear tug of war, but both games have multiple levers to push and pull constrained by the card draw making for great 2 player experiences.
It was also a lot of fun to introduce No Thanks and Circus Flohcati to my sister and brother in law. Just fun light fillers, easy to teach but with meaningful decisions. Both well designed games, also by Thorsten Gimmler and Reiner Knizia respectively. My daughter even joined in for No Thanks and enjoyed it well enough.
Interestingly, all of them were card games, as were almost all the other games I would have thought to pull out. Amongst the board-dice-cards categorizations, I definitely lean towards cards.
But honestly, my daughter had the most fun of all when we played hide and seek in the house.