Lusciousity

Have you noticed how there just isn’t one first day of school anymore? This probably isn’t a new development in the history of school, but I’m feeling it this year as I gather up my schedules and my notebooks and my one and only kind of black pen that I like. School in Broward and Miami started Monday, school in Palm Beach started Wednesday (and so did D’s teaching career), my one university starts Saturday and my other one starts Tuesday… how are we supposed to feel part of a grand rush to the classroom with such scattered entries into the months of homework and pencil shavings? As a child, I always imagined that as I went to bed on the night before school, I went to bed with children all over the country, getting ready to venture into a new year. I had a mythical sense of life like that. Of course, it wasn’t true even then, but it seemed true. It seemed like at least children all over the state of Michigan were sharing in a single night of excitement and dread before reporting to a new teacher and a new locker. There was none of this changing the date by three or four weeks every year depending on how many hurricanes we think we’ll have or how pissed off we are that there’s no time for family vacations, none of this one county going back before the other. There was endless planning of what I would wear, and re-planning, and knowing that it wouldn’t help anyway and I’d probably look like a dork no matter what, and instead looking forward to a new year of book reports and spelling tests. Most years I could barely sleep I was so excited.

I guess the good news is, no matter how many different ways the start of school gets deflated by random start dates and a lack of crisp fall air, I’m as pumped as ever, and more this year than last as D ventures into the land of the sixth grade and I look down the long cold barrel of perhaps my last ever year of school… but I’m sure I’ll find a way to keep that from happening. An addict always gets her fix, right?

Long before I was a vegetarian, I was the member of my family who could be counted upon to order the reddest, bleedingest thing on the the menu. In my teen years this usually meant the prime rib, but my days as a meat eater began with the hamburger. Wherever we went, the hamburger is what I ordered. Then boarding school cafeteria food and youthful idealism happened to me, and I went veggie for about six years. Then, due to either blood chemistry or pure gluttony, I came back over to the meat eating side during my senior year at Kenyon. I think I’m now pretty balanced, eating meat usually once or twice a week.

This morning’s “The Minimalist Column” in the NY Times threatens to undo all of this balance. Why? Well, just go read it: it’s about how to make a juicy, sumptuous burger in your very own kitchen in the same amount of time it takes to make a crappy one. Reading Mr. Bittman’s descriptions of his own family’s burger recipes took me back to summer afternoons in the kitchen, standing next to my mother while she chopped onions and garlic and whipped out the bottle of Worcestershire sauce for the final, crucial dash of flavor. Then came the part where she put her hands into the pink goo and rolled little balls, but I usually ducked out for that. As the piece points out, for not much extra effort you can lift an average burger to the realms of the luscious, and that is pretty much the essence of lusciousity if you ask me.

Mr. Bittman has a several concrete recommendations for making sure your burgers are rave quality every time. The most drastic is that you must grind your own meat. He admits that this sounds scary, but he contends that you can do it quite quickly with a food processor and that the pay-off will have you converted for good once you try it. Choose a high quality and higher fat cut, cube, dump into the processor and pulse away. Next, have a field day with the seasonings–don’t throw in an overwhelming amount, but feel free to experiment. The lamb with smoked mozzarella burgers looked particularly delicious to me. Finally, when you cook, don’t over cook and never (he repeats, never) squash your little burger ball into submission with a spatula. That makes you look like a short order cook and it mashes all the juice out, so just let the roundness be and work on toasting your bun.

If it wasn’t 9am, I think I’d be headed to the Whole Foods for my chuck roast right now.

There’s a lot to be said for watching the rain come down. As I was carrying in some last minute weekend groceries earlier this evening, I had a sudden vision of what I would most likely to be doing this evening, round about 8pm. I saw myself sitting on the postage stamp my landlord calls a balcony, in the second-hand folding chair with a freshly opened beer in my hand, resting on my propped up legs. I could just imagine the cool air wafting off of the heavy rain, and the droopy palms outside my window getting even droopier as I sat and let the act of doing nothing sink into me. It’s like that Guster song that made me cry when Daniel played it on his tiny speakers in his Paris bedroom: I used to sit and watch the pouring rain…when do we begin? It’s not a bad way to spend a Friday (even though it will always come in second to a night in D&F’s backyard, in which way I’ve had the good fortune to spend the last couple of Friday’s). Not to mention that we’ve been having a drought down here in the Fla, and even a single drop is cause for a minor celebration. Not to mention that it’s been a long week of pushing at things that seem to be going nowhere fast, like teaching jobs and novels in progress, and it feels good to have a night to just give in to what happens and know that it is good. And wet. Nothing’s for sure yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed and the sky is getting darker.

Lushes, summer is ‘icumen in, and we all know what that means… it’s time to start drinking summer drinks. As you may remember from the early days of Lusciousity, one of our first featured drinks was the Chelada or Michelada. The savory chelada (beer mixed with fresh lime juice and served in a salt-rimmed glass) is a perfect summer sip, or swill, depending on the occasion. Diego and Frida introduced it to us during a soiree last year, and I have kept good acquaintance.

Recently, I started noticing a particular billboard on US 1 as I drive into south Miami, one that advertises a new beer from Miller called Chill. The website describes it as “a chelada-style light beer brewed with a hint of lime and salt,” and while I was skeptical I knew that inevitably I would give it a try. It’s kind of irresistable, in concept.

Well, last week I toted home a 12-pack of Chill and started drinking. I didn’t make it very far. For starters, it’s a light beer, and while I have nothing against them in principle and drink my fair share of Corona Light and Yeungling Light and sometimes even the Sam Adams variety, when it comes to straight domestic light beer, I usually can’t get very excited. No exception here. Still, some quality flavoring could theoretically overcome a lackluster foundation. Unfortunately, this is very much not happening with the Chill. The lime flavor is way too sweet and has nearly none of the tang that I consider essential to a true chelada. Further, I think because it’s a light beer, they are seriously paranoid about adding any extra calories and have decided to sweeten the lime (which shouldn’t have been sweetened in the first place) with just a hint of aspartame. Gross! The salt flavor they claim to have brewed in is just plain non-existent. So, the end effect is more like light beer mixed with diet Sprite rather than a refreshing summer beverage.

All in all, it’s a big fat thumbs down on the Miller Chill from this Lusciousity editor. As always, it pays to stick with homemade. On that note, I’m off to Publix for some Negro Modelo and some limes.

Verdict: Miller Chill = unluscious

I’m going to rewind a couple of key luscious points made early in the life of lusciousity:

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well– Julian of Norwich

And when we can’t see how it will be well or it is utterly impossible to believe that all shall ever be well again:

Life takes lusciousity– The Editors

Lushes, of late I have been gripped by life’s uncertainties and have too often allowed that to distract me from finding the gushing, lip-staining fruit of every moment. So for today, another too familiar day of aftermath and regret, I want to share with you this piece by Naomi Shihab Nye and a thought from Christine Apter the yoga teacher: this world has so many bad things, but always also there are good and better things.

I’ve been a little slow in following up on this luscious tip from Frida, but today I finally managed to get my behind to the nearest Target and pick up a tin of Dark Chocolate Altoids. Yes, you read that correctly. Dark Chocolate (possibly my second favorite food on this planet, right after red wine) + Altoids (it’s not a mint, it’s an Altoid–I’ll never forget my first Altoid encounter on an afternoon break from Double Reed Camp in Holland Michigan. By the time I got back to rehearsal, my airways were so clear that I could play whole pages without taking a breath.) = oh yes please. There’s nothing really to be curious about in that formula: it is sure fire success. It’s dime to ditch the Junior Mints and get luscious with your breath freshening choices. These things are just about everything you could want in a mint or a chocolate–and they’re both. It’s multitasking for your mouth, but in an indulgent rather than overworked way. Thanks Frida!

You will love the Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It is a haunting short story about our technological future. I was thinking about it last week when a coworker and I were discussing the relative merits of robots in our lives. Coworker was pro-robot, especially the Roomba. Me, well, I think I am pro-robot, because I do hate to see Asimo fall down, but do we really need more beings/things to do our work for us?

Anyway, to fulfill the nostalgifying requirement I have set for myself in my Tuesday blogs, I’ll mention that I first read that story during my brief stint as the only student in my English independent study sophomore year of high school. I call it a brief stint because within a week of starting my sophomore year at my regular public high school, I found out that I had gotten last minute financial aid to move to the performing arts high school I eventually graduated from. But one of the reasons that I think I might have been okay even if that had not worked out is that the teacher who I was assigned to was clearly going to let me push ahead as far as I possibly could. He assigned me three short stories to read in a week; I of course had to read them in one day. He assigned me a book the next week; again, finished by my next class meeting (I remember the book, it was the classic A Separate Peace). So it looked like I might finally have met my match. But then, right when the leaves had started to turn and I had started to accept the school year rhythm of getting to school at 7am and riding the short bus to the math and science center after lunch, I got the call that turned me into an oboe player for the next three years. Funny how you think things are going to turn out, and then the way they actually do.

But local food is catching on in a big way, and to that Lusciousity says yum and it’s about time. Just today Salon ran an article about Georgetown Law’s attempt to integrate local food into their cafeteria cuisine and I ran across a south Florida blog that is spreading the word about community supported agriculture down here in the third world*… oh I mean tri-county area. Local food is something that I have wanted to support with my very own dollars ever since a presentation an Ohio farmer gave to our history of food class senior year. He was a farmer’s farmer with a four year degree in economics. He connected a lot of dots that I was only just beginning to see. Firstly, the percentage of budget that Americans spend on food has gone down twelve percent in the past century. And that twelve percent saved has not been evenly distributed among other costs or pumped into luxury goods. The segment of our budget that has gone up is health care. 2) The amount that farmers are able to sell staple foods for hasn’t gone up either. The price of a bushel of this or that has not fluctuated all that much since the subsidies went. So while everything it takes to grow the stuff has gone up, its market value has not. 3) The most profitable thing for farms to grow these days are houses. We are giving up our farmland to McMansions and unlike soybeans and corn, they don’t give the land back.

In my mind, all of this adds up to s-c-a-r-y, but there are glimpses of hope and sanity returning in small ways, like the willingness of people to become farmers and find a way to make growing high quality local food work as a livelihood. Daniel talked about doing that when we graduated, and I laughed at him, but seeing as there is a waiting list for every local community supported agriculture collective that I have found, maybe I shouldn’t have. The will and apparently the dollars are out there (even though really it’s not an exorbitant cost by any means, no more than what I’d spend a week on fruit at Publix if I didn’t restrain myself), so this is one luscious trend I’d like to see grow and grow.

*I kid because I love–if this part of the US resembles the third world any more than any other part of the country, it certainly isn’t because of the melange of languages and cultures, it’s because of the income inequality and structurally corrupt government IMHO. I should shut up before I have to start sounding intelligent to gain credibility.

Asimo is the name of my new robot friend. You can see him do a jog here, but what makes him luscious today is heart-panging reverie he sent me on this afternoon when I watched him fall down here. Even though I know he is a robot and therefore just a machine, watching him turn his head toward the audience quizzically yet pluckily while he faces the stairs in front of him made me want to leap through the YouTube screen, back in time, and right up on stage to catch poor Asimo before he fell. See, I feel that he knew the stairs were too much for him, but because he is a loyal robot and he knew we were all watching he tried to do it anyway and ended up a curled up ball of hurt robot just because he didn’t want to let us down. This really got to me, almost but not quite as much as watching the animated movie The Brave Little Toaster once brought me to tears and marked me for life as one who felt true pain for the brave little appliance, throwing himself into the garbage compactor at the crucial moment just to save the mean vacuum cleaner who would clearly never put his skinny metallic neck out for anyone. I still think about the brave little toaster, and now I’m going to keep thinking about Asimo too. Some people have told me I am too sensitive, and they are right, but I just can’t keep myself from worrying about the innocent machines among us. We are a long way from A.I. or I, Robot, but I’m one of those ones who will be passing around get organized petitions and promoting robot solidarity when the time comes.

…but as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would tell us, it bends towards justice if we all keep doing our little bits every day. Celebrate the lusciousness of fighting the good fight by checking out video of Dr. King here and write a letter to your Representative about the plight of Iraqi refugees. 50,000 of them are fleeing their homes every month, and so far the US has accepted only 202 refugees from a war we started into our country. As Senator Kennedy says, we must do better. Sorry to get all soapbox on your Monday, but this really bothers me, and anger feels a lot better if it is directed somewhere and what else are Congress people for?