When I was a kid – many moons ago – my mother made breakfast almost every morning; a service I full-on took for granted. She made eggs or pancakes a lot, but on days she ran late (or just didn’t feel like it) she’d put out big boxes of brightly colored breakfast cereal. Lord how my brothers and I heaped our bowls with those chemical-laden nuggets. Lucky Charms. Cap’n Crunch. Frosted Flakes. Sure beat the horrid porridges my mother also chose to make. So, forgive my double-take when I sat down to a delicious helping of steel-cut oats the other day, deliberately passing up a beckoning box of Golden Grahams.
bo-r-r-r-r-ing…
Like tomatoes, avocados, and yogurt, I have zero fond memories of hot cereal in my childhood. I recall coming downstairs for breakfast, and before even reaching the kitchen I’d smell the distinct nastiness of cooked grains. Quaker Oats. Cream of Rice. Cream of Wheat. Wheatena (the worst of them all). My mother had more choices for hot cereal than she had sons (and she had a lot of sons). It’s like she wanted us to vote for “blandest breakfast”. Mercifully, she allowed small amounts of brown sugar and/or raisins to sweeten things up. And milk. Lots and lots of milk.
I should’ve figured this out decades ago. Hot cereal’s a whole lot better with fresh fruit (raisins are a poor excuse for fruit). Strawberries, blueberries, apples – they all turn “mush” into an appealing “meal”. And the learning curve continues. Rolled oats are better than instant oats. Steel-cut oats are way better than instant oats. And lest you’ve forgotten: anything is better than Wheatena (even tomatoes and avocados).
Tell me this: when was the last time you used “porridge” in a sentence (Brits aside)? What an utterly dated word. The last time – the only time I uttered “porridge” was reading “Goldilocks and The Three Bears” or jigging to “Peas Porridge Hot” (“…peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old…”). My nursery-rhyme days. Porridge doesn’t have a modern ring to it (did it ever?) and yet that’s exactly what we’re talking about today by definition: hot breakfast cereal made by boiling grains in water (or milk). Wikipedia counted ’em – all grain types included – and came up with seventy-five distinctly different porridges. Doesn’t matter. If I’m a kid I still opt for Froot Loops.
You need porridge trivia for your next socially-distant gathering and I’m happy to oblige. Consider the following:
Whole-grain oats date back to 7,000 BC, which sounds like dinosaur times to me (even though it isn’t). The Chinese and the Greeks made claim to the first versions of porridge back then.
Lisa Williams and “The Golden Spurtle”
If you’re supremely proud of your cooking, there’s a World Porridge-Making Championship in Scotland every October. The list of winners looks suspiciously Scottish (i.e. “Duncan Hilditch”, “Ian Cruickshank”, “Addy Daggert”) but last year’s champ was England’s Lisa Williams. She earned “The Golden Spurtle“, which begs a most excellent trivia question: What do you call a stick for stirring porridge?
In 1755 it was documented oats were horse food in England but people food in Scotland. Not exactly a boost to Scottish pride (although to be fair the people’s version was cleaned, toasted, hulled, and cooked).
In Portland, OR you used to be able to buy hot cereal from an oatmeal-only food cart. “Bloop” – with made-to-order mush like “Peanut Butter Banana Dreams” and “Good For You Goodness” – shuttered its wheels in 2011 after a single year in business. I get it: oatmeal’s no passing fad but it’s also no passing food truck.
Your standard can of oats (18 oz.) contains over 26,000 grains. Don’t count; just trust.
The oat capital of America is (drum roll…) Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of most-popular-brand Quaker Oats. Small town, big factory.
Once upon a time, Quaker Oats included coupons in its oatmeal boxes redeemable for legal deeds to property in Milford, CT. Granted, the lots were only 10’x10′ but you could still be a landowner with a modest purchase of oatmeal. The whole scheme became a property tax collector’s nightmare and the lots were eventually condemned.
Speaking of the Quaker Oats Company, in the 1970’s they came out with flavored instant versions of their hot cereals. “Apples & Cinnamon” and “Maple & Brown Sugar” come to mind (“Ready in Just 90 Seconds!”). God answered my prayers to distance myself from Wheatena. Also deserving kudos, Quaker Oats used to own Fisher-Price Toys. Can’t you just picture the marketing division, trying to develop an “oatmeal plush” doll?
I’m devoted to my steel-cut oats these days but I’m not gonna pretend I’m not tempted by alternatives. Cheerios (especially the “Honey-Nut” variety) is the ultimate oat cereal. Life (especially the “Cinnamon” variety) is another delicious Quaker Oats product. And I’ll never get my childhood love for Lucky Charms out of my DNA. They’ll always be a little more “magically delicious” than porridge.
If you’re like me, you’re prepping meals at home more often than you used to. Your grocery lists are electronic or paper instead of in your head. You may even be meal-planning and on your way to becoming America’s next gourmet chef. But no matter the approach eventually you succumb to food out instead of food in. “Taking away” meals these days means navigating an app, a website, a drive-thru, a phone call, or for the really daring, an unscheduled appearance at the front doors. You never know which approach works until you try a couple. Sometimes you simply give up.
Case in point. Last Friday we took my wife’s truck for a service – scheduled just after sun-up. Leaving the house so early meant breakfast would be out instead of in. My first thought? McDonald’s. An Egg McMuffin is still a pretty good on-the-go breakfast, and navigating McDonald’s hasn’t changed (drive thru, pay at the window, drive away, enjoy). I also admit to a soft spot for the Golden Arches because I worked there in high school.
My wife had other ideas. Since a breakfast sandwich was the order of the day she wanted Einstein Brothers Bagels, and with good reason. Einstein’s offers a choice of five “classic” breakfast sandwiches and another seven “signature” specials: twelve different spins on bagels and eggs. While Egg McMuffins are assembled from just four mass-produced ingredients, Einstein’s creations are made-to-order adventures with options like chorizo, avocado, spinach, and mushrooms. If the choice is Einstein’s or McDonald’s it’s a no-brainer. Except now.
“Save time?” I beg to differ.
Not knowing Einstein’s take-away approach during COVID, I parked in front of the restaurant while my wife went inside to place the order. Nope. Einstein’s allows two options: DoorDash or order from the app. Well blast my bagels – DoorDash doesn’t even deliver to our neighborhood so it was either the app or go hungry. Fine. A quick download and I went in search of the “Order” button. Nope. Einstein’s wants an account first – phone number, email, birthday, credit card, and so on. Fine. At last we assembled our on-line order and I went in search of the “Pay” button. Nope. Einstein’s makes you bank a minimum balance first (and welcome to “Shmear Society Rewards”). Really? A cash reserve for a breakfast sandwich? Once and for all, nope. I X’d out of the app, deleted it from my phone, and left a skid mark or two as I accelerated away.
“McDelivery?” Not necessary.
McDonald’s was also on the way home, a couple miles up the road. We didn’t have their app either but so what? Order at the drive-thru, pay at the window, drive away with an Egg McMuffin, enjoy. We even splurged on hash browns (and an order of breakfast sausage for the dog). A McDonald’s breakfast for two people and a pet costs far less than a similar order at Einstein’s. Was my Egg McMuffin forgettable? Yes. Did I consume my sandwich within minutes of leaving the restaurant? Yes (today’s Egg McMuffin is smaller than your palm). Did I wish I’d had a custom-made Einstein’s instead? Of course. But not if I must jump through a bunch of electronic hoops to get one.
I want to support restaurants through the COVID pandemic; I really do. Our favorite Mexican place has nothing electronic, so you just place a phone order and take-away fifteen minutes later. Our favorite coffeehouse is a converted bank, so it’s drive-thru, pay, and go, lickety-split. That’s all I’m asking for: simple process, no hoops.
Einstein’s theory of relativity assumes accelerated motion (say, a car pulling away from a restaurant with an order of food). Einstein’s Bagels requires decelerated motion (say, the unanticipated time to download, setup, and bank-load their app). Take your pick: Einstein’s approach or Einstein Brothers’ approach? For me, it’s Albert’s way every time.
Our church is weighing creative approaches to conducting in-person services next month. Pastor Bob sent out a survey recently asking we-the-congregation to consider options like outdoor church, weekday church, and evening church – all in the name of social distancing. We’ll also be shaking up the service “touchpoints”, like sharing the peace, passing the (offering) plate, and partaking in communion. The Big Guy doesn’t care about the where’s, when’s, and how’s, of course – just that we have church. On the other hand, He (She?) might have something to say about the music. After all, how does a church organ sound after a three-month absence from tuning?
It’s bad enough our congregation is gloriously inharmonious when we bellow out the hymns (no choir of angels are we), but add in a fully discordant church organ and you have a complete mess. Organs need tuning like the human back needs a chiropractor: maintenance is key. When dust accumulates and seasons change, organ pipes sound noticeably different than they’re supposed to (hence the term “off-key”). Imagine the pitch-perfect tones of a bass saxophone, but instead you get more of a sour wail. That’s an organ pipe sans “tune-up”.
Every one needs tuning
Tuning organ pipes is serious business and can run thousands of dollars per visit. Consider, the biggest organs have as many as 25,000 pipes. The booming bass pipes can be thirty feet long and two feet in diameter, while the little pixie sopranos look more like metal soda straws. Each pipe must be individually tested and tuned no matter how big or small. Tuner A presses a key on the (up to four) keyboards down below, while Tuner B adjusts the pitch of the pipe up above (sometimes on a ladder, sometimes on a suspended platform). It’s hours and hours of monotonous – and in the case of cathedrals, death-defying work, one demanding pipe at a time. Better love what you do.
Here’s another reason organ tuners deserve hazard pay. Imagine you’re suspended hundreds of feet above the sanctuary floor on a swaying rope-suspended platform (I’m already saying “no”), virtually floating like the angels, and as you reach over to adjust the pitch of a mid-sized pipe, bats fly out. Yep, that’s the kind of critters tuners encounter when an organ wants for too long (or a single pipe sounds suspiciously out-of-tune). Squirrels even make their homes in the pipes – though don’t ask me how they don’t go plummeting to their death the moment a note is blasted from the keyboard. Maybe they’re flying squirrels?
The view from above
In the land of COVID-19 there are no organ tuners (or very few). Those Peter Pipers are being denied access to their church-bound “patients” because a) COVID may reside on a surface like, say, a keyboard, and b) no congregation means no offering plate means precious few payments to the Piper. So what do stay-at-home tuners do instead? Why, they tune their pianos of course! Then they play those pianos hours on end. We may come out of COVID with a whole new genre of classical music called “tuner tunes”.
Talk about a sprint from feast to famine. An organ tuner’s busiest weeks are those leading up to Easter, often requiring extra staff and longer hours. COVID downpoured on that parade. Demand for pre-Easter tuning disappeared faster than Mr. Bunny himself. In the case of one tuner – profiled in the Wall Street Journal – 100 contracts withered to less than a dozen inside of two weeks. He furloughed his entire workforce, worried instead over simply paying the rent on his shop.
One day soon, we faithful will walk away from our laptops and wander back into church sanctuaries instead. We’ll spread out over more services. We’ll wave hands instead of shake hands. We’ll drop the offering into the plate from a “safe height”. We’ll bypass communion servers and help ourselves to the bread and wine instead. The organist will play and the congregation will sing; both noticeably off-key. And when that happens give a nod to the organ tuners, who will someday get the pipes pitch-perfect again.
Just hope they don’t need an exterminator as well.
Some content sourced from the 3/25/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “As Coronavirus Shutters Churches, an Organ Whisperer Changes Key”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
When I was ten years old, the progressive rock band “Yes” released an unforgettable song called “Roundabout”. The lyrics included trippy phrases like, “… mountains come out of the sky and they stand there…”, and, “… go closer hold the land feel partly no more than grains of sand…” The words made no sense but the melody hooked me with its driving beat and wandering synthesizer. “Roundabout” and “Stairway to Heaven” – both released in 1971 – are perfect examples of my rock music baptism.
Turns out, “Roundabout” was not a metaphor for the song’s underlying message nor even a made-up word. The lyrics really were spawned from an overdose of traffic circles. Yes was on tour and traveling from Aberdeen to Glasgow when its lead singer Jon Anderson says their van passed through “maybe 40 or so” roundabouts. Anderson promptly teamed up with guitarist Steve Howe to produce one of Yes’s biggest hits. Wikipedia dedicates an entire article to “Roundabout” here.
A “roundabout” (in the UK, of course)
Fifty years forward, roundabouts are more prevalent than ever on our city streets – and in some setups, as mind-boggling to navigate as a Yessong lyric. In a neighborhood near my house, I pass through three consecutive roundabouts to get to a friend’s house. Each has two lanes entering and exiting the circle from four directions. If I’m not conscious of the lane I’m in when I enter a circle, I’ll find myself going round and round before I remember it’s safe to exit from both lanes. If I lose track of which circle I’m in (all three look entirely alike), I’ll exit onto a street nowhere near my friend’s house.
A “rotary”
You’d think we’d have them figured out by now since roundabouts first appeared in 1966 and have proliferated ever since. (By definition, we’re talking about circles tight enough to induce centrifugal force, not the more leisurely curves of an urban “rotary”.) The Wall Street Journal reports traffic authorities still toy with public awareness campaigns, signage, and modified roadway designs in an almost desperate effort to reduce roundabout fender-benders.
Here are two lingering oversights with the rules of roundabouts. First, drivers entering the circle sometimes assume they have the right-of-way over drivers already in the circle. Second, drivers approaching a two-lane roundabout don’t check signage to see whether one or both lanes also exit the roundabout. On the latter problem, I admit to several instances where I had to quickly change lanes while circling, just to exit where I needed to. Changing lanes in a roundabout ranks among the scariest driving maneuvers of them all.
Not in this lifetime
Roundabouts really do make a lot of sense, even if drivers never, ever figure them out. They eliminate electronic signal systems or stop signs. They create a safer environment for pedestrians (who only have to look one direction for oncoming traffic instead of three). They force vehicles to slow down, and statistics show a dramatic reduction in the number of T-bone and head-on collisions. Finally, roundabouts require less asphalt to create a new intersection, and are sometimes enhanced with an eye-pleasing landscaped island in the center.
Look closely and you’ll see (all four) Bristol Circles
The first time I ever drove in circles was in West Los Angeles. A street known as “Bristol Avenue” earned the nickname “Bristol Circles” by teenage drivers in the neighborhood. That’s because Bristol’s four rotaries allowed for a lively game of “car tag”, where my friends and I would zoom around trying to “tag” each other with the headlights of our cars. If we were really daring (i.e stupid), we included the topmost of Bristol’s four circles, which is bisected by busy, unpredictable Sunset Blvd.
Cities in the northeastern states of the U.S. have some pretty good-sized rotaries these days but for the really daring, it’s hard to beat the giant urban circles in France or the tighter many-tentacled roundabouts in the UK. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe rotary may deserve the title “most vicious circle”. Watch the following video and see if you don’t agree. This rotary may be the genesis of the term “distracted driving”. Note to viewer: no lanes. Note to self: no thanks.
Some content sourced from the 3/14/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “Car Crash Mystery: Why Can’t Drivers Figure Out Roundabouts?” and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
Thanks to several weeks of mandated “stay-at-home” here in Colorado, my wife and I limit our trips to the grocery store to every ten days or so. In turn, we’re digging deeper into our freezer, discovering a rather exotic world of forgotten foods. We found a box of gourmet croissants the other day that hadn’t quite earned their expiration date (score!) We also found ingredients to a “healthy” dog food recipe, which will probably never become dog food. But mostly we’re unearthing frozen vegetables; the ones passed over for months (years?) in favor of peas and carrots. And now that we’re out of peas and carrots? Suddenly we’re eating more cauliflower. Cauliflower?
flower power
Here’s my earliest nightmare memory of cauliflower; maybe yours too. 1) steam the florets fresh in a big pot. 2) sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese on top. 3) call it good. News flash: cauliflower isn’t good that way – not at all. It’s just colorless and tasteless, and I remember thinking what in God’s name am I eating here – tree roots? In my childhood evaluation, cauliflower rated below spinach and broccoli. Miles below peas and carrots.
Today’s cauliflower is a whole different animal (er, vegetable). It’s being described as “the new kale”. You see, someone discovered how to “rice” cauliflower a few years ago and suddenly it’s a trendsetting side dish. Someone else discovered how to make crust out of cauliflower and suddenly it’s an option for pizzas. Cauliflower’s popularity surge is probably because of what it doesn’t offer. 85% fewer calories than white rice. 23 times fewer carbohydrates than a wheat pizza crust. There’s even a vegan form of Gruyère cheese out there, with cauliflower as the main ingredient. Keto and Paleo fans are flocking to this great imposter.
The data backs up the newfound power in the flower. Sales of cauliflower are up 40% in the last four years. We’re now buying less cabbage and garlic than cauliflower (in my case, way-y-y-y less cabbage). Cauliflower’s green leaves are the latest addition to salad bars. Aldi, the German company with a delicious cheesy-cauliflower rice (more cheese, less flower), claims it’s now its top-selling product. Aldi capitalizes on this volley of cauli with other products, like tortilla chips and gnocchi. Tortilla chips made out of cauliflower? Now that’s just wrong, people.
THIS is how you eat Brussel sprouts
Cauliflower falls under the same veggie species as the Brussel sprout (as well as broccoli, cabbage, and kale), and I think those little green buds deserve a debt of gratitude. Brussel sprouts may be the original edgy veggie. Back in the day, Mom prepared them the same way as cauliflower (and the same way she prepared every other legume in the world) – steamed with a sprinkle of canned cheese. They were awful. But years later we have sliced and diced Brussel sprouts buried within liberal helpings of grilled bacon and onions. Genius. It’s like you’re only eating bacon and onions, with a slight aftertaste of Brussel sprouts.
Taken the same way, cauliflower now lands on my “consumables” list. I prefer the riced version with cheese (cheese makes everything better). The hybrid pizza crusts aren’t too bad, like cauliflower with cornmeal. Maybe I’ll even give the vegan Gruyère a try. In other words, as long as cauliflower is an ingredient – not the whole enchilada – I’ll bite.
Kale may now be passé, with white becoming the new green (although cauliflower also comes in orange, green, and purple). Take your pick: roasted, grilled, fried, steamed (aka boring), pickled, or raw. Plant cauliflower seeds in your garden and you’ll have full heads in 30 days or less. With all this demand for stand-in veggies, your next bite may beg the question, “is it flour or is it flower“?
Some content sourced from the 3/4/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “‘The New Kale'”: Cauliflower Becomes a Bestseller”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
St. Brigid’s Cathedral dominates the quaint urban landscape of Kildare Town in central Ireland. The centuries-old stone church beckons the short walk up the hill from the village square, for a tour around Brigid’s domain. And while you’re on the grounds, you’ll be tempted to climb the adjacent tower for a bird’s eye view of the surrounding county. I assure you; the vistas are breathtaking.
A bird’s eye view from my own locale would be just as breathtaking right about now. In the last ten days, I’ve ventured beyond my driveway once, for a mundane grocery shop at the local market. For all I know, nearby Colorado Springs has been erased from the map. For all I know, all my neighbors in the surrounding county traveled to a tropical island where they’re making merry, while I’m left to keep an eye on things back here at home. Who nominated me for that job?
Proceed with caution!The tower “stairs”
No kidding, the view from the tower at St. Brigid’s is spectacular. Not only do you see all of Kildare Town below, but you’ll be mesmerized by the lush green acreage of the adjacent Irish National Stud (and its countless roaming thoroughbred horses). When my wife and I visited several years ago, targeting Kildare Town to see the cathedral of her namesake saint, I figured light a few candles and say a few prayers; not climb a ten-story tower. I have a mild fear of heights so you can imagine my trepidation. And here’s the kicker: there’s no code-sanctioned, easy-to-navigate stairwell within the tower. Instead, you hand over a couple of Euros for the privilege of climbing a dozen ladders to the top. I almost called it quits after the first few rungs.
My longing to “rise above it all” today is not just inspired by the pandemic, nor even my acrophobia-be-damned adventure up the tower at St. Brigid’s. I also think about nearby Pikes Peak, the highest of the Rocky Mountains in this part of Colorado. “America’s Mountain” tops out at 14,115 feet, and I’ve hiked to the summit several times (the trail begins at 6,000 feet). You begin the journey on a series of easy switch-backing trails, which then give way to a remarkably gentle incline through a forest of Ponderosa pines. For several miles under the treetops, you have no orientation to suggest you’re even climbing a majestic mountain. But once you hit the tree line, everything upwards is a moonscape: rocks and dirt and scrub brush all the way up to the summit. The view is stunning; as if you’re looking down from space. You can see clear to Wyoming to the north and Kansas to the east.
Pikes Peak, through Garden of the Gods
I could use a mountain (or a ladder-filled tower) on my property right about now, just to connect with the world around me. Oh sure, rural living means the stay-at-home rules are a minor inconvenience, but it’d sure be nice to confirm someone else is out there. The local news shows human interest stories every night on TV, but c’mon, how many of us trust the media these days?
Here’s my very favorite climb-ev’ry-mountain memory. I grew up in a narrow canyon on the outskirts of Los Angeles; so narrow in fact, some stretches could only accommodate a single row of houses on one side of a winding two-lane road. Biking with the cars was taking your life in your own hands, as was scaling the canyon trails into the domains of rattlesnakes and other wildlife.
Lucky for me, a steeply rising network of paved residential streets branched off the canyon floor less than a mile south of our house. On foot, those streets became a kid’s adventure up and out of the isolation. I’d stock a daypack with cheese sandwiches, Pop-Tarts, and anything else I could pilfer from the pantry. Some days I’d go it alone; others I’d drag my brother with me. Up, up, up we’d climb, rising breathless until we could peer almost straight back down to the canyon floor below. The final stretch of the topmost street – with houses perched precariously along on its edges – afforded a view of Los Angeles and the nearby Pacific Ocean like none I’ve seen to this day. There I’d sit, munching snacks, wondering what all I was missing down there in the big city.
Today it’s the same feeling, only different. What am I missing out there in the big city? Is Wyoming still to the north and Kansas to the east? Are cadets still at the Air Force Academy, anticipating this weekend’s socially-distanced graduation ceremony? Have the majestic red rocks of Garden of the Gods finally crumbled? Truthfully, I can’t answer any of these questions, not while I’m stay-at-home. But at least I can see the summit of Pikes Peak from here. At least I’m confident St. Brigid’s Cathedral still stands in Kildare Town (Notre Dame in Paris, maybe not so much). And at least I can revisit fond memories, the kind I never thought I’d yearn for again. On that note, think I’ll make a cheese sandwich.
In the midway of the wonderful San Diego Zoo Safari Park in California, you’ll find a colorful attraction called the “Conservation Carousel”. Unlike traditional carousels teaming with horses, the Safari Park merry-go-round boasts giraffes, rhinos, zebras, cheetahs, and other “rare and endangered creatures”, just waiting to be taken for a spin. It’s a full-on circle of animals. It’s like riding a zodiac.
Wheel of Fortune
Speaking of the zodiac, what’s your sign? I’m an Aquarius (born in late January), which makes me water-bearer to the gods. As much as I don’t subscribe to horoscopic astrology – a visual representation of the heavens to interpret the inherent meaning of life – I can’t deny water’s played a significant role in my world. I spent childhood summers in the Pacific Ocean and the backyard pool. I lazed away hours in Northern California’s Lake Tahoe, swimming and water-skiing. I enjoy a lively display of water, whether Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls or the fountains of Vegas’s Bellagio Hotel. A gentle rain is nature’s therapy.
He’s not as great as he looks…
But then there’s the hell-or-high-water side of things. Literally since our wedding night (when my bride and I awoke to dripping from the bed-and-breakfast room above us), the two of us have endured all manner of water problems. A fully flooded basement. A backed-up septic system. Drinking water with a PH so out-of-whack we had to install a conditioner and a neutralizer. Our well water quit pumping one time – for days – when a squirrel chewed through the electrical connection. It’s like those gods have nothing better to do up there than play games with their little water-bearer down here on Earth. If it were up to me I’d spin the zodiac wheel and land on another space instead.
Turns out my wish may have already been granted. According to the Wall Street Journal, the earth maintains a wobble in its orbit around the sun, caused by gravitational pull on its not-so-perfectly-round midsection. That wobble (called “precession”) – projected over the last several thousand years – shifted the alignment of the Earth with the zodiac constellations as the Sun passes through them. Long story short, everything astrological advances one month on the calendar. In other words, you rams out there (Aries) are actually fishes (Pisces). You maidens (Virgo) are now lions (Leo). And us water-bearers (Aquarius) – mercifully – are now mountain goats (Capricorn).
… but they don’t fall down.
With more passing of time, the earth’s Weeble-wobble will redefine basic astronomy as we know it today. Take Polaris, the “North Star” at the end of the Little Dipper, and the starting point to locate the more distant constellations. A few thousand years from now, Polaris will give up its position to Vega, another bright star. All because our planet is a little fat in the middle.
With talk of a “changed world” after a curbed pandemic, I think it’s high time for me and you to adopt our newfound zodiac signs. Goodbye Aquarius. Hello Capricorn. To preview my new persona, I looked at today’s horoscope in the local paper: A conversation with a female acquaintance will be important to you today. This is a good time to share your hopes and dreams for the future with someone to get his or her feedback. Bless my lucky stars – I’m to check with my wife before moving one position on the astrological merry-go-round. Seriously? What does she know, holding court from under the sign of Cancer? Whoops – make that under the sign of Gemini instead. Either way, she can finally refer to me as, “you old goat, you”.
Some content sourced from the 2/21/20 Wall Street Journal article, “You’re a Scorpio? Why the Earth’s Wobble Means Your Zodiac Sign Isn’t What You Think”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
While grocery shopping the other day, my wife asked me if I’d eat something containing “77% dark chocolate”. I replied casually, “No, my limit’s more like 72%”. To those in the know, the percentages refer to the cacao content; not the broader term “chocolate”. And that level of technical shows you how far I’ve come from the 3 Musketeers bar of my youth.
Each of us taps into our particular coping mechanisms as we deal with impacts of the pandemic. My wife spends countless hours playing brain games on her iPad. More of my neighbors take daily walks than I’ve ever seen before. Me? I’m getting lost in a few rainy-day projects, but more to the subject at hand, I’m tapping into my dark chocolate stash. There’s something therapeutic about a small square of the good stuff slowly dissolving on the tongue. Dark chocolate is medication for troubled times. It sates my soul.
I can’t recall when I graduated from “candy bar” to “chocolate bar”, let alone dark chocolate. Like most kids of the 1970’s, I was drawn to Milky Way, Snickers, Nestle Crunch and the like, due to an annual dose of “fun-size” every Halloween. But somewhere I had an epiphany and realized chocolate was pretty good all by itself. The clincher: studying abroad in Italy during college. Overnight it seemed, I graduated from the products of Hershey’s and Mars to the more refined of Perugina and Ferrero.
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Thierry Muret, the executive chef chocolatier at Godiva, and after reading the article I thought, “Now there’s a dream job”. Not so fast, Mr. Goodbar. Turns out Monsieur Muret is an industrial chemistry grad who leans heavily on his knowledge of science to create Godiva-worthy delicacies. Muret’s all about “molecular gastronomy”, or decomposing/recomposing the very elements of chocolate to develop new textures and tastes. Think about that the next time you bite into a Godiva truffle.
This much I know. Chocolate’s most common varieties are “milk”, “dark”, and “white”, and while each contains cocoa butter, they’re better defined by their other ingredients (i.e. the dairy in “milk”). My taste for dark chocolate evolved over a lot of years, the way my coffee matured from “instant” to “espresso”, and my wine from “Chardonnay” to “Cabernet”. The basic versions simply don’t cut it anymore.
Thanks to Monsieur Muret, this much I don’t know about chocolate. There’s a tight temperature range (65°-75° F) where fine chocolate can be “tempered” (shaped into truffles, etc.) without altering its delicate flavor. There’s also a tight time frame to temper, because you don’t want the temperature to fluctuate more than a degree or two. But Muret colors outside of the lines. He throws temperature and time frame to the wind to concoct new textures and tastes. He once spent an entire year perfecting a single ganache. Whoa; that’s taking it to a whole new level.
The path to chocolatier typically goes through culinary school, not the chemistry lab. You start with a pastry degree (pastry degree?) and then specialize in chocolate/confections. Nope, not what I studied in college – not even close. But I do deserve a “tasting degree” for my years of experience.
If the pandemic goes on long enough, I may find the shelves of our grocery store devoid of dark chocolate. No problem: I’ll settle for a good ol’ 3 Musketeers bar instead. Milk chocolate (not to mention the dose of childhood nostalgia) is a passable backup coping mechanism.
The so-called experts say there’s “no high-quality evidence that dark chocolate provides health benefits”. With coping in mind, I couldn’t disagree more.
Some content sourced from the 2/7/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “Nothing Could Be Sweeter Than Being Godiva’s Top Chocolate Chef”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
In the airy but over-aired romantic comedy Me Before You (2016), the dashing but damaged Will Traynor (Sam Claflin) laments bygone times when he refers to, “Paris. Place Dauphine, right by the Pont Neuf. Sitting outside the cafe with a strong coffee, a warm croissant with unsalted butter and strawberry jam.” Place Dauphine is not just a scene in Me Before You; it’s a real square in the heart of Paris. And it probably has Will’s cafe, thanks to the nearby river and central views of the city. Yet French cafes are growing scarcer every year. In fact, these quaint little gathering places are disappearing in droves.
Painting by Vickie Wade
If someone asked me to paint a scene from a French country village, I’d surely highlight a charming cafe on a cobbled central space, bursting with patrons. In the cafe, the proprietor would serve incomparable pastries alongside fine, pressed coffee. The room would swell with music and chatter; the locals swapping their work-day adventures before heading home to supper. The evening stopover in the cafe seems to me a staple of French culture.
So it pains me to read about closed doors on France’s rural cafes, according to a recent report of the Wall Street Journal. Sixty years ago, you would find over 200,000 of them liberally dotting the country. Today, there are less than 40,000. “Progress” – in its various forms – has forced the rural worker out of traditional French industries and into the big cities. Time once spent in the cafe is now given over to the workday commute. Adds a village mayor, “Without a cafe, a village is pretty much dead”.
A “French cafe” in Ireland
Even though I’ve been to Paris, I can’t claim to have spent time in any of its cafes, not even the famed Les Deux Magots, where writers like Hemingway and Joyce were said to have gathered. And yet, I’ve still experienced authentic “cafe culture” (and I don’t mean Starbucks). On a trip to Ireland several years ago, my wife and I concluded our first day of sightseeing by ducking into what we thought was a small pub in downtown Dublin. Turns out the place was more “French cafe”, complete with black-and-white prints on the walls, candle-lights on the tables, and coffee, tea, and pastries to beat the band. We were so taken by the place we stopped in every afternoon for the better part of a week. Perhaps the most showstopping memory of all: we never saw a phone, tablet, or laptop. Patrons were there to gather and chat, or at least – in the case of a few loners – to lose themselves in a good book.
van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”
The French cafe is made all the more romantic thanks to the artist Vincent van Gogh. In 1888 in the southern town of Arles, van Gogh observed the play of a cafe’s lights against the nighttime sky, which inspired his painting Cafe Terrace at Night, the precursor to his unequaled The Starry Night.
“Yellow vest” protestors
Perhaps you recall France’s “yellow vest movement” a year or so ago, when protestors took to the streets to battle aggressive economic policies. Turns out the French cafes played a part in the melee. The government sought to impose an increased fuel tax to reduce the number of cars on the road. The protesters interpreted the tax as an impolite shove, to get more people to move to the big cities. In other words, less people in French country villages. And no people in French country cafes. Remarkably, one of the government’s concessions following the yellow-vest protests was subsidies towards small businesses. Perhaps the French country cafe is not dead after all.
Had I written this post two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have come up with much positive spin on this topic. But let’s face it, those of us “sheltered in place” right now yearn for social interaction (not social distancing). We want face-to-face again, not Facetime. We want the congregation, not just the church service. So perhaps there’s a silver lining to the current pandemic after all. When we return to “new normal”, my hope is we’ll have a newfound appreciation for gathering, instead of hiding behind our electronic devices. As well, my hope is my next visit to France will find the doors of French country cafes wide open again, just beckoning me inside for “strong coffee and warm croissant”.
A couple weeks ago, my Nespresso coffee maker sprung a leak. As it brewed a cup, it also “espressed” a small river of coffee from the base of the unit. An online chat with the good people at Nespresso determined, a) the maker really was broken, b) the one-year warranty covered the repair (whoo-hoo!), and c) the fix would take up to ten business days. Well beans; ten business days meant regressing a full two weeks on drip coffee instead. Hold the phone; did I just label myself a coffee snob?
Nespresso
Nespresso – for those of you not familiar – is one of the many capsule coffee systems on the market today. Unlike the Keurig K-Cup, “Nestle-Espresso” capsules spin as the water passes through the grounds (7,000 RPMs – vroom vroom!), adding a light-colored frothy cap of “crema” on top. The crema enhances the aroma, but more importantly delivers the mouth-feel of a latte, as if you stirred something in from the dairy family. But call me fooled; Nespresso’s nothing more than coffee in the cup.
Bunn’s coffee-monster
Coffee snob? Parvenu, perhaps. It wasn’t that long ago I contentedly drank “joe” from one of those big metal Bunn machines, flavor-boosting my Styrofoam cup contents with a sugar cube and powdered Coffee-mate. Then, I spent a year in Rome and my world was forever coffee-rocked. I returned to the States armed with words like cappuccino and espresso and caffe latte. But America didn’t even know the word Starbucks yet. A “coffee shop” was still a greasy spoon diner; forgettable joe in a forgettable cup.
Mind you, not having Starbucks didn’t mean I was gonna crawl back to the Bunn, especially after a year of Italy’s la dolce vita (look it up). Eventually I dropped hard-earned cash on one of those early model home coffee/espresso/steamed milk contraptions – a machine requiring twenty minutes, twenty steps, and a phone-book-sized operations manual to produce a small cappuccino. The birth of the American barista did not start at Starbucks, my friends. It started in the frustration of orchestrating an overly complicated home-brew system in search of pseudo-Italian-style coffee.
Sometime after Starbucks opened its first doors (but before Nespresso), Keurig developed the K-Cup. The Keurig coffeemaker felt like a huge step up from standard drip (and ushered in the concept of single-serve coffee at home). Keurig opened a seemingly new world of coffee to me – exotic names like Green Mountain or Paul Newman’s or Donut Shop – but let’s be honest. Keurig was basically glorified drip, and I still wasn’t taking my coffee straight, like I did in Italy. And that’s where Nespresso shines. If the K-Cup is a step up from drip, Nespresso is the entire staircase.
Ironically, the same company producing Nespresso markets a line of oil-based creamers sugary enough to make your coffee taste like Easter in a cup. Nestle already offered creamer flavors like Peppermint Mocha or Italian Sweet Creme or Toasted Marshmallow, before recently adding Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Funfetti. Not to be outdone, International Delight augmented its own coffee creamer line – REESE’S Peanut Butter Cup, Cinnabon, and OREO Cookie Flavored, with – no joke – a PEEPS flavor. Better check for bunnies before you take a sip.
For the record (if the Pulptastic website is to be believed), I’m not even close to being a coffee snob. I can choose from any of their twelve defining characteristics and come up short. I don’t read about coffee. I don’t speak the lingo (“Robusta?” “Arabica?”). I don’t know what “cupping” is. I do enjoy a Starbucks coffee every now and then. Finally, I’m half-tempted to check out the PEEPS creamer (maybe I won’t even need the coffee in my cup). See the Pulptastic list for yourself. Maybe you’re the coffee snob instead of me.
I’m still waiting (im)patiently for my repaired Nespresso coffeemaker to come back. I’m barely surviving on my backup K-Cups. But I’m no coffee snob. And I was just kidding about wanting to try PEEPS in a bottle. On the contrary, those creamer schemers can keep their product far, far away from my Nespresso.
Some content sourced from the 2/3/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “Rich Sales Boost Coffee Creamers”.
I should’ve figured this out decades ago. Hot cereal’s a whole lot better with fresh fruit (raisins are a poor excuse for fruit). Strawberries, blueberries, apples – they all turn “mush” into an appealing “meal”. And the learning curve continues. Rolled oats are better than instant oats. Steel-cut oats are way better than instant oats. And lest you’ve forgotten: anything is better than Wheatena (even tomatoes and avocados).
Tell me this: when was the last time you used “porridge” in a sentence (Brits aside)? What an utterly dated word. The last time – the only time I uttered “porridge” was reading “Goldilocks and The Three Bears” or jigging to “Peas Porridge Hot” (“…peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old…”). My nursery-rhyme days. Porridge doesn’t have a modern ring to it (did it ever?) and yet that’s exactly what we’re talking about today by definition: hot breakfast cereal made by boiling grains in water (or milk). Wikipedia counted ’em – all grain types included – and came up with seventy-five distinctly different porridges. Doesn’t matter. If I’m a kid I still opt for Froot Loops.
In Portland, OR you used to be able to buy hot cereal from an oatmeal-only food cart. “Bloop” – with made-to-order mush like “Peanut Butter Banana Dreams” and “Good For You Goodness” – shuttered its wheels in 2011 after a single year in business. I get it: oatmeal’s no passing fad but it’s also no passing food truck.
Speaking of the Quaker Oats Company, in the 1970’s they came out with flavored instant versions of their hot cereals. “Apples & Cinnamon” and “Maple & Brown Sugar” come to mind (“Ready in Just 90 Seconds!”). God answered my prayers to distance myself from Wheatena. Also deserving kudos, Quaker Oats used to own Fisher-Price Toys. Can’t you just picture the marketing division, trying to develop an “oatmeal plush” doll?
I’m devoted to my steel-cut oats these days but I’m not gonna pretend I’m not tempted by alternatives. Cheerios (especially the “Honey-Nut” variety) is the ultimate oat cereal. Life (especially the “Cinnamon” variety) is another delicious Quaker Oats product. And I’ll never get my childhood love for Lucky Charms out of my DNA. They’ll always be a little more “magically delicious” than porridge.
Life In A Word 