Best of 2011

• Best novel: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. (Actually published in 2001, I believe, but what a wonderful story. The minotaur of Greek mythology is alive and lonely in the American South, living in a small trailer park (where he likes to work on cars in his spare time) and working at a restaurant (where the manager has the brilliant idea of taking M.—as everyone calls him—out of the kitchen to carve prime rib for customers in the dining area). There is plenty here to make a grotesque southern gothic novel—a half man half bull protagonist; a hirsute woman; a gay civil war re-enactor; a jealous weightlifting husband of an underdressed, attractive, and flirtatious neighbor; a dead dog; aimless young men looking for a fight—but what’s amazing about this book is its tone and tempo: a calm and somewhat bemused loneliness even as various threats loom ahead.)

• Biggest book read: A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles (968 pages).

• Best book of poetry: At Lake Scugog by Troy Jollimore. (How did this book not get more attention? I just assumed it would be up for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer and so on. This guy has as big a brain as anyone else writing poetry today. A professor of philosophy, he writes formal, funny, musical poems that engage rather than intimidate the reader.)

• Favorite new cookbook: Trout Caviar: Recipes From a Northern Forager by Brett Laidlaw. (Laidlaw wrote a couple of interesting novels back in the 80s and 90s. Though they were realistic stories set in the Midwest, their Berrymanesque circumlocutions flew in the face of the plain-spoken minimalism that was au courant at the time. When I met him and mentioned the novels, he seemed genuinely surprised that anyone read and remembered them. Now, without warning, and nearly 20 years after his last book of fiction, a cookbook full of hearty recipes and good, clear writing.)

• Best New Yorker Article: “Dr. Don” by Peter Hessler in the September 26 issue. This profile of a small-town pharmacist in Western Colorado is like McPhee at his best.

• Favorite new band: Avett Brothers.

• Favorite new solo artist: Sharon Van Etten.

• Single of the year: “Miss K” by Dear Tick.

• Best movie: Bill Cunningham NYC.

• Best television series on DVD: Slings & Arrows. (Three seasons of a Canadian series about the goings-on behind the scenes at a Stratford-on-Avon type theater. Wonderfully combines Shakespeare, humor, and poignant drama. I actually watched these at the end of 2010, but certainly haven’t seen anything better since then.)

• Best online video: Ultimate Dog Tease.

• Favorite new restaurant: Cajun Potluck in Shoreview, MN.

• Favorite spice: prosciutto.

• Favorite new breakfast food: smoothies.

• Most awesome national landmark visited this year: Crater Lake in Oregon.

• Biggest fish caught: A twelve-inch brown trout in Hay Creek.

• Prettiest fish caught: A couple small brookies in the Poplar River.

• States I attempted to catch trout in this summer: Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon, and California.

• States I was skunked in: 0.

Please note: "New" means new to me; "best" means favorite; "favorite" is self-explanatory.

Line of the Week

"I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal."

—Jordi Roca, in Adam Gopnik's article, "Sweet Revolution," in the January 3, 2011 New Yorker

A Recipe for Happiness

It feels a bit pretentious to call this combination of three uncooked ingredients a recipe, but if there can be entire cookbooks devoted to salads (and there are!), then this simple concoction can bear up under the weight of being called a recipe.

• Trader Joe's Old Fashioned Cinnamon Grahams. I grew up with Nabisco's cinnamon grahams as the rarest and most satisfying of pleasures, but after trying Trader Joe's there's no going back. Crispier texture and a more pronounced cinnamon flavor.

• Peanut butter. Your call on this one, though I'm a smooth and creamy Jif man myself. Spread some pb on a graham cracker.

• Dark chocolate. Again, I'm a fan of the Trader Joe's bars from Belgium on sale in the check-out aisles. Three delicious bars for under $2: you can't go too far wrong. Put one little rectangle of chocolate on each half of the cracker.

Eat. Repeat. You won't be sorry. Simple and delicious. I've had them for breakfast, snacktime, and dessert, and I can't see laying off them anytime soon.

Best of the Backlist

The other day I was telling my friend, Jomama, who is a sales rep for a book publishing company, how much I thought of Dave Eggers' post-Katrina book Zeitoun. Ms. Mama had just been down in New Orleans on business, and she commented that many of the bookstores down there were still displaying the book prominently even though it was no longer a frontlist title. Since then I've been re-reading Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, a book that I have loved since it was first published back in 1998, though I hadn't sat down to re-read it until now. Well, it stands up. It's an almost unbelievable story in many ways, and Orlean does a masterful job of telling it. Just because it's not brand new doesn't mean it's not worth reading.

I have also recently noticed that the window for comments on Facebook has shrunk to just a few hours. If people don't comment on a status update or a new photo in the first couple hours, they probably aren't going to. And that's too bad in a way. The update (if it isn't tied to the moment—and most aren't) doesn't really lose humor, poignancy, or validity half a day later. A year or two ago, such comments might have trickled in over the course of a few days, but now the conversation is over much more quickly. It seems to me even more of a loss when people post family or vacation photos. These things seem even less ephemeral, and yet the active comment window remains equally small.

All of which puts me in mind of something Quentin Tarentino said about his video store days. Customers would come in looking for recommendations, and film geek Tarentino would press whatever odd, obscure, great, foreign, or forgotten movie on them only to have them ask if it was new. His response: If you haven't seen it before, it's new to you.

In the spirit of Mr. Tarentino, I bring you the best of the Corvus backlist. The most recent of these is over half a year old, and the others were posted before 2010. They are the ones that have received the most visitors, but which many of you—if you are new to Corvus—may never have seen.

• The poetry of divorce

• The poetry of rocks

• Basketball and marinade

• Reviewing a review

Enjoy!

Adventures in Translation

From a student paper on Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants":

"The man tells the girl about a drink called Anis del Toro (meaning butt of the bull)."

No wonder I could never stand the taste of anise.

Another Thing Julia Child and I Have in Common

For reasons I don't fully know and can't clearly explain, I have always found the taste of cilantro revolting. Cilantro and members of the fennel family almost literally make me gag. If I accidentally ingest some, it's all I can do to choke it down, and then try to get my palate cleansed. What makes this even more frustrating is how ubiquitous it's become. It seems like practitioners of every ethnic cuisine just want to ladle it on.

Turns out I'm not alone in my response to cilantro. The New York Times just ran a piece on the vile herb. There's a historical and cross-cultural distaste for it. How comforting. So much and such good company!

A Taste of Bretagne

Last spring when I was in France, I was served a memorable salad before my lunch that was comprised in large part of grapefruit and shrimp. At the time, it seemed to me something that would be worth approximating after I returned home. In addition to being delicious, it appeared that it would be fairly simple to make, and it would undoubtedly make a great impression on my guest(s). Then I mostly forgot about it. Until yesterday morning, when Ms. O said something that reminded me of it. Suddenly I wanted to make it for her.

I couldn’t find anything in my cookbooks, and when I went online, searching for grapefruit and shrimp or grapefruit and shrimp and salad, I came up with some similar things, especially a couple that also included avocado that I may try at some point down the line, but nothing that represented the dish I had enjoyed. I then tried to call my French travel partner, Fast Freddie, hoping she might be able to help me out, but as I was dialing I remembered she isn’t much of a seafood fan. Even though we were served the same dish, she probably hadn’t felt the same way about it that I did. On the other hand, her husband is French—maybe he would know something about it. As it turned out, she wasn’t home. Or wherever her cell phone was. Or taking calls from me at that time. Which is when Ms. O had the breakthrough idea:

“Why don’t you google the words in French?”

As soon as I could remember the word for shrimp in French, I did it (you never forget the word for grapefruit—pamplemousse), and there they were at the very top of the list—variations on this wonderful dish I wanted to make for my girlfriend. And the information that it is a regional dish specific to Bretagne. No wonder it hasn’t made its way to the cookbooks I have on hand or to the enormous compilation of online recipes in English (at least on an initial cursory search).

So, here it is. Three ingredients in its simplest form, and the chance to wow friends with a simple, fresh dish they have probably never seen before.

What you need:

1 grapefruit

100 grams of already cooked shrimp (roughly a ¼ pound—essentially equal parts grapefruit and shrimp)

2 dollops of mayonnaise

What you do:

Halve the grapefruit. Remove the fruit, and chop it up. Scrape out the bowl of the rind, and dispose of the membranes. Chop up the shrimp into similar size pieces. Stir together the shrimp, grapefruit, and mayonnaise. Place the combined ingredients back in the grapefruit-rind bowls, and serve. Voila!

Why?

How come Peter Paul doesn’t combine the best of both worlds and offer a candy bar with the nuts of the Almond Joy and the dark chocolate of Mounds? Even if it was only one month a year, a special seasonal offering. Think about it, Peter Paul, take your worst sales month, and offer a special limited time dark chocolate Almond Joy during that period. You would see a serious increase in sales, Peter Paul. You would make many people happy and you would make more money. Peter Paul, this could be the best of both worlds in so many ways. Paradise on earth is practically within reach.

Also, why is the flatter of the two candy bars you produce called Mounds? That mystifies and sometimes confuses me, Peter Paul.

Yesterday’s Concoction Inspired by My Frustration and Fred’s Comment in France

I am no great chef, so it doesn’t happen very often, but now and then a new dish simply presents itself to me. A few years ago I had a vision of shrimp and bell peppers with feta and sun-dried tomatoes over rice pilaf, and it became one of my signature dishes for a while. A reliable, simple, colorful, flavorful dish that people weren’t going to get anywhere else.

Yesterday, I was trying to decide what to make for dinner that night. The boys were coming over, and I wanted something that would appeal to them as well as me, but something a bit different than the ordinary fare, and something that wouldn’t take too much time, when another culinary light went on for me.

While on my recent trip to France, I was complaining to Fred, my traveling buddy, that the US still really hasn’t caught on to crème fraiche. You can find it in any French grocery store, but while many other delicious French foods and ingredients have become much more common in the states since my first trip abroad a quarter century ago, this one is still fairly rare. It shows up on the menus of many fine restaurants, but I can’t get it at my local grocery store. She suggested Boursin as an alternative for my purposes—creating a creamy sauce for a pork or chicken pasta. The Boursin idea kept rolling around in my head for a couple weeks without finding traction, when suddenly I knew what I wanted to do with it.

So, here’s what I came up with and what you will need to make it chez vous:

chicken breasts.
shallots
olive oil
pasta
prosciutto
white wine
Boursin

An hour before cooking, cut chicken breasts into one inch pieces and then marinate them.

Mince two very large shallots, then sautee them until they turn brown. Add the chicken. When it is nearly cooked, toss in some small pieces of prosciutto. Once the chicken is cooked, remove it from the pan. Pour a little white wine into the pan, and turn up the heat. Once it has begun to cook off a bit, turn the heat back down, and mix in the Boursin until it is smooth and creamy, then place the chicken back in the pan, and mix until it is all covered in the sauce.

I served this over pasta with haricots verts on the side, and R. said I should quit teaching, go to the track for a few years to get enough money, and then open a restaurant. Not only is it one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my cooking, but it sounds like a fun way to raise money for such an enterprise. In any case, it’s easy and delicious. Try it at your home.

Success du Panache

Nearly twenty years ago while spending a couple weeks in Provence I was introduced to a drink I fell in love with: the panache (pronounced pan-uh-SHAY—there should be an accent mark over the e—pronounced correctly, the first and last words of the title of this piece should rhyme). I was told it was a mix of lemonade and beer, and after a day of hiking around the warm, dry countryside (always concluding with a final uphill to the town where we were staying), a glass or two of this was more refreshing and flavorful than anything I would have imagined on my own.

When I returned home, I set about recreating this concoction on my own, and met failure after failure. Clearly what the French called lemonade was different than anything I could find in the Midwest. I even tried mixing lemonade, mineral water, and beer, but to no avail. The funny thing is whenever I told friends what the drink was made of they all did some version of wrinkling or turning up their noses—lemonade mixed with beer didn’t sound appealing to anyone.

As time passed, I almost began to doubt my memory. It seemed like something I had made up or dreamt, and eventually I even forgot about it. When I returned to France for the first time a couple years ago, it never even occurred to me to try to track down a panache. Coffee éclairs, bread, cheese, and wine—yes! Panaches—never crossed my mind. Of course, I was in Paris and Bretagne, places that with their relatively cool climates might not have as much cause to cultivate panache drinkers.

This year’s trip, which started out with Paris and Bretagne, passed without incident, but one of the first restaurants we went to once we headed south listed panache on their drinks menu. I knew I needed to ditch the high school students we were traveling with, and find a little time alone to see if I still found this drink satisfying almost two decades since I last tasted it.

I only had to wait a couple of short, hot hours—the perfect preparation for such an event. It proved to be nothing less than glorious. The rest of our time on the Cote d’Azur, I looked for opportunities to savor a panache at the end of a hot day of walking and sightseeing.

At some point, while enjoying one of my drinks and mourning that I would soon be leaving them behind, it dawned on me that I lived in the age of the internet. Surely, I could find a recipe, so I could recreate this drink in the comfort of my own home. And I did. Though, it is more commonly known as a shandy, some version of this drink is enjoyed in a number of countries around the world.

While that seemed affirming in and of itself, I felt like I hit the jackpot when I found a discussion thread on the topic, which included the telling detail—Trader Joe’s carries a French lemonade and a lager is the ideal beer with which to blend it. I promptly went out to the suburbs and bought multiple bottles of their limonade, and raced home to try it out—a 100% success. I no longer have to cross an ocean for this pleasure.

Bonus Happiness Point: Trader Joe’s is opening a store near my home, so I no longer have to make a trip out to the suburbs to load up on supplies.

Honoring Irreverence

There's really no substitute for a well-turned definition, so the following passage from a new writer at a new blog had me swooning:

Back when I took myself more seriously, I could not distinguish irreverence from arrogance or ignorance. They were all symptoms of the same shortcoming. But now, the lines are clear. Irreverence comes from complete honesty and respect. It’s the ability to step outside a serious situation, see it objectively, and help others understand it with levity. To throw down a much needed reality check just in the nick of time.

Influenced by the recent biographies of John Cheever and Donald Barthelme and the ingenious NCAA-like brackets of the Tournament of Books, said blog also features a nice showdown between the stories of Cheever and Barthelme.

Leftover Breakfast Creation (More Twice-Cooked Food)

The highlight of dinner last night was my first attempt at aligot, a cheesy, garlicky, goopy version of mashed potatoes from the Auvergne region of France that I learned about in the current (April 2009) issue of Cook’s Illustrated (pages 18-19). The boys had left the table in the same fashion they had eaten—quickly and recklessly—and I was left staring at the remains of what I had started preparing four hours earlier and which had then mostly disappeared in about fifteen minutes of nearly wordless feeding when the vision of this morning’s breakfast came to me. The main dish had been a corned beef brisket, and since corned beef hash has long been a favorite breakfast treat of mine, the combination of potatoes and corned beef seemed natural, but there was a step before that as well. In the same post-dinner haze minutes earlier I had thought of another breakfast rarity I treasure: pan-fried mashed potato patties. Well, the combination was as good or better than I had hoped: pan-fried corned beef aligot patties. The crispy light brown surface, the soft, gooey, cheesy, interior, the salty shreds of the corned beef, and the underlying pleasure of garlic infusing every bite. Fortunately I have enough left for at least one more patty.

Chevre for Breakfast

Sometimes it only takes one ingredient to turn an ordinary dish into something extraordinary. This week that ingredient was chevre. After work on Monday, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up four items. Whether it was because I was hungry or because I had a serious lack of supplies at home, I quickly exchanged my basket for a cart, and loaded up for the week. One of my first unplanned purchases was a little package of the tangy goat cheese. Even before I got to the deli counter to pick up the week’s rosemary ham (a staple of R’s Wednesday lunches), there was a woman offering samples of a local chevre produced by Stickney Hill Dairy Farms. By chance, the cracker I tried was topped with a peppercorn chevre. It tasted good, so I picked up a small package of the stuff with no plan for how I would use it.

The next morning, I was contemplating a homemade egg McMuffin, but I was low on cheddar, which I needed to save for R’s lunch and the possible emergency quesadilla if W didn’t want whatever I was serving that evening. Then I spied the chevre. It was a more than perfect substitute. It brought the breakfast sandwich to life. In fact, I treated myself to the same breakfast on Wednesday morning as well.

This morning brought a slight but no less satisfying variation to the eggs and chevre breakfast. I sautéed a shallot, scrambled a couple eggs, then added chevre, sun-dried tomatoes, and leftover salmon. Served with a couple slices of ciabatta toast, it was a wonderful way to start the weekend. You could do worse at any number of restaurants.

Restaurant Review: Schilo's

At Schilo's, a family-owned deli in downtown San Antonio since 1917, they serve your morning orange juice in a frosty glass mug, an unprecedented delight in my experience. On the other hand, they don't butter your toast, and I didn't get a glass of water until after I asked for one, and was down to my last few bites. The food was serviceable, but nothing really to write home about. The juice, however . . . I'm going back for more of that!

A Food List Inspired (in some way) by the Impending Holiday

‘Tis the season to be thankful. ‘Tis also the season to think about food. But how strange to combine these thoughts of gratitude and food around such things as turkey (dry and bland) and sweet potatoes (which I’ve never taken any pleasure in since I started eating foods of textures beyond mush). Of course, Thanksgiving is about tradition and ritual (not to mention quantity), which is why you don’t really have to taste or enjoy the dinner, as long as you gather with family and friends and ingest too much. This did seem a good time, however, to recognize the foods for which I have been exceedingly grateful recently. Please understand this is not a list of my favorite foods necessarily, but foods and flavors that have taken on a larger place in my life in the last year or two.
• Sun-dried tomatoes.
• Seared tuna.
• Pancetta & prosciutto.
• All members of the Allium family, though it has been the quality time I have spent with leeks and shallots that really sealed the deal for these guys.
• Fresh raspberries from the backyard, especially those that come from plants that produce more than one crop per year.
• Brussels sprouts.

Dream Logic

I continue to be fascinated by the connections my sleeping mind is making. Last night I dreamed I was in New Orleans for a night, and I was walking around looking for Tipitina’s or some other famous restaurant for dinner. A block or two off the busy commercial area, I came across a restaurant in an old railroad shed/depot. The walls were corrugated tin, and inside the spacious hangar-like building there was a counter and then lengthy rows of tables with benches. Here and there solo nighthawks were nursing their coffees. Outside the building there were signs indicating the distances to other towns. Much to my surprise and delight, this was Alice’s Restaurant, the one Arlo Guthrie sang about. I decided I would be sure to have breakfast there the following morning before I left town.

When I woke up this morning, I realized the reason for the restaurant being set by the railroad tracks in New Orleans was because one of Arlo Guthrie’s other signature songs was “The City of New Orleans,” a song not about the city of course, but about the train of that name. Somehow, more than 25 years after I listened to those songs with any regularity, my dream mind managed to compress those details quite concisely.

Raspberries!

Five Reasons This Evening’s Quiche Made Me a Real Happy Man

• Leeks
• Gruyere
• Pancetta
• Shrimp
• Leftovers

Toasted Almonds

Discovery

Last night I discovered Ben & Jerry's creme brulee ice cream—to the tune of better than half a pint. Chasing the brulee riffle is a particularly tantalizing addiction. I guess I owe it to myself to finish the rest of the container today, and get that particular temptation out of the house.