Smell-o-Vision

 

 

You know how much I love to quote Emeril Lagasse whenever I find a dish that's so flavorful "you could put it on a bumper and it would taste good," or that some dishes are a "food of love thing." One Emerilism I haven't gotten to yet is how he would complain about the limitations of a TV cooking show: “Oooh! I can’t wait till we get Smell-o-Vision so you can smell this at home!”

UaKS goes global

 

Once in a blue moon I check the stats for UaKS to see just how irrelevant I am as a blogger. I've been doing this for over ten years now. As of today, the sum total of my "All Time" pageviews is 114,494, or about 915 per month since October of 2015. But every once in a while there's a huge spike in the numbers, for reasons that cannot be explained, as UaKS has certainly never had an episode go viral to my knowledge. As you can see below, this March has been one of those spiky months, with 5.5K pageviews in the last 30 days, with 1,580 views just on March 13 and 14.  

 

 

 

Family stories

I recently heard an interview with Robin Fivush, who is a professor of developmental psychology and the director of the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University. She has done some fascinating work studying how children’s and adolescents’ knowledge of their family histories can serve as a "clinically useful index of psychological well-being and prognosis."* Fivush and her colleagues reported that such "knowledge of family history is significantly correlated with internal locus of control, higher self-esteem, better family functioning, greater family cohesiveness, lower levels of anxiety, and lower incidence of behavior problems." This is about as correlational (as opposed to causative) as findings get, but I still like the idea that knowing your family's stories somehow makes for healthier families and family members.

Goodwill hunting

Mom has a new hobby. Whenever she's been out longer than I expected, she invariably ends up having visited one of the Goodwill shops around town. There's not much Mom takes more delight in than getting a compliment on a "new" shirt and responding, "Thanks, it was $3 at Goodwill!"

Fortunately, Mom's bargain shopping finally paid some kitchen dividends. She was looking for a cheap slow cooker and found this classic Rival Crock•Pot:

 

And look at the sticker: only $2.99, just like Mom's shirts she loves to brag about. The only problem is that it's small, only 2½ quarts, which is not enough for the slow cooker recipes I've already posted, which tend to nearly overflow even a pot more than twice that size. But it just happened to be exactly what I was looking for to make Alton Brown's ridiculously easy, and well reviewed, recipe for slow cooker chickpeas. How do you like dem apples?

 

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The dud parents wash their hands

One of the many things Mom and I apparently neglected to teach you is how to wash your hands properly, which is a skill that is obviously more important now but that will serve you well for the rest of your lives. I've sent the New York Times video around, but several of you have confessed to not having watched it, so I'll try again by embedding this CDC video right here on UaKS, which I know you all read religiously.😄




At first, it seemed like a big drag to be washing my hands for at least 20 seconds at a time, over and over, every day. But now I've realized it's a great way to have a moment of Zen at various times during the day and really be mindful about what I'm doing while washing my hands. Lots of books say to take mindful showers, but I find the focus required to wash my hands properly is much easier to carry off. So watch the video and start washing your hands the right way so there will be one less reason that I'm a dud parent.

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Rosebush

I've lately been looking to poetry for perspective and have a couple of good sources in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry columns and the Poetry Unbound podcast that Uncle Clint recommended. I don't have the patience for most podcasts, but the Poetry Unbound episodes are only about 8 to 10 minutes each (and some shorter than that). In his fine Irish brogue, the poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama reads, and comments on, a single poem in each episode. The first 16 episodes have all been worthwhile, but I particularly enjoyed the fifth episode on Tracy K. Smith's exquisite poem "Song."

Dylan also unwittingly introduced me to the Spoken Word Poetry (isn't all poetry "spoken word poetry"?) of Rudy Francisco through his 2017 volume Helium. I can't say the book as a whole did much for me, but I did relate to the poem “Ouch,” in which the poet injures himself just walking and muses that “At this age, / my body is a stranger that I / keep meeting over and over again. / The words ‘I am’ are slowly transforming / into ‘I used to be.’” Here is Francisco reciting the whole poem (it only lasts a minute):



But take a look at this dude! I looked it up and he was only thirty-five when “Ouch” was published. Good grief, Rudy, wait till you see what life has to offer when you're fifty-five.

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Rosebush


My running peaked at fifty,
through the alchemy of age-grading,
till I tore my right hamstring in 2014.
The left one followed three years later.
From a young fifty to a cascade of complaints:
arthritic spine;
a chestful of grief;
a shoulder stabbing in the night (though I haven’t
thrown the horsehide in anger since I was ten);
the accumulating allergies, democratically covering
all seasons and places, inside and out—
Dust mites (the terrible D. pteronyssinus,
like some microscopic dinosaur up my nose),
spring white oak, fall common ragweed,
wasp, yellow jacket, yellow hornet, and
the white- or bald-faced hornet (D. maculata),
to match the bald spot Cassie pointed out in my
otherwise still thick, albeit more gray than not, hair,
mocking me in snapshots taken from the back.

The other day I sat on our bedroom floor,
pressing tissues to a toe on each foot, to stanch
the blood pooling around my just-clipped nails.
K stopped and looked, curious.
“I gotta lot of thorns in my side,” I sighed.
“That just makes you a rosebush,” she replied.
I’m certainly prickly, and maybe
abscinding more abruptly than I’d like.
Do my fallen petals smell like sautéed onions, or
the toasted oatmeal in a warm chocolate chip cookie?

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The dud parent: episode I reboot

No one will ever forget the genesis of "The Dud Parent" series, in episode I of which Mom and I took Brad and Cassie to the oral surgeon to have their wisdom teeth extracted. Mom accompanied Cass into the operating room, leaving me to take Brad in, with the specific instruction not to leave Brad until he had been put under. The surgeon who was doing Brad's procedure wasn't going for that, so when Mom got back to the waiting room, she was horrified to see me already there engrossed in a Bon Appétit magazine. In my defense, it was a fettuccine Alfredo recipe that looked promising enough that I tore it out of the magazine and brought it home (together with Brad and Cass once their procedures were over). Even though the recipe has, in fact, become a family favorite, the incident has forevermore earned me the "dud parent" moniker.

Fast forward a little over two years. Last month, Mom drove me to Northridge to get an epidural steroid injection to try and relieve the pain I've had in my arse for about 18 months now (no such luck). While I was getting prepped for the procedure, Mom thumbed through a Real Simple magazine, where a recipe for black bean posole caught her eye. Sure enough, she tore it out of the magazine and brought it home (along with me once my procedure was over). 

Last weekend, Mom made the posole, which substitutes black beans for the usual pork, and it was really pretty good—good enough, in fact, that Mom is thinking about adding it to her list of "specialities." Oh, the irony.

Black Bean Posole

Adapted from Real Simple (December 2018)

Time: ~6½ to 7½ hours total; only 20 minutes to get everything into the slow cooker in step one

8 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
3 poblano chiles, chopped
1 large yellow onion, chopped
4 medium garlic cloves, minced
53 grams (¼ cup) extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons chili powder
15 grams (1 tablespoon) tomato paste
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 pound/454 grams dried black beans, picked over and rinsed
1 (28-ounce) can white or golden hominy, drained
60 grams (¼ cup) fresh lime juice from 2 limes
1½ teaspoons kosher salt, more as needed
⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper

For serving

Choose among:

minced fresh cilantro

sour cream (or plain whole-milk yogurt)

sliced plain or pickled avocado

thinly sliced radishes

crumbled cotija

tortilla chips

    1. Combine the vegetable broth, poblano, onion, garlic, oil, chili powder, tomato paste, oregano, and black beans in a 6- to 7-quart slow cooker. Cook on high until the beans are tender, about 5 hours.
    2. Stir in the hominy, lime juice, salt, and cayenne. Cook on low for another hour or two, until you're ready to eat. Taste for seasoning. Serve with your choice of toppings, with tortilla chips on the side. Makes 8 servings.