(Cold) Tingle of anticipation

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It’s been a goal of ours since arriving in LA to visit some of the more “unusual” states of the USA, with Alaska being top of that list. Three years on, we feel we really have to make those plans just in case our visas and work contracts are not renewed. A stressful fortnight of dithering (and agonising of a different nature) later, and our flight is booked! Fingers crossed that US Airways does not live down to my poor expectations of the smaller US airlines.

Accommodation, car rental, day excursions have not been finalised, which is a bit risky since we’re hitting Alaska just after the summer tourist season is over. But that’s a minor matter; we’ll enjoy it whatever we end up doing!  Since we’re not prepared to backpack or take multiple bush plane rides, we’ll focus on the areas just south and north of Anchorage: the Kenai Peninsula and the Matanuska-Susitna region. On my wish list are, in no particular order: a boat trip to see the Kenai fjords, a glacier hike, fishing of any kind, and lazy days. Actually, I’d put lazy days right at the top of the agenda.

Which reminds me that I have to sort out the agenda before we miss out on the last fjord boat trip of the summer!

Posting this in lieu of the many food and concert posts that are languishing in my inaccessible cortex and camera memory. And because what is to come is always far more exciting than what has been…

Red, White and Blue Fool

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Red white and blue fool

Science doesn’t stop for anyone or anything, much less a public holiday. Which left me with a dilemma: what to take to the mega-lab’s Independence Day Blast? My RSS reader to the rescue with a really pretty take on the classic Eton Mess by Maki of Just Hungry.

For top marks, I should have made the meringues and star biscuits days in advance. Instead, I bought them. And I should have marinated the strawberries overnight and drained them. Even so, it turned out pretty good. And it only took me 30 min to assemble everything.

About 5-10 min was spent thinly slicing a 450g of strawberries, 2/3 of which were shaken up with 2 tsp of raspberry vinegar and 1 tsp of sugar and left to sit while I whipped half a pint of cream. After stirring in 220g of creme fraiche, I dumped in about 100g of meringue kisses (thanks Whole Foods!), 200g of blueberries and started to stir in the marinated strawberries. Which was when I realised that I should have brought a strainer to drain the strawberries because they were turning the cream pink. Ach well. Next time.

A quick save was achieved by making a giant hole in the cream and dumping the wet strawberries in, a la a sloppy custard-, jelly- and sponge-free trifle. The cream was spooned over to cover. The remaining strawberries were dotted on, along with 100g of blueberries and the reserved merinuge kisses (30). The sides were then lined with some star-shaped “Morovian ginger cookies” (thanks again, Whole Foods), and the dessert was assembled.

It went down very well indeed. If I’d been thinking, I’d have brought 2 bowls and layered the dessert instead so that the wet strawberries would be on the bottom. Or a colander to drain them. Next time, I might turn this into a nearly-trifle with layers of sponge fingers to soak up the sweet and sour juiciness of the marinated strawberries. There’ll definitely be a next time for this entirely store-bought, super-fast, no-equipment dessert.

And the party was pretty good too. It was nice not being stuck at the grill and the sink for once.

Sexy Salonen*

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I’ve been a busy bee: R.E.M. at the Hollywood Bowl, quickly followed by the LA Philharmonic playing Salonen’s Piano Concerto at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Of the two nights, you’d think that I’d have enjoyed the Hollywood Bowl night of rock more, but perhaps as a sign of aging, I think the LA Phil gave me far more satisfaction. Since I reviewed the R.E.M. concert on my last.fm page, I thought I’d continue with the LA Phil review there.

I’m not sure how well this will work, but I’m going to try to blog these short and uninformed reviews to my last.fm page just ‘cos it’s so… empty. And link to it from here on the off-chance that anyone cares. To be honest, these little blurbs aren’t so much reviews as random thoughts from the evening that survive any alcohol damage.


* He’s looking a bit older these days, but back when he brought the LA Phil to Edinburgh for the Festival, I thought Esa-Pekka was possibly the sexiest male conductor around. His soon-to-be successor, Gustavo Dudamel, is currently challenging him for this title. In my head

R.E.M. at the Bowl

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R.E.M. played at the Hollywood Bowl this Thursday past. Fresh off the plane from the East Coast, P and I headed along with our ghetto “recycled” plastic bottles of wine. Yes, we resorted to pouring a bottle of wine into some “Honest Tea” drink bottles (irony intended) because this was a “lease event”, which meant no glass would be allowed, nor alcohol of any sort. Normally, the bottle of wine is what keeps us going from 2 hours before the concert all the way to the end of the 6 hour trip for us (the H’Bowl shuttle leaves SaMo 2h before; be on it or be stuck in traffic through the whole concert). I mixed up a lavender, honey and gin cocktail in another Honest Tea bottle because we have turned into right lushes from our week of lunchtime cocktails in D.C. that extended into late night drinking.

A brief review of the night is here on my last.fm page and copied below for the link-lazy.

Sticking my neck out here, but I think the show-stealers were The National. Their direct, un-fancy performance was befitting of a warm-up band, and they certainly got me in the mood for a night of rock. Finishing their set with
mr november was a stroke of genius. No doubt some non-fans finally cottoned on who they had been listening to.

I had low-to-middling expectations from Modest Mouse, and wasn’t entirely surprised when they didn’t sparkle. Don’t get me wrong; I think they make great music. But I think their talent lies in crafting perfect albums that need to be listened to in their entirety. Somehow, the experimental nature of their music is lost on a live stage, especially one as large as the Hollywood Bowl.

As for the headliners, R.E.M., my mistake was in not listening to their latest album, Accelerate, before the show. My bad. It was good, but since it was all new to me, not much sunk in. Of the older songs, I really enjoyed hearing Final Straw live. And I loved their super-fast take on Bad Day, possibly my favourite R.E.M. song, although that changes depending on my mood.

As a non-music aside, one of the big downers of the evening was the number of pot-smokers in the audience. Normally, at the Bowl, the smokers do us all a favour and smoke their stinky weed outside. This time, I had the misfortune to be sat behind 4 pot-heads, whose constant lighting up made my wine unpalatable and my evening a little sour. Talking through the performances also did not endear them to me. It’ll be an awful day should I ever stoop to reporting pot smokers to the equally unpleasant security people.

That aside, I enjoyed the music. Even if I didn’t know half the set-list. In fact, that was what made it better: that R.E.M. didn’t just play their best-known hits. Consummate professionals to the last man, they keep track of what they’ve played in each venue and try not to repeat songs over the years. Blimey, that’s organised!

Bleg – smartphones

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I’ve hummed and hah-ed over getting a smartphone for nearly 5 years now. I’ve made do with pay-as-you-go basic phones, and they’ve served me well. As mobile phones. I’ve also been willing, in that time, to lug my laptop around on the off-chance that I’ll find wi-fi at my destination.

No longer. I’d like to shrink my phone, music player and surfing capabilities into one package. Preferably a robust one that works whether there is free wi-fi or not. I thought I had done well to narrow choices to my three favourite brands: Palm, Apple and Nokia.

My very early Palm PDA was a joy to use in its youth, and I’ve always admired the simplicity of its OS. Apple gets on the list for the very simple reason that I use a Powerbook as my main computer, and would hence benefit from easy porting of music and other crap to and from the iPhone. Nokia is, for me, a no-brainer where mobile phones are concerned; I bought the early banana phone and graduated to various very basic Nokias (and one fairly fancy hand-me-down from my mother). Again, the familiarity of navigation is greatly in its favour.

Well and good, you’d think. Not so! I now find myself dithering even more. Do I like the low(ish) prices of the Palm Treo (or the even cheaper Centro) enough to sacrifice screen size and sexiness? Or am I so pro-Apple that I can overlook the lack of 3G capabilities in the current iPhone (let alone be prepared to buy the model that is bound to be superseded by Christmas)? Or do I want to bankrupt myself and get the sexiest Nokia N95 8GB?

My cheapness nags me to get the cheapest (that’d be the Palm Centro then). My shallow nature informs me that the N95 will up my cool factor (which is currently non-existent) and worth every one of its 750 unlocked dollars. My Apple-washed brain screams that the iPod/phone/browser-in-one is a no-brainer (especially since my old 3rd gen 15GB iPod AND my not-as-old 4GB iPod mini both died recently).

Then I remember why I stopped using my Palm: the sync station is unwieldy if you don’t have a dedicated computer desk (which is my current situation) and the battery life is somewhat ridiculously short. Did I already mention the $750 price tag of the Nokia N95? I should write it on a post-it and leave it on my screen as a reminder. And as for the more-than-three-in-one iPhone, BOTH my iPods died recently; there’s some mega flaw with the hard disk that is clearly incompatible with my lifestyle.

What to do, interwebs? I bleg you to save me from my dithering and give me some advice.


N.B. No one has prompted me to list these 3 brands as advertising. Who’d be silly enough to want to advertise here anyway? I just like them because their stuff kind of works for me. But I’m not adverse to any free phones… (Oh, if only I’d taken this offer up!) I have no scruples. And I save my ethics for science and the environment only.

muse ick

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It’s gonnae be a super-hectic weekend, which means I’ll have nae chance of making this blog feel loved. But I just had to put down something about the fabulous music I’ve been hearing: live, on the radio, on last.fm and in my head.

Last Friday saw us finally getting some tickets to the concert venue closest to our home in SaMo: McCabe’s Guitar Shop. I’ve been itching to see something there ever since popping my head in to buy some picks a few months back. It’s celebrating it’s 50th birthday this year, and in LA, I reckon that’s a pretty big deal since everything’s a temporary tattoo here. Anythehoo, McCabe’s has a back room where they host concerts every weekend. I have to confess to never having heard of most of the artists¹, but I overheard excited whispers regarding a certain Hansard fellow while picking my plectrums². Unsurprisingly, it was a sold-out concert and not for the likes of me³.

This Friday past, on the other hand, must have been the day off for my Ticket Tormentors4. Their slack resulted in us being blown away by the amazing Peter Mulvey, of Wisconsin. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He’s a very engaging performer with an easy patter. His folk rock was part of his patter, or is it the other way round. Anecdote after anecdote, he charmed us all and really raised the bar for the main act, Patty Larkin.

She was amazing. The things she did with her pedals made her one-person show a full aural spectacle. And like Peter Mulvey, she was on fine form with the stories and explanations. We were left in no doubt that she’s mighty annoyed about her MySpace squatter (thus leading to an evening of puns, which you’ll be pleased to hear I won’t be repeating here). I think if I’d heard her music before the show, I would have enjoyed the experience a lot more. As it was, I sat captivated by the technique, the meshing of different sounds. And quite forgot to listen to the music.

How can Blink-whatever-number get so much airtime and a wonderful and truly gifted musician like Patty Larkin never be on the radio at work? Oh yes, I work in a lab filled with teenagers. Fortunately, when I remember to put batteries in, I have my trusty FM/AM/LW-bigger-than-an-iPod radio which allows me to drown out Kanye with KCRW. Which was most fortuitous this morning because I suspect a very sneaky Fran Healy leaked one of the band’s latest songs on Morning Becomes Eclectic.

Oh yes. Immediately after the latest Coldplay single (which, btw, sounds very Travis-rock-like), a two-chord riff jarred out of the earphones and a very familiar voice launched into J Smith5.

there’s a man on the street
and he looks at his feet from his window
and he swears at the sun
and he curses the moon for his shadow

take a leaf from his book
take a thread from his suit
he’s a new man
and he prays to his god
that he reaps his reward for his new plan

It’s a good song. It’s lean yet anthemic. A touch of Queen with the dramatic Latin/Italian chorus. And yet saved from becoming melodramatic with the chew and growl of the guitar, driven by a rough bass line, accented with perfect bursts of drum. It’s raw but smooth: like a freshly caught fish, sashimi-ed in front of your very eyes. If you’re not a sushi person, think Lagavulin: smoky and peaty, with a hint of acid that threatens but never emerges, leaving a rolling smoothness in your mouth. Only it’s aural not oral.

I’ve gone from feeling like my music tastes had stagnated to being overwhelmed with choice. Despite my complaints about Ticketmaster (it hates me, I’m sure of it), we have a list of summer events to make up for the end of the LA Philharmonic’s season. This weekend sees us back at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, but for the Kronos Quartet. Halfway between here and there, we’ll see KT Tunstall at the Wiltern. I’m off to be eaten by gators in Florida after, and then get lost in the Smithsonian in DC, but I’ll be back for REM and Modest Mouse at the Hollywood Bowl.

And maybe I’ll just stay at home in June. Maybe.

2nd May 2008 Update: My little delurk (see footnote 5 below) made the front page of the Travis website. Woot!

1 Not because they’re not good or famous. Just chalk it up as yet another thing in a bajillion that I know diddly squat about.

2 I settled for the variety pack by the counter, thank you very much for asking. And my favourite of the random pack is the Pickboy 100; a solid plectrum with dimples for grip. P likes the really thin own-brand pick. But plectrum or pick choice has not turned us into Turin Brakes. Maybe we need guitar straps?

3 There are many, many concerts that I am clearly unworthy for, as Ticketmaster often reminds me. They have very rightly screened the potential audience for plebs, and have informed me in no uncertain terms that I’m not good enough to see Flight of the Conchords or Radiohead live. But I thumb my nose at them, for I am one of the privileged few to have seen the f*lksome twosome when they were selling themselves as Figwit and friend at the Edinburgh Fringe. Surgeon’s Hall, if I remember correctly. The Fringe was always a little surreal for me: comedy in my lecture halls.

4 Like Dementors, only they suck out the joy and excitement you feel in anticipation of a concert and replace it with that bottomless dread of having to tell your fellow concert goers that you have failed in your mission to bring joy to their lives.

5 If interested, go to the Morning Becomes Eclectic page and listen to the 1st of May edition at 40 minutes into the show. Hearing it was enough to prompt a de-lurk on the Travis messageboard. Back under the rock now…

Satisfying Street Stall Fruit

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Satisfying Street Stall Fruit

Bought my first bag of fruit from a street vendor in LaLaLand. Sprinkled with some pico de gallo, a little salt and a squeeze of 2 limes, this $5 bag of fruit made me feel I’d ripped the vendor off¹! This $5 bag saved us both from dehydration. It’s so easy to get dehydrated in LA. It was cool on Thursday, which meant we got away with having about 4-5 drinks during the day. This needs to be increased to an hourly drink on hot and dry days, which is sometimes difficult if you’re juggling many experiments. And invariably leads to mild heat stroke and a sodding headache for the rest of the day. Oh, to be a camel.

The spiced and salted fruit also reminded me of a childhood of choosing fresh fruit over snicker bars just because it tasted so much better. We had street and food court hawkers of such a huge variety of fresh fruit that I never learned all the names. As an 8 year old, I swung between: “Aunty², can I have only watermelon?” and “Aunty, mixed bag please!”. Another favourite was guava with a 5-spice dip, to which P was recently introduced when we found some really small lime-sized guavas in the shop. Needless to say, instant convert to jazzed-up fruit³!

In yesterday’s mix: watermelon, mango, orange, melon and another melon/radish/turnip thing whose taste is familiar, but name is forgotten. It’s bugging me. We’ll just have to find the fruit vendor again.

¹ Relative sense of expense always increased when thinking in £ and shopping in Whole Foods.

² Aunty being a generic Singaporean way of showing respect to a lady older than yourself. Can sometimes be insulting to a lady who considers herself too young for the Aunty label. Use with caution. In fact, I think you can only use that as a kid. I dunno. It’s been a long time.

³ Guava is, in kind words, a hard, tart bastard. It makes a fantastic juice, and its use as flavouring in my new-favourite daifuku is enough for us to fight for the last one. But let’s be honest. It needs help to stop the insides of your mouth from turning into a desert.

Kimchi noodles revisited

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Kimchi noodles

These kimchi noodles were so good and so tasty, they prompted a blog post after a month of absence. This is round two, with udon instead of somen. The different noodles create completely different eating experiences. We had both cold, like noodle salads. Even so, the udon version was very more-ish. Chewy and mouth-filling, it’s the option for a hungry day. I can just about picture the somen version going to the Hollywood Bowl or Greek Theatre for a summer day’s picnic. That said, I can picture both versions in my tummy any day of the week.

Oh, and I added sesame seeds for some prettiness this time. That added another 5 seconds to the total prep time.

Hard boiled (egg)plant

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Hard boiled (egg)plant, originally uploaded by framboise.

The potential fruit of this plant has had a progression of names that track the continents I’ve lived on. It’s the brinjal of my childhood, aubergine of my twenties and now eggplant of my thirties.

I now need a new continent and local name for Solanum melongena for my forties.

(Incidentally, yes, I know it’s going to grow to be a monster… That little patch needs more shade anyway. So, grow away little brinjal!)

Ginger biccies

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Ginger biccies

Made some ginger biscuits, recipe courtesy of BBC’s h2g2 pages. Three substitutions: used butter instead of margarine, raw crunchy brown turbinado sugar of forgotten name instead of demerara sugar, and maple syrup instead of golden syrup. Just because those were staple pantry items.

It worked pretty well. I plopped two different sizes of dough on the floured baking sheet since the original recipe called for “walnut”-sized pieces, and I wasn’t sure if they meant the two halves of the walnut interior or the entire walnut in shell. Both worked fine, but I’d improve it next time by squishing all with the back of a spoon. The centres of some of the biscuits weren’t biscuity and resembled soft cookie instead. The edges, however, were perfect ginger snap crispiness, just a minute short of being burnt. Another thing I might do is use molasses instead of maple syrup. And I definitely want to try it without the egg yolk to decrease the moisture content (which may have been increased by my use of turbinado sugar).

I’ll reproduce the recipe here with my modifications later. I just wanted to post something before it became too onerous a task to get it all down. Catch ya later, alligators. And here we go…

Ginger Biscuits
modified from h2g2 recipe

  • 125g butter, softened on “defrost” in microwave for 10 seconds
  • 125g turbinado sugar (sugar in the processing stages)
  • 1 tbsp (15ml) maple syrup
  • 1 egg yolk from a US large egg
  • 180g self-raising flour¹
  • 1 heaped tsp ground ginger

Method

(I pretty much followed the h2g2 protocol, but this is what I actually did)

  1. Pre-heated oven to 350°F / 180°C.
  2. Sprinkled some flour onto 2 baking sheets and smeared them around with my mucky paws. I shook the excess into the bin. Wasteful, no? Incidentally, I like this a whole lot more than greasing the sheets then flouring them. It actually worked this time.
  3. Prepared all the ingredients, taking care to WATCH the butter to prevent accidents like this happening again:

    melted butter 1

  4. Creamed the butter and sugar using my trusty hand-held beater. I have no idea what I did before inheriting this hand-held beater. I have wonderful memories of my mother’s Kenwood Chef/Professional standing mixers, then a almost blank period of painful recollections of hours spent whipping cream and mascarpone for tiramisu as a semi-impoverished, aspirational under- and post-graduate and postdoctorate in Edinburgh. I’m still semi-impoverished, but at least I inherited a hand-held beater from a friend who left the lab.
  5. Added the egg yolk and maple syrup, beating it in well. Saved the egg white for cocktails later because my impressionable mind had read in some fancy foody website that egg white-containing cocktails were da bomb these days. Is it still alright to say “da bomb”? OK, forget I said it.
  6. Mixed the flour and teaspoonful of ginger well, then sifted it into the creamed mix in batches (about 4). After each sifting, folded the flour/ginger mix into the creamed mix. Final product was considerably softer than shortbread, a little softer than American cookie dough, but still firm enough to form tight balls in my mucky paws.
  7. Formed tight balls in my mucky paws. h2g2 recipe suggests walnut-sized balls that will later double in spread. I agree. I tried walnut nut-sized balls, which made cute little biscuits you could serve for a teddy bear picnic, and walnut-with-shell-on-sized balls, which were far more satisfying in my grabby paws with a cuppa tea.
  8. Baked in oven for the suggested initial 12 minutes, after which I added 3 min for the smaller biscuits (total 15 min). The bigger biscuits were left in for 18 min, mainly because I kind of forgot to set the timer again. Their bottoms were a bit on the dark side, but still edible. 2 baking sheets would have been enough, but I split the dough into three because of the following troubleshooting help on the h2g2 page:

I don’t have biscuits! I have one biscuit, and it’s huge…
* You probably underestimated the space that you need to observe between each of the biscuits on the tray.

As he stuck this paws into the biscuit tin, P’s first question was: “Are they crunchy?”

I didn’t hear a word he said for the rest of the night…

¹ I make my own self-raising/rising flour to the tune of: 4 US cups flour, 2 tsp salt, 2 tbsp baking powder (not soda). I sift each ingredient into a plastic container and shake shake shake it all about. Makes life a little bit easier when making mini pancakes.