Filed under: Golfist Cinema, Naturalism, golf food | Tags: cannibal, Cormac McCarthy, The Road, The Road Movie, Top Ten, top ten recipes from the road, Weinstein, zombie
The Road is an important book, a big book, an Oprah book. It is now a Weinstein production, and soon we’ll be inundated with The Road publicity. As much as I like the book, I dread the movie. All reports are that it takes a book so hard to read into a movie that is miserably difficult to watch. Then again, it could be a great big fail and turn out to be just another zombie movie.
Thinking about this, I twittered my top ten recipes from The Road:
- Lady Fingers
- Hush Babies
- Mock Roast Turkey
- Nice Piece of Ass
- Babyback Ribs
- UnMystery Meat
- Chewy Tubes Cormac n Cheese
- Really Sloppy Joe
- Meat and No Potatoes
- Roadkill Haggis
The garden is crammed full of tomatoes, sweet corn, giant pumpkins, beans, peas, cantaloupe, watermelon, and zucchini squash. The vine plants I am allowing to escape the cage. Iowa has perfect growing conditions during the summer for vegetables.
Filed under: golf food, my golf | Tags: Bukharan Jews, comfort food, instant noodles, lagman, lo mein, midnight snack, Ramen, Shin Ramyun
I have always loved ramen, pronounced ramyun in Korean. It is a corruption of the original Chinese lo-mein. Other cultures, including the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, enjoy noodles in soups (they call it lagman). I have seen people eat these dry -I confess as a kid I used to do that too. Back in the day, my favorite was Sapporo Ichiban Ramen from Japan. It was basic -ur Ramen. Though the Chinese created these noodle soup dishes, and the Japanese made it a snack food by frying and drying the noodles for packaging, it is the Koreans who have created the perfect flavor -hot and spicy.
As a kid -the way to pep up the relatively bland Sapporo Ichiban was to add some kimchi into the boiling water. But kimchi is sometimes not available, but the food scientists at Shin Ramyun have recreated the perfect salty/spicy blend. It is the best Ramyun on the market. A close second is Neoguri (pronounced nuh-goo-ri).
The way I prepare it is boiling it the usual way, but I add two eggs which become poached in the soup. One egg i will break up to create kind of an egg drop effect, but the other I will leave to make a perfect poached egg within the spices. It is the real center of this dish. To this, I will add chopped green onions cut long (about two to three inches). Maybe some spinach leaves from the giant Costco packages.
If you’re really hungry, adding some cold rice to it is an easy way to increase the deliciousness. It is incredibly satisfying in a way that soul food satisfies. Water boiling now -must go.
Filed under: Golf and Religion, golf culture, golf food, golf mysticism, golf proverbs | Tags: 25 things about me, chain letter, confession, exhibitionism, facebook, narcissism
This is a chain letter circulating around Facebook -this is my contribution. My soul has been bared.
Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.
(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)
25 things about me
1.Imagination -my imagination tends to run amok. Ally MacBeal was a bit jarring to watch because on some levels, my brain works in a similar fashion.
2.Navel gazing -I am a chronic self examiner. Combined with number 3, blogging and Facebook suits me like swamp water does for a frog.
3.Exhibitionism -Yes. I am a bit of an exhibitionist,. Not in the trenchcoat with no pants way, but more in the need for getting everyone’s attention. But I have a purpose!
4.Food -Food, good food, obsesses me to the point that I have to force myself to view food as a bodily function and not the center of my day. Spam is the pearl of American food, by the way. I can be seduced with food. I prefer savory over sweet.
5.Bloody mindedness -I have a masochistic streak. My personal motto was set at four, when I declared to my whiny cousin Eugene, “Namja neun ch’ah muh ya deh.” which loosely translates to “a man must persevere.” Stoicism appeals to me, even though I may unstoically complain of its absence. Once, out of boredom, I pulled out 5 of my remaining baby teeth at age 10.
6.I can’t talk about number 6. It involves the Plaza Hotel, the Harvard Club of Boston, Locke-Ober, The University Club, the Four Seasons of New York…There I said too much. They might be reading this.
7.Doing things from scratch -I enjoy creating things from elemental items. For a cucumber and tomato salad, I grew these items along with the chives and then became flustered over not being able to make the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and coarse pickling salt. I then contemplated making the bowl out of the clay from the deeper soil of the garden. The longer the process and the shorter the reward, the greater the appeal. I like to fish with flies that I’ve tied myself, and dream of catching fish in Central Park with just the items from a sewing kit from one of the hotels.
8.Narcissism -I tend to personalize everything. You are me, and he is me, and we are me, and we are all together -isn’t how that song goes?
9.Golf -I play golf in my mind when I’m not thinking about myself or what I’m going to eat next. I’m a big baby.
10.Rules -I like structure insofar as it draws lines for me to cross, if I can.
11.Impatient -I am not terribly patient.
12.Grand Gestures -I am a bit of a primitive or a throwback in my love and appreciation of grand gestures. Think Taj Mahal or the Defenestration of Prague -actually scratch that last one.
13.Mongols -Yes, I love anything Mongolian. I would love to live in a yurt with forty horses and my clan in tow going from pasture to pasture.
14.Chimpanzees -I can sit and watch them all day for weeks on end if given the opportunity. Their inner workings are so mysterious.
15.Women -I can sit and watch them all day for weeks on end if given the opportunity. Their inner workings are so mysterious.
16.Minorities -The Yakuts, the Kipchaks, the Tai Dam, the Hmong, the Hottentots, Parsis, everyone Stalin moved around, the Piraha, remnant hunter gatherers of the world, Central Asian Jews, the Celts, the list goes on and on. Fascinating stuff.
17.The Encyclopaedia Brittanica -I used to read it obsessively.
18.Scouting -I was an avid cub scout, but made the mistake of not going beyond Webelos. The ethos of scouting has always been a part of my worldview.
19.Fishing -I can usually catch fish. A good skill to have.
20.The Next Thing -My To-Do list is a branchy, multiply bifurcating clade of the next shiny, neat thing to figure out or do. I enjoy constantly remaking my environment.
21.School -If I hit Powerball, I’m going back to school forever.
22.Anchovies -I really enjoy the salty, super fishy flavor of anchovies on the side with a freshly made Caesar’s salad.
23.Writing -If I had to do it all over, I would have put more effort into writing and storytelling.
24.Love -I am a believer in true, romantic love. The kind that gives you strength, perspective, and a clear vision.
25.Purgatory -If the Old Testament, hellfire Christians are correct, then the best I can expect is to be in a line with quadrillions of people ahead of me, a line that includes Gandhi, Socrates, the Buddha, the entire pre-Columbian Aztec nation, most everyone who has ever lived in Marin County, aborted fetuses (each wearing an original sin pin on a simple gray smock), spilled semen (reconstituted as hopping demi-beings with whiplike tails, wearing half a black tee shirt with Onan in globby white letters), and a couple of my high school teachers. We’re all waiting to get processed and sent down a large hole in the clouds. We entertain each other with stories about our lives. I’m surrounded by a couple of billion demi-people who claim some relationship to me…
Filed under: golf food, golf philosophy | Tags: avoiding work, evil turkey, hard labor, thanksgiving meal, turkey dinner
Thanks
When we stopped making the turkey last year, we had the best thanksgiving ever. We had it catered from Wakonda from the inimitibable Chef George. In fact, when you take in the food costs and time, it pretty much is a draw. We were having our front door neighbors over. It was our first Thanksgiving without blood relations. At around 5 in the evening, I drove over and picked up 6 neatly packaged bags in cardboard boxes. Driving home, the smells were otherworldly. We unpacked, put out our good (and only) china, and popped a bottle of wine. The neighbors came, and we had the best Thanksgiving meal that I have ever had (except for a visit to my college roommate’s family in Philadelphia in 1987, where I ate enough for three, and then lounged around for five hours alternately watching football and a Star Trek marathon, before eating AGAIN).
There was no Star Trek last year, but there was homemade cranberry sauce with perfectly tart fresh cranberries in a jammy gel that had never had the shape of a cylinder. The stuffing could have been a main course by itself. I could have lifted the gravy boat and guzzled the brown ambrosia. The mashed potatoes were really smashed with the evidence quite clear from the non-uniform pearls of pure earthy flavor. Washed down with a Gewürztraminer, followed by pumpkin pie a la mode and serious fresh ground coffee. Oh, the turkey was perfect.
The clean up involved putting away the leftovers in the packages they came in. No hours of back breaking labor for a 5-15% chance of a turkey mishap (observation from about 25 Thanksgivings as an adult). That bad luck turkey is a mofurkey which in its many manifestations is alternately unevenly cooked, over-done (usually due to relying on the popup signal designed by lawyers), or generally associated with some misfortune (this year, a nephew with second degree burns, have heard stories of houses burning down). No, we completely avoided the mofurkey last year by outsourcing. It wasn’t just the meal we outsourced -it was the stress and the work on a day that no one should work. We could concentrate on the giving of thanks and enjoying each other’s company. What did we do for Thanksgiving this year? We ate jja-jjang myun at a seriously great place in Bayside, Queens. No mofurkey!
Shown is a can of SPAM, which took a big hit during the nineties after junk e-mail (about p3n1s 3nlarg3m3nt, p0rn, and millions of dollars stuck in an account in Nigeria) was named after it. Fact is, for Koreans of a certain age, it meant not just sustenance, but luxury. During the Korean War, when hunger struck the fleeing and bombed out Korean population, SPAM in the form of government issue C-rations, was a treasure more dear than chocolate. I remember that it was very expensive, much more so per pound than fresh meat, and to give a case of it was the kind of thing you gave at weddings of very important relatives. That or the cans of pineapple rings, but I digress.
I suspect it had to do with the fact that it goes so well with cold rice. Sliced thin and fried in its own juices (and fat) on a grill to a crispiness on both sides, a slice of SPAM gives instant flavor to a bowl of leftover cold rice in ways that cannot be described. It is comfort food that is existential, bringing rush of memories of childhood when as a child of privilege in Korea, I was fed not only the finest fruits and vegetables, but meat, and the best meat in the form of SPAM.
I googled its shelf life, and most reports come back that as long as it has kept its vacuum, its probably still good to eat (link). Meaning as long as you keep it in a cool dry place, you can keep it for years, possibly decades.
Bachelor mock-fried rice:
cold rice from Chinese takeout, butter, soy sauce, sesame seeds (optional), black pepper, two fried eggs, spam. Melt butter into the cold rice in a skillet. Drizzle soy sauce. Separate pan, fry two eggs over easy and enough slices of spam for your man appetite. Put done eggs on rice and mix with spoon until eggs are fragmented. Put spam on side in bowl. Season with sesame seeds and black pepper. Go to TV and enjoy.
