cartopia, 12th & hawthorne (vine)

Happy Malasada Day!

A few photos of the malasadas we had in Honolulu. A malasada is a traditional Portuguese-Hawaiian deep fried pastry, similar to a donut without a hole. Leonard's Bakery, where we got these from, is sort of the canonical choice for malasadas, and it was a short walk from our hotel.



I'm posting the photos now because apparently it's Fat Tuesday today, or "Malasada Day" as it's known in Hawaii. The traditional idea, as I understand it, is that you're supposed to use up all your remaining butter and eggs and oil and so forth before Lent, and that means a big party with lots of tasty deep fried goodness, and then everyone wakes up the next day and it's 40 days of sackcloth and ashes and self denial and silly religious nonsense. The modern-day idea is that the next morning everyone wakes up with empty coral pink malasada boxes and it's time to go get more.



People often say Hawaii is generally a few years behind the mainland when it comes to trends and so forth. I don't know if that's generally true or not, but I did notice that nobody seemed to be selling bacon-wrapped malasadas. I'm quite certain that would be a license to print money, so maybe the "add bacon to everything" trend simply hasn't arrived in Hawaii yet. It's the only plausible explanation I can think of.

lunch of champions

This, o Gentle Reader(s), is a Pork Hammer sandwich from Big-Ass Sandwiches. Ham, bacon, sausage, fries, and cole slaw, and I had them add some grilled onions. Oh, and a side of fries to go with the fries already on the sandwich.



This isn't what I usually have for lunch, but I was in a good mood & felt like indulging a little. I'd finally convinced the Pointy Haired Bosses to let me fix a pet peeve bug I've wanted to sort out for, oh, at least a year and a half now. It's actually one of a nest of related bugs I'd like to fix, so the hope is that this one is just the thin end of the wedge and they'll go for the others soon. So yeah, in short, I have a really super-exciting thrills-a-minute life in RL.

haddock & chips

From the Frying Scotsman cart at SW 9th & Alder, downtown Portland. There's other fish on the menu besides haddock, but that's the traditional fish in Scotland, so that's what I had. This humble blog isn't really a food blog, and I don't really do reviews, but I would happily recommend this, especially with another cold wet dreary winter coming up. Also, don't be afraid of the HP sauce.

If you're really looking for reviews, take a look at the writeups at Food Carts Portland, Yelp, & Willamette Week.



I haven't yet tried the deep fried Mars bar, but I'm sure I will before too long. I'm not trying to be hip or ironic here. I had a deep fried Twinkie a while back at a place in downtown Las Vegas, and that turned out to be quite delicious. I've also had deep fried dill pickles at a bar somewhere in NW Portland (if I remember right). From what little I remember of the evening, I seem to recall thinking they were ok, but they really ought to have used better pickles. The WW piece also mentions deep fried haggis as a possible future menu item. And I'd happily try that too. But first, more fish.

Apples, Howell Territorial Park

korean tacos

A trio of tasty Korean tacos, from the Korean Twist cart at SW 3rd & Washington, downtown Portland.

I really haven't taken a lot of food photos, so this and the previous post are something of an experiment. These were taken on a park bench in Waterfront Park, on a hot day, at a point where I really needed to eat something. So it didn't occur to me to rearrange things so you could get a clear look at the other two tacos. They were basically variations on the same ridiculously delicious theme though.

green tea mochi

Bridge Diner

Some photos of the old, historic Bridge Diner under the Broadway Bridge in downtown Portland. Ok, it's not actually old or historic. It's not even a diner. It's a movie set, a very detailed and believable set for the film Untraceable, currently shooting here in town. (The Mercury has a bit about it here, and there's a mention at CafeUnknown and I think I've seen it somewhere else too.)

Passersby could be forgiven for wondering how long it was here without them noticing. The movie folks did a great job making the thing look old, and it's small enough that it's conceivable it could've been overlooked. It looks like something you might find here, a half-forgotten relic of the old industrial days when the area was a working seaport.

I already knew the story when I set out to find the thing, so I just sort of walked around admiring it for a while, taking a few pictures and smiling at the bored security guard in a nearby pickup. Then my stomach growled at me. It sure would be nice if there was a real diner here, or around here somewhere. The surrounding area is mostly residential these days, but there's nowhere to eat, at least not anywhere that I've noticed. So a restaurant of any kind would be welcome here, I'm sure.

One fun bit: The "Diner parking only" sign is part of the set, but it serves precisely the same purpose in the real world too, keeping people from hogging the parking spaces around the building. It's like, postmodern, or whatever.

And since it's not really blogging unless I find something to be all anal-retentive and pedantic about, a couple of quibbles. First, a sign on the back of the building (photo 4) advertises "hero" and "grinder" sandwiches. Nobody uses those words here. Here they're always sub sandwiches. Don't ask me to explain that; it's just how it is. Second, the prominent "AIR CONDITIONED" sign on the front might not gotten that kind of billing here, even back when AC was a novelty. The whole damn state is naturally air conditioned about nine months out of the year. What you do see more often on old buildings are signs advertising "Color TV". Also, the building is even smaller than a Waffle House, which is really saying something. That's entirely too small. But that's not unusual for movie sets. Maybe one of the stars is really short and insecure, or something.

The thing with diners is that what people really love is the idea of diners. Maybe it's the architecture, or the music on the jukebox. Maybe they're seen as relics of a "simpler" and more wholesome era. Maybe it's even the food for some people, but not everyone, I'm sure. Case in point: Out in Hillsboro there's a place called the Blue Moon Diner. (inside photo here) It's located in a strip mall off TV Highway, across from a big Intel plant, and it's only been there maybe 10-15 years. But apart from that, it's the real deal, as far as I can tell. It's one of those airstream-style prefab aluminum diners from the Midwest, which are still in production, believe it or not. The owners bought one, had it shipped here, and set up shop. The food is exactly what you'd expect: Eggs, bacon, and waffles; burgers, fries, and shakes; the whole deal. I'm told (by people who should know) that the burgers are just like the burgers you'd have gotten way back when. Which is not the same thing as saying they're the best burgers you can find now in 2007. And in 2007, you don't always want a burger anyway, regardless of the setting. When we lived out in that part of town, we went to the Blue Moon now and then, but for every visit we probably made ten runs to the neighborhood Thai Orchid. But still, the building sure is pretty. Your cultural studies professor can call it "pastiche" all s/he likes, but it's hard to beat curvy shiny aluminum, since everything else for miles around is nothing but relentless beigeness. Some of the more adventurous buildings are beige with khaki accents. But it can be hard to tell from a distance.

If you're closer to downtown and looking for an "authentic" diner experience, you might try the Original Hotcake House, on SE Powell near Milwaukie Ave. Not quite a "diner" per se, but definitely a greasy spoon. The bacon's good, which is really all you need to know. Oh, and, it's open 24/7. Back when I lived nearby in the Brooklyn neighborhood, mumble-mumble years ago, I'd occasionally drop by there at 2AM for some greasy breakfast chow and coffee. I'm not as much of a night-owl-about-town as I once was, but I'm still awfully fond of the place.

But I digress. More than any concerns about regional or historical authenticity, or whether it's physically possible to stuff enough customers inside to pay the bills, what I really worry about is Oregon's movie curse. Nearly every movie made here has been jaw-droppingly godawful, although sometimes (rarely) they achieve so-bad-it's-good status. Think The Hunted, or Portland Exposé, or Body of Evidence (which I just saw over the weekend, but that's another story). I hope the latest production manages to avoid the curse, even if it's supposed to be yet another Northwest serial killer movie, like we really need another of those.

Anyway, I hope the movie doesn't suck, and if it does, I hope it sucks in a non-memorable way so we don't get buses full of tourists through here looking for the real Bridge Diner. If anyone asks about it, feel free to play oldtimer and make up stories for the wide-eyed tourists. Tell them Harry Truman ate here, or that Marilyn Monroe worked here for a month or two, just before she got her start in showbiz. Say it's haunted by the ghost of some mafia kingpin who got gunned down in the parking lot back during the pinball wars of the late 50's. Repeat a few off-color jokes and say you heard them from old Stumpy McGee, the legendary line cook at the Bridge who retired to Yuma just last year. Tell 'em the place hasn't been the same since, but you remember how it was in the old days...

fruit & industry

A few more assorted pics I had lying around in iPhoto:



Rose hips from somewhere in downtown Portland.




Blueberries from the Portland Farmers Market, from a few months back.




The moon over a construction crane, again in downtown (near the waterfront if I remember correctly), again from a few months back.




A bit of industrial grimness from Aberdeen, Washington.

a lemon on the way

My wife's lemon tree has decided to get with the program this year. So far, anyway.

I hope I'm not jinxing the lil' lemon by posting this.

A "different" carrot recipe

Hey, campers! Here's another tasty recipe from the wilds of Eastern Oregon. Like several previous items (the UFO invasion in Morrow County, and the local way to make "chow mein", for example), my wife discovered this in a local newspaper from out there, and brought it to my attention, just to gross me out. The dry 2/3 of our state seems like a normal, calm, rural place on the surface, but then you read the local paper and realize you're in Twin Peaks country. I don't know what would be weirder: a.) that people really eat this stuff out there, or b.) they don't (due to common sense and taste buds and so forth), but they put it in the newspaper anyway.

Today's recipe actually comes from the same "nice" little old lady as the chow mein glop I wrote about earlier. This recipe doesn't seem to have a name other than "A Different Way to Cook Carrots". She writes, "For those who do not like carrots, please try this recipe, you might like them this way." Fat chance.

Our delicious, nutritious ingredients:

1 1/2 cups raw baby carrots
1 8 oz. can cream of chicken soup (follow directions on can)
1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
buttered dry bread crumbs [no quantity specified]

The directions, such as they are:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. [She doesn't say to do this, but it stands to reason.]
  
• In a buttered baking dish [of unspecified size], place the baby carrots in it, and pour the soup over 'em.
  
• Then sprinkle the cheese on top, and finally top it all off with the bread crumbs.
  
• Cover and bake for 30 minutes.
  

When she says to follow the directions on the can of soup, I assume she means to reconstitute it with milk the way you normally would, although I'm not 100% sure about that. Maybe it's just because I'm a computer geek or something, but imprecise directions make me nervous, especially if I'm supposed to eat the end product. I haven't looked at a can of cream of chicken soup in a long time, and there may be other directions besides how to use it as soup. If there are casserole-specific directions, I suppose you'll probably want to use those instead.

The justification given for this dish is that it's a great way to get people to eat their carrots. Which is crucial, because carrots are wholesome and nutritious and full of vitamins and minerals and generally super-duper good for you and all, in case you missed that part back in grade school. The classic way to get people to eat what's good for 'em is to disguise it with so much fat and salt and modern gee-whiz chemicals that you negate any health benefits the clandestine nutritious bits might provide. But hey. At least they ate their carrots. Mission accomplished.

What you get from this recipe, I imagine, is something akin to a chicken pot pie, except without the pastry crust. Which is heresy, of course. The chicken and the crust are what it's all about, and everything else is secondary. I will grudgingly tolerate carrots in a pot pie, because they're traditional and everyone does it, but I really don't think they go with chicken. Or cheese, for that matter. And it's rare that chicken and cheese are improved by being combined. It's like matter vs. antimatter, except three ways instead of two, if you can imagine such a thing.

Despite all the snarkiness, I really do, 100% sincerely, want to help, for real, honest, and if you're going to insist on serving this stuff to picky eaters (i.e. people who don't like carrots), you'll need all the help you can get, so here are some suggestions on how to improve this tasty, tasty delicacy, without making it too much work, or involving any weird ingredients. My sense is that this recipe has less potential for improvement than that chow mein recipe, so I don't really want to get your hopes up too much, but here goes:

1. She doesn't say to do anything with the baby carrots. If you're going to hide them under an opaque layer of salty beige soup, the decent thing would be to slice them up, especially if you're serving this to carrot-o-phobes. It's harder for them to pick all the orange bits out that way. And maybe add some chopped celery while you're at it. I mean, why not? It wouldn't be worse that way.
   
2. In this day and age, suggesting that people make their own pie crust definitely counts as "too much work". But maybe you could get a frozen crust from the store and use that, and bake your soupy cheesy carrots in a proper pastry crust, the way God intended. Hint: You probably want to avoid any premade crusts that involve graham crackers or oreos. I mean, be my guest and try it if you really want to; I just don't think it'll have the desired effect, is all I'm saying.
   
3. If your frozen crust doesn't come with a top, or even if you aren't doing the whole pastry crust thing, you might try some mashed potatoes on top. There's a rich tradition in England of putting mashed potatoes on top of meat pies. I don't normally advocate copying what the British do when it comes to food, but, I mean, there are potatoes involved. You can't go wrong with potatoes. (If you ignored my advice in the last item and went with the graham cracker crust, my advice this time is to leave off the potatoes. Like you'll really listen or whatever.)
   
4. Add some garlic, maybe some onions. Even garlic powder would work in a pinch, for this sort of thing. If you think garlic's a weird ingredient, there's nothing I can do to help you.
   
5. If you have a can of peas or a bag of frozen peas lying around, this might be a great opportunity to dust it off and inflict it on the unwary. Just hide 'em under the soup, like you did with the carrots. Peas are traditional in your classic pot pie recipe, so you can get away with it, although I personally don't hold with cooked peas, generally speaking.
   
6. But please, please don't try the above with lima beans. Your oven will explode and burn down the whole neighborhood. Or to be more frank about it, I refuse to offer any useful advice when it comes to lima beans; if I have to make up crazy nonsense to deter people from using lima beans, I'll do what I have to do. You have to draw the line somewhere.
   
7. Find some way, somehow, to ditch the canned soup. Ok, I'll admit that getting some chicken and doing up some gravy would be harder than just going with the canned soup, so let's agree that "not using canned soup" is an advanced technique here.
   
8. This will probably taste better after a few drinks, especially if you used the Oreo crust. Like the recipe itself, it wouldn't do to get too fancy here. Martinis would be correct if you're trying for the whole 50's suburbia effect, but they just seem a little too swanky under the circumstances, and I just don't think the pairing is quite right, flavorwise. Rum-and-cokes would be better, and drink 'em out of jelly jars if you've got 'em.
   
9. Just pack it in and make the damn chicken pot pie, already. Or get a frozen pot pie from the grocery store and microwave it, if you're feeling unmotivated. It'll be a million times better, either way.
   

That chow mein recipe I covered (or variants of it) turns out to be a time-honored taste sensation native to the upper midwest, and today's recipe certainly has a sort of cornfed, stick-to-yer-ribs quality to it as well. I wonder if the, ah, chef is originally from that neck of the woods. From the grainy photo of (allegedly) her next to the recipe, I'm guessing she's somewhere in her late 70's to mid-80's. If you read local obits of people that age and older, a remarkable number of them were born somewhere in the Midwest, usually the Dakotas or rural Minnesota, and moved out here some time between 1910 and the dustbowl era. My own grandfather-in-law is yet another of these Minnesota migrants, and my father's family came west from Missouri about that time, and I've met several other people who did this as well. Nobody's every really explained why all these people left en masse, although I suppose the climate may have been a factor.

Right now it's state fair season in the Midwest, which is a great chance to examine the current state of the art in the local cuisine. Pharyngula has a bit about the state fair in Minnesota -- tater tot hotdish on a stick! deep-fried Oreos! The Champagne of Blogs offers a similar report about the Iowa State Fair, with plenty of photos. Deep-fried mac & cheese! Pork chop on a stick!

I hesitate to mention this, because I'm not a mean person, but on one hand you have this... cuisine, and on the other you have all these nice, well-meaning little old ladies whose husbands all had heart attacks and kicked off at age 55, my own sainted, dearly-departed grandmother among them. As I said, I'm not a mean person, so I would never, ever suggest there's a causal link here or anything. I'm just sayin'.

Bones and Brew 2006

Stopped by the Bones & Brew festival near the Rogue pub on Sunday. Had a few good beers and some tasty, tasty ribs, including the ones pictured above (from Sellwood Public House).

I don't want to be negative here, but I have to say the event as a whole was, um, not of the top rank. It's not the organizers' fault it was so hot and windy yesterday, but they could've provided more seating, and a tent for a little shade, and they didn't, and they're lucky there wasn't much of a crowd. There were a lot of empty spaces where vendors ought to have been, and the whole thing had a sort of empty, forlorn feel (which made the lack of seating all the more weird.) There was musical entertainment by a cover band playing classic rock hits of the 70's, 80's and 90's, far too loud, almost drowning out the roar of the I-405 freeway right next door. My senses of taste and smell had a grand old time, but the other three were under serious assault. I stayed just long enough to have my fill of bones and brewskis, and then headed off to seek air conditioning.

On the other hand, any day that includes ribs is a good day. Yesterday I discovered that a day is also a good day if it includes the IPA from the new Ninkasi brewery in Eugene. Mmmm, hoppy...

Here are a couple of posts about last year's Bones & Brew, one at Metroblogging Portland and a very negative one at ExtraMSG. The latter is a local "foodie" blog, and the writer focuses exclusively on the food and doesn't mention the beer at all, which just isn't right. It's fair to say that Portland is not, and never will be, a center of the BBQ arts. The conditions aren't right for it. I could go off on a rant and try to explain why it's impossible, but instead I'll just give one example. Some of the best barbecue I've ever had was in Columbia, SC, at a local institution called Maurice's. If you peek at the website, you'll quickly realize that Maurice is a deeply opinionated man, and about as politically incorrect as you can possibly imagine. Here he'd cause angry letters to the editor, and attract protesters, and eventually be run out of town on a rail, because people here are not about to overlook such things in the name of a good meal. That's just not our way. A genuine BBQ joint with an uncontroversial owner wouldn't fare much better. Chances are it wouldn't be located in a trendy upscale shopping area, and therefore would be widely ignored by nearly everyone who (supposedly) matters in the local food scene, other than our fairly small corps of diehard BBQ junkies. Then one day the neighborhood will become trendy overnight, and the restaurant will be run out of town by the forces of gentrification, to make way for yet another doggie day spa.

But hey, no city can, or should, be tops in every last category. We can specialize in tasty beer, and Memphis can specialize in tasty pig meat, and it's all good. That's what tourism's for.

Anyway, all of this is making me really hungry. I think I need to go find me some more ribs.

Thursday Market

Here's yet another sign that summer's just around the corner, despite what the weather might lead you to believe. The Portland Farmers Market began its thursday forays into Yuppiestan (a.k.a. Pugtopia, a.k.a. the Pearl District) yesterday. The locals annoy the hell out of me, but the market's close to the office, so I keep going back. Oh, and did I mention yesterday was also First Thursday as well? Jack Bogdanski has a short, curmudgeonly bit about yesterday's, um, art extravaganza. He's basically the local blogoverse's grumpy old guy who's against everything new, dammit, and he's overly fond of conspiracy theories, but he can be fun to read, and he's a rare break from the city's usual shiny-happy-people boosterism.



Anyway, fresh fruit season's only just begun, but local strawberries are starting to show up now, and I'm willing to put up with a lot if there's fresh fruit involved. Mmmm.... Strawberries...



As an extra bonus feature, here's a broken window in an empty building in the Pearl. The building was recently vacated by an auto repair business that had been there long before the area became all ritzy and trend-o-licious. Now the building's up for sale or lease, and I expect that before long we'll see a nice new wine and cheese shop, or maybe another doggie day spa. Or maybe they'll just tear the building out and put in a high-end condo tower at taxpayer expense, and then put in the doggie day spa. Goodness knows we need more of those. The building behind it is also vacant at the moment, so maybe that's where the inevitable tapas-n-cocktails bar will go.

Mmmm... Ortolans... (Mmmm!?)

In the previous post, I made a rather rash comment to the effect that I'd be willing to eat just about anything, if I thought it might taste good. Let me qualify that, please: I do firmly draw the line at chowing down on endangered species, in case you were wondering, or getting ready to picket me, or something.

I mention this because while I was rifling through some old cookbooks full of (mostly) icky food while writing that last post, I came across a real gem. This recipe comes from an old, fussy 1972 cookbook of mine, "Great Classic Recipes of Europe", which combines two of this blog's continuing fixations: Weird food, and cute wildlife. I am referring, of course, to "Ballotine de Faisan Villeneuvoise Flanquee d'Ortolans" (the book omitted any vowel accent marks in the name -- it's not my fault!) , which the book translates as "Pheasant Presented in Sausage Form, Flanked with Game Birds", proving again that everything sounds tastier in French. But the English translation is inaccurate, in that not just any old "game birds" will suffice. No, this recipe calls for ortolans, small birds which are both a legendary French delicacy, and a highly endangered species. A footnote in the recipe explains that ortolans are "Tiny birds (buntings) much prized as delicacies in Europe. Gourmet stores sometimes carry the small birds canned, or halves of very small Cornish game hens could be used as a substitute". So I think the authors were sort of aware the birds were scarce even in 1972, but failed to grasp the environmental implications of that fact. I'm not going to reproduce the recipe in full here, because it's exceedingly complex, and 95% of it concerns the tedious preparation of the pheasant ballotine, which doesn't really concern us right now. Among the 36(!) ingredients, we require 6 ortolans, and 6 pastry shells. The relevant instructions are simply: "Braise ortolans 5 minutes in fat. Salt and arrange them in individual flaky pastry tart shells".

That cookbook isn't the only book I've got that mentions ortolans. They also appear in a fascinating 1834 natural history volume titled System of Natural History (although later editions are known as The Naturalist's Library, and the book's more commonly known by that name), compiled by one Augustus Addison Gould. The University of Michigan has a searchable online version of the book here, with images of the original text's pages. Here's what the book has to say about ortolans:

THE ORTOLAN ²
Is somewhat less than the yellow-hammer. The plumage on the upper parts is brownish chestnut, mixed with black; the under parts are pale rufous. These birds are common in France and Italy, but are not found in England. They are caught in numbers to fatten for the table. This is done by including them in a dark room, and feeding them with oats and millet. By this process they become so fat that they would die from that cause alone, were they not killed for sale. In this state they will sometimes weigh three ounces, and are accounted the most luxurious repast of the epicure, being, as it were, one lump of exquisite fat.

² Emberiza hortulana, LIN.

A few more E. hortulana items:

• In case you missed it in the Wikipedia article I linked to above, ortolans were served in the traditional style as part of Francois Mitterand's last meal.
  
• Photos of ortolans in the wild, taken by a birder in the UK.
  
• A page (in French) with instructions on how to capture ortolans in the wild and fatten them up for the table.
  
• An allegedly Italian recipe in Japanese for "risotto dell ortolan". If the photo is correct, I don't see an actual bird in the dish, but maybe it's under the rice or something.
  
• A project on ortolan conservation in Norway.
  
• And a paper by Finnish researchers noting a crash in the ortolan population [PDF] in southern Finland, due to agricultural development and the resulting loss of habitat. You'd think you'd see the habitat loss argument being advanced as an excuse by militant ortolan devotees, but they just don't even bother trying to explain themselves.
  
• Recipe-For.com has several recipes for ortolans, beginning with Broiled Ortolans in Papers. Click the "Fried Ortolans" link to go on to the next one, a tasty sounding concoction with bacon and a white wine sauce. And so on.
  

Like I said, I'm not actually in favor of eating these poor little creatures, even if I'm providing recipes. They're strictly for you to marvel at, ok? Eating ortolans is one of those things people indulge in when they have far too much money and not a clue about how to enjoy life. Sort of like caviar, Havana cigars, and luxury SUVs. Blech. But the ortolan phenomenon is still fascinating to me. It's a mystery how, of all the species of tiny birds out there, this one gets singled out as an ultra-high-end delicacy. And it's amazing how, once something like this gets going, it feeds on itself, and continues unchanged for centuries. It doesn't translate into afficionados switching to other tiny helpless songbirds when the ortolan becomes scarce. Passing laws against the practice has no effect, since ortolanophagy is typically restricted to the rich and powerful, people who can and regularly do ignore the law with impunity (which is why the bird's probably doomed in the long term). No doubt that's the real thrill for a lot of ortolan-munchers. And even if the birds weren't being captured from the wild, and they weren't endangered, the traditional force-feeding process would still be unbearably cruel. And on top of everything else, the Mitterand link (above) notes that many first time ortolan diners are overcome with nausea, which suggests people don't eat the birds for the taste. It's just one fresh horror after another here. This is true decadence in the Roman style, and not in a good way. No, this is 5-minutes-before-the-fall-of-the-Empire, profoundly pessimistic, joyless decadence. The nihilist's last meal, sucking the last bitter juice out of the world, leaving nothing behind but an empty husk, and not caring a whit about it. A cullinary "Après moi, le déluge".

Compared to that, grinding up rhino horns as an aphrodisiac seems almost civilized. Almost.

Linkage: "Ortolan Buntings, Qatar" at 10,000 Birds

tags: ortolans environment nature food

Blurry Photos of Tater Tots

I realized I hadn't posted anything here since Thursday. Then I realized I couldn't think of anything to write about. Ah! The dreaded Blogger's Block! I've actually been trying to write a post about Portland's South Waterfront mess, but I decided I need a map to really explain what's going on, and I'm still figuring out how to use that pesky Google Maps API. So it may be a while before you get to see that post.

Also, I'm bored. Every now and then I peek over at the xterm where g++ is grinding away on my HP-UX build box. It's been doing that for a couple of hours now. My, what an exciting job I have.



Luckily I had some really poor photos of tater tots just lying around, so I figured I'd write about those instead. You might think this is a really pointless topic. Perhaps you didn't realize that tater tots are a matter of life and death. Or at least they are in San Antonio.



Perhaps you're also unaware of tater tots' key position in our national cuisine. Here's a vast archive of recipes for Tater Tot Casserole. Before sneering, please recall that "casserole" is a French word. So clearly it can't be that bad. The Boston Globe goes much further, offering a recipe for Cod with Truffled Leek Sauce with Tater Tots. Although I'm not sure this is truly a tater tot recipe per se, since they merely serve as the starchy side dish and aren't actually combined with the cod or the leek sauce. I suppose you could mash it all together on the plate with your fork, though, if you felt you needed to. The article claims the recipe's originally from a book titled "Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean". Doesn't sound all that Mediterranean to me, although on the other hand I'll bet tater tots would go great with hummus, come to think of it.



Our very own Oregonian gets in on the act, with a recipe combining tater tots and crab. It's a shame that I don't really care for crab very much. Maybe if it was combined with crispy golden potato ambrosia, I'd find it more palatable. Perhaps.

And here's something novel: Rather than using store-bought tater tots as a raw ingredient, here's how to make your own tater tots. Pasta began to be considered an upscale, gourmet food once you could buy a special gadget and make your own at home. I entertain high hopes for a similar transformation of the humble tater tot.

Note: Not to be prissy or anything, but everything below this horizontal line here is at least a little gross, and none of it has much do with tater tots. So if you're strictly here for the tater tots, you could quit now and not miss much. Between the first line and the second, it's mostly just funny (well, I think so, anyway) and maybe a little gross, if you're a wuss. Really the first line is there as a buffer between the food and the more offputting material. After the second line it gets a lot grosser, and it may or may not be funny, depending on your sense of humor. So you were warned, sort of, I guess. Actually I'm mostly doing this to give this post the appearance of structure. But if I can ward off any litigious nutjobs before they decide I owe them beeeeelion$ just because I made them feel all sad and confused inside, hey, that's all the better.

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I do realize that for a lot of people, tater tots straddle the line between tasty food and gross food. I don't, but I do think gross food is awfully funny sometimes. I recently bought an extremely funny book about gross food, Wendy McClure's "The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from the 1970s". If you're cheap, or you just want to try before you buy, some of the material is also up on the author's website. Observe her difficulties in captioning the photo of "Liver Pate en Masque". More gross recipes may be obtained here. And here are even more of 'em.

Updated: Here are a few more icky food resources, for your entertainment, or at least for mine:

• The legendary Steve, Don't Eat It!. I say "legendary" because think I'd heard of this page before I saw it today. Pickled pork rinds!? I'll eat just about anything, if I think there's any chance it might taste good. I'll happily chow down on normal pork rinds. And I'm also a big fan of just about anything pickled, especially if there's a big pile of garlic involved. But combining the two things... ugh... And those photos...
  
• A post at Deanaland titled "Remember the 50's?", including a horrific jello mold, and the surprisingly straightforward instructions for making "7UP in Milk". Mmm!
  
• A Slashfood article, "The stuff of nightmares: 1950s food ads", which in turn links to Plan59, a site devoted to mid-20th-century commercial art.
  
• "The American Food FAQ". As in, questions frequently asked by Swedes about US food, along with amusing answers. Don't worry, the page is in English.
  
• A page from Sri Lanka, covering a few things the author thinks are gross, including haggis and chitlins.
  
• And for dessert, why not visit Bad-Candy.com. You may not realize this, but if you've been raised exclusively on candy churned out by large multinational conglomerates, you're missing out on the best and the worst the confectionary world has to offer. And it gets far, far worse than you could have reasonably imagined.
  

Ok, here's that second horizontal line I warned you about. I'm even adding some whitespace as a bit more of a buffer.

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I was disheartened to learn that there's (supposedly) an extremely painful-sounding sex act called "tater tots". Click here only if you're absolutely sure you really want to know. No photos or graphic descriptions, thankfully. Honestly, I bet someone just made this up, and nobody's ever really tried it. Ow! OW!!! But if you didn't want to go away from this blog with that particular image in your mind, today's your lucky day! Here's a completely unrelated item from over at K5, where some weird guy claims he cured his asthma by giving himself intestinal parasites. Hint: It involves a trip to Cameroon, and a lot of walking around barefoot in the local latrines. And now you know. tag: tater tots

Mmmm... Rhubarb Pie...

I wandered over to the Portland Farmers' Market this morning, which in itself is a sign that spring is here, finally. I was picking up a few staples and noticed that a few vendors had rhubarb for sale. I'm not exaggerating when I say that in an instant I'd decided to buy some and make a pie today. Making pie is an occasional hobby of mine, but I'd never made a rhubarb pie before. I'd always meant to, since it's about my favorite, but for whatever reason I usually don't start making pies in earnest until June or so, when cherries are available. I think my food impulses sometimes tend to lag a few months behind what the weather's doing, so that a big plate of sausages, potatoes, and sauerkraut sounds great for a month or two after everyone else is eating light summery nibbles. But I overcame this tendency long enough to put a pie together, and I think it turned out pretty well.

I chatted with a couple of other people at the market who were also buying rhubarb, and they were all intending to use it in various dishes combined with strawberries. I didn't say this at the time because I often try to be reasonably pleasant in person, but adulterating rhubarb with strawberries or any other fruit is an abomination, pure and simple. It's not that I don't like strawberries, because I love strawberries. I don't want rhubarb in my strawberry pie either. The two tastes don't go together. It's just plain wrong.

The other thing I noticed is that none of the other customers was making pie. People have gotten the idea that making pie is just too hard. Meaning that making the crust is hard. And they aren't entirely wrong. I just recently switched to doing pie crust with half butter, half shortening, which I'm currently convinced is the secret to good crust. I used to use all butter, but this gives you a crust that's tasty but really hard and tough. The shortening gives you a nice flaky consistency, but it's got no flavor whatsoever -- try tasting a dollop of Crisco some time. A lot of restaurant and bakery pies seem to go the 100% shortening route, which makes the result bland and uninteresting, and kind of greasy if it's done badly. I've always heard that lard crusts turn out really well too. I've never tried that, but I'm thinking it might go well with an apple pie, sort of the whole pork & apples thing, since I understand you do get a faint sense of the pig in the result when you use lard. Not a lot of people use it, I'm not sure why. I expect it's the saturated fat, although if you're eating enough pie that the fat content is a serious component of your diet, you're probably eating way too much pie, and you ought to think about maybe reducing your intake a little.

One "pie secret" you hear about a lot is the importance of making sure your fats don't get evenly mixed into your flour. In practice this means keeping the fats from softening up too much. You can be as obsessive as you like about this. It doesn't get really critical, or difficult, until midsummer when the days are hot and it doesn't cool off at night, but trying to minimize heat absorption is kind of an engineering problem, so I play around with it even when I don't really have to. I tend to put the butter in the freezer, chop it up with a sharp, chilled knive once it's really hard, and then put it back in the freezer. I try to do this with the shortening too, but it doesn't work out as well. That's a point I haven't quite figured out just yet. The general idea is to keep everything as cold as possible, touch things with your hands as little as you can, and generally do as little as possible to the dough, right up until it goes into the oven. You want everything to hold together, so you have to work with it a little, but in general the less you do to it the better. That's been my experience, anyway, although I'm certainly not a pro at this.

I think my biggest problem is technique. Everything I do tends to come out a bit, ah, rustic looking. One look and it's obvious I don't do this for a living. Not even as one of those "artisan bakers" who makes things carefully designed to look rustic. Hence I haven't posted any photos. Well, mostly that was because we ate part of it before it occurred to me to write about it. Which is because even I have my priorites straight from time to time.

Here's a page with a whopping 52 rhubarb pie recipes. Many are of the abominable multifruit variety, but some people apparently like that sort of thing, and it's a free country. The Wikipedia article about rhubarb pie is no great shakes, but their rhubarb article is interesting. My pie today was sort of based on the rhubarb pie recipe in Ken Haedrich's book Pie, which I highly recommend. My sole complaint is that it's so big that it doesn't want to stay open to the recipe you're working on, so your copy will end up with some doughy fingerprints on it sooner or later.

I tend not to stick to recipes all that religiously regarding what to do with the fruit. Fruit is flexible, and if you don't have / can't find a certain ingredient, there's bound to be something else available that will go nicely in a pie. I didn't have any orange juice or orange zest today, so I substituted a bit of lemon juice, and a bit of grapefruit juice, which I thought turned out pretty well. Cherry pie recipes often call for a splash of liquor, usually some kirsch (cherry brandy), which is something I don't often have sitting around the house. One time I used dark rum and a bit of vanilla instead, which turned out really well. Last year I simply couldn't find any fresh pie cherries anywhere, so I got cherries of a couple of other varieties and soaked them overnight in some Belgian kriek lambic beer, which is produced with sour cherries and additionally has a lot of lactic acid sourness from the lambic process. You want to add less sugar if you do this, since the kriek is pretty sweet in addition to being sour. That turned out rather well too. Obviously you want to use fresh sour cherries if you can get 'em, but for some reason nearly all of the nation's sour cherries are grown in the midwest (mostly Michigan) and not here. So sometimes you just gotta improvise. Sometimes that turns out great. And if not, well, it's just pie, you know.

Mock Chow Mein

Updated: This has proven to be quite a popular post, and every few days someone shows up at this humble blog, looking for Mock Chow Mein recipes. I originally wrote this post because I thought the stuff sounded icky and I wanted to make fun of it. Now that I'm getting so many hits from people sincerely looking for information, I feel kind of bad about that. I'd hate for people to come here and go away disappointed, and I do think there's a kernel of a good idea within the recipe, so at the end of this post I'm adding a few thoughts on how to improve on the dish. Enjoy!

Updated II (8/18/06): I'd like to further point out that roughly 85% of the hits I get for this recipe come from the upper Midwest, primarily from Minnesota. So I'm wondering if we ought to consider this a regional specialty, and treasure it alongside the likes of New England Clam Chowder and Memphis-style BBQ. Hmm. I dunno about that, really, but I figured I'd pass it along, for whatever it's worth.

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Here's a recipe that was recently brought to my attention, for a classic, uniquely American dish known as "Mock Chow Mein". It's originally from a newspaper somewhere out in Eastern Oregon. Possibly it was the Baker City Herald, although I can't find it on their site. [Updated: Wrong paper; it was the Heppner Gazette-Times. I stand corrected.] Perhaps they want to keep this fabulous taste sensation a secret only the locals get to know about. But somehow a hardcopy version has come into my possession, and now all shall be revealed:

Brown together:
1 lb. ground beef
1 chopped onion
1 cup cut celery

Add:
1 can mushrooms
1 can tomato soup
1 can cream of mushroom soup

Cover and bake 1 hr. at 350 degrees.

Just before serving, stir in one pkg. chow mein noodles, 
so they're still crisp when eaten.

What could be easier? What could be more scrumptious? Well, just about everything, quite honestly, but it's still a classic, dammit, just like the Edsel.

Here are three more recipes, although it must be said that all 3 introduce suspicious foreign impurities, such as rice and soy sauce. The recipe sitting on my desk has the fewest ingredients, and it also has a grainy picture of the nice(?) little old lady who contributed the recipe. It looks like she's smiling, so we can assume she meant well when she sent the recipe in. Since it has the fewest ingredients, and contains no added seasonings whatsoever, I have to conclude that hers is the most purely American of all the variants, and is therefore the best. I'm 100% sure of this despite never having tried any of them. The experts do disagree on whether Mock Chow Mein is a casserole or a hotdish, and I'm not sure where I stand on that controversy. It seems to draw equally from both rich cullinary traditions, so it's hard to say.

Most recipes don't include a tomato component, so the consensus seems to be that you can omit the tomato soup if you prefer. Also, the celery and canned mushrooms are just there to provide roughage, not flavor (as far as I can tell), so you can probably get away without those either. The truly minimal recipe is simply to eat the chow mein noodles directly out of the bag, and dispense with all that other crap. It's faster, it's cheaper, and the noodles stay crisp for as long as you like. This is the only version I was able to find a picture for, for some reason.

The ideal drink pairing would be an O'Doul's, or perhaps a Kaliber if you're feeling extra fancy.
For dessert, serve Mock Apple Pie and a nice cup of Postum.

Bon appetit!

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Like I said, I do think the basic idea has potential, and so here are a few ideas on how to make something tastier than the recipe given above. The main problem with that recipe, and with the other recipes I've seen, is all that canned soup. Ugh! Dishes made with canned soups are always way too salty and underseasoned for my taste. It also seems like you could save yourself an hour or more if you just did everything in the pan or skillet and didn't bother with baking it all into a casserole, which seems kind of pointless.

A brief survey of mock chow mein recipes via Google gives us a few clues about the "essence" of the dish. Let's begin by completely abandoning any idea that we're making Chinese food here, because we aren't. This dish has nothing whatsoever to do with what people in China actually eat, but that's ok, because we're not in China. Well, I'm not, anyway. And as a result, we're free to cook it however we like, and ignore any silly questions about whether we're being "authentic" or not.

As for ingredients, I think the guiding principle is flexibility. You should be able to make it with things you're likely to have at hand. If you need to omit or substitute a few of the ingredients, it's not a big deal. And it just seems wrong somehow to require any weird, hard-to-find, expensive ingredients. That would really violate the spirit of the whole thing.

• First we have those crunchy chow mein noodles. We'll keep those, because it just isn't chow mein without the noodles. When I talked earlier about eating chow mein noodles right out of the bag, I was speaking from experience. The most important thing with the noodles is to keep them crispy, and the best way to do that is not combine them with the other ingredients until serving time.
  
• Then there's meat of some kind. Ground beef is the default, and if a recipe simply says "mock chow mein", you can bet it's got ground beef in it. I'm a big fan of beef, so we'll go with that.
  
• I expect the onions are included because they go so well with beef. That's an undeniable fact, unless you're a vegetarian or something. Browning/sauteeing the onions with the beef is a fine idea.
  
• Mushrooms are a matter of personal opinion. I think they go great with beef, but I'm the mushroom-eating half of a divided household. So let's agree they're optional. Oh, and don't use the canned ones if you don't have to. Please.
• Then we have one or more crunchy vegetables, typically celery and/or water chestnuts. Both of these are longtime staples of so-called "oriental food", but I think you could just as easily use bell peppers, for example, or just dispense with the vegetables if you prefer. You already have the crunchy noodles, so you'll still have some texture even if you leave the veggies out. It's no big deal either way.
  
• Which brings us to the canned soup. Most of the time it's cream of mushroom soup, which I understand was the magic elixir of every 60's housewife. Sometimes a second soup is added, like the tomato soup in the recipe above, but let's focus on the mushroom soup right now. Every canned mushroom soup I've ever tasted has been a complete salt grenade, so let's not bother looking for the "right" canned soup, and try to figure out why the soup goes in in the first place. A quick Google search gives lots of mushroom soup recipes. The recipes differ in a few details, but they're broadly similar in their ingredients: Mushrooms, chicken stock, salt, pepper, nutmeg(!), butter, cream (or half & half, or evaporated milk, or even sour cream), onions (or shallots), salt & pepper, sometimes a bit of sherry, sometimes a bit of flour to thicken things up. Let's assume we're already covered in the mushroom and onion/shallot departments, and go from there.
  
• I have to admit I'm not keen on the dairy component, but you're the chef, not me, so feel free to add it if you think you need it.
  
• The stock and the sherry both sound like great ideas, and you can use either one, or both. They can just go in the skillet along with the beef, onions, and other veggies, and then use one or the other to deglaze with afterwards. I'd use red wine instead of sherry, myself, because I think it'd go better with the beef, onions, and mushrooms. Heck, you could probably use beer instead and it'd be good too.
  
• I'd add some garlic, too, because garlic is great in everything.
  

As for preparation, just cook everything up together in the skillet, until the beef and onions are done, and serve over the noodles. It's not fancy, it's certainly not gourmet or anything, but I'll bet money it's better than anything you can make by going the traditional "Campbell's soup casserole" route.

A Taco for Lenin

Another picture from Seattle, this time of the Lenin statue that graces the Fremont neighborhood, right in front of the local Taco del Mar. The statue's presence inspires frothing-at-the-mouth rage from the usual quarters, naturally. Do conservatives just have no sense of irony at all? Yes, we all realize he was a bad guy, ok? You'd think that just living here in the irony-soaked, angst-ridden Northwest, at least a very teentsy amount would've rubbed off on them, but apparently not. I mean, the local merchants (capitalist running dogs that they are) decorate Vladimir Ilich for Christmas. In that Christmas article, a local gelato shop owner remarks that she first thought it was a statue of Ivar, the local clam chowder baron. Which, quite honestly, is what I thought at first too. A giant bronze Lenin statue is not exactly the sort of thing you go around expecting to see every day. At least in this country, and in this day and age.

In Budapest, there's an entire outdoor museum devoted to old Socialist Realist sculptures discarded after 1989. I have to admit I rather like some of the statues done in this style. Your art history professor will scoff, of course. I personally think the art world's scorn for all things Soviet is primarily due to aesthetic trendiness, not ideology. While the outside art world had moved on to increasingly abstract and esoteric works, comprehensible only to an elect few, the Soviets stuck with their own brand of romanticized neoclassicism, in art, architecture, music, and literature. In the Western art world, being seen as stodgy and outdated is far worse than being ideologically suspect, so the entire creative output of a very large country was lumped in with the likes of Norman Rockwell, Rogers & Hammerstein, and Thomas Kinkade. It seems to me this is a rather harsh and unfair judgement. Sooner or later a major museum will do a "groundbreaking" show, and there'll be a critical reevaluation, and prices of old Soviet statues will go through the roof. Mark my words. Not next year, and probably not in the next five or ten, but sometime within our lifetimes, I think we'll see it.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times has a great article about the ambivalent legacy of 20th century modernism, in response to a new show at the V&A Museum in London. It'd be interesting to go travel a couple of centuries into the future and see what stuff from the 20th century turned out to have staying power in the long term and what didn't. I think the results would be surprising, although I wouldn't dare to guess about the particulars.

It's not like most of the art created in the West during the last hundred years or so has been all that fantastic. The last 50 or so, in particular, have produced some great works, and literally tons of absolute crap. I'm not one of those people who freak out about abstract art and sculpture, and I think some of it can be quite nice. There's even a small amount of modern classical music out there that I'd consider to be "nice". But it's rare for a modern artwork to elicit a stronger reaction than that, and quite a few simply get dismissed without evoking any sort of feeling or response at all. This is fine in an art museum; different works will strike different people in different ways, and all that. However, if you're going to plunk a sculpture down in a park or public square, I'd argue that you have additional obligations toward the general (i.e. non-art-major) public. Presumably it's supposed to be there for everyone, not just an in-crowd elite, so you should at least try to make the work appealing to a broader cross-section of society. There's a limit to how much aggressively ugly modernism the public should be asked to put up with. I don't care what the experts say, Rusting Chunks #5 is not a real improvement over a grouping of heroic steelworkers and peasants striding into the glorious future. Yes, a world of nothing but endless worker-and-peasant statues would be monotonous, to say the least, but an occasional one here and there would be nice, just to spice things up.

You'd have to adapt the style to local conditions, of course. No Lenins (Fremont notwithstanding), and most likely no hammers-and-sickles. I mean, nobody actually wants to live in a totalitarian society with a broken Leninist command economy, except perhaps the president of Belarus, and he's a complete lunatic. You could possibly get away with a statue of John Reed, since he was originally from Portland and all. (I've heard there's a park bench dedicated to him somewhere around town, but I don't know where it is, if it exists.) For the most part, though, you'd have a lot of burly, square-jawed loggers, cowboys, and fishermen. I recall having seen at least one example of a Soviet statue of heroic engineers, and I'd obviously be ok with that. Heck, I'd even model for one, if I was asked nicely.

Mmmm.... Lemon Bars...

It's sunny outside and I have the day off, so I think I'll go up to the Gorge and hike around a bit. If I take any good pictures, I may post them here. Or not. We'll see.

In the meantime, I haven't had breakfast yet, so I thought I'd do a brief post about lemon bars, my favorite (perhaps my only favorite) classic 50's American pastry. Ok, I don't know whether they were invented in the 50's or not, but when you think bar-shaped pastries, you think 50's. It's right up there with vaccuuming in pearls.

The difference is that lemon bars are actually good. At least the ones made today are good. I didn't experience the 50's firsthand. The originals were probably made with artificial lemon flavor, yellow food coloring, saccharin, and lard. But today you're allowed to use actual lemons, and that can be quite tasty. It's not the world's most complex taste, but hey, it's dessert, it's breakfast, it goes with coffee, what more do you want?

Seeing lemon bar recipes in old cookbooks is all the more amazing when you look at the recipes surrounding them. On either side, you'll find endless soul-crushing jello molds packed with pineapple, shrimp, and beets; horrific casseroles of ground mystery meat, lima beans, ketchup, and lots of extra salt; a catalog of unnatural acts done with hard-boiled eggs; bland, greyish roasts covered in deep layers of quivering fat...

Wait, I'm wandering off topic here. And it's getting kind of gross, too. So back to the lemon bars, already.

Some lemon bar recipes, from Cooking for Engineers, about.com's Southern food, and the above image, which takes you to a lemon bar recipe in Japanese, believe it or not.

Still don't think they're a sophisticated, modern delicacy? Here are two recipes in French. Convinced now?

Key Lime bars are nice also, btw.

Egg and Olive Penguins

From the very beginning, it was inevitable that I'd eventually write about the egg-and-olive penguin phenomenon. It's a unique combination of two recurring themes here at Cyclotram: cute animals and horrific 60's cookbooks. As the original article notes, you can indeed assemble a semi-realistic, semi-cute, semi-edible, semi-penguin-like object out of nothing but black olives, hard-boiled eggs, and toothpicks. Does this count as "cooking", or do we file it under "hobbies and crafts"?

And to top it off, the, ah, recipe first appeared in an immortal tome titled "Meals with FOREIGN FLAIR". It's not known what country the authors had in mind, in this case. Perhaps Italy, because of the olives, you know.

I had a surprising amount of trouble locating pictures of egg-and-olive penguins. Once upon a time, they were everywhere, in every cookbook. But that was in the pre-Internet era, and they seem doomed to be one of the many things destined to disappear down our collective cultural memory hole, merely because they failed to make the leap to the latest and greatest medium. Just like all the great songs that never made the leap from 8-track to mp3. Yes, both of them.

If you'd like to compare and contrast, here's another penguin recipe. This recipe suggests they'd be perfect for a Linux get-together. Not because anyone will eat them, but a good ironic laugh will be had by all.

The page also provides a recipe for Tang Pie, but sadly there's no image to go with it. Sure, we can all laugh about it now, but when they start holding county fairs on the moon, this recipe's guaranteed to bring home a nice blue ribbon for some happy homemaker of the future.

If you tire of the whole egg-and-olive business, and you wonder what real penguins taste like, you may be out of luck, if this FAQ from NASA is to be believed. Seems the UN frowns on that sort of thing. Another FAQ page, this time from the US Antarctic Program. There seems to be a fairly widespread public interest in chowing down on penguins, which our government is valiantly struggling to discourage. Here's one rather colorful passage.

Frederick A. Cook, a doctor aboard the Belgian vessel Belgica when it was stuck in pack ice in 1898, basically regarded penguins as inedible: "If it's possible to imagine a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce, the illustration would be complete." But because they needed fresh meat to help combat scurvy, he told the captain of ship to regard penguins as medicinal, and swallow the meat as a duty and example to others.

You have to admit that sounds awfully discouraging. Although it's also true that most food from the 60's and 70's could be described in roughly the same way. Sometimes there was even Jello(TM) involved. Even today we aren't entirely free of icky retro-food. As one example, the one and only Emeril recently proffered a recipe for lima bean casserole, although at least he had the decency to relegate it to being a side dish and not the main course. So in theory you could feed it to the dog and nobody would notice, assuming the dog was hungry enough.

And speaking of Linux, which we were doing a minute ago becaue of the whole penguin thing, while also speaking of things that ought to disgust all civilized minds, everything's looking very very bad for SCO these days, as usual. And yet the charade continues. I just don't get it. I really don't. I mean, even back in the lawless days of the Spanish Main, you couldn't go on indefinitely in the piracy business unless you managed to turn a profit on occasion. Granted, these days SCO's more of a ghost ship than a pirate ship, but it's still amazing (and highly suspicious) how the bastards keep the damn thing afloat.