(mid-July 2023)
I returned home from vacation to find that my Frau had acquired even more flowers. A tight squeeze at points but the carport and deck looked colorful and lovely.
Not sure what this one is. A deadly Pitcher Plant?
The purple thingies in the hanging basket were coming along nicely.
It was nice to see her develop a nascent green thumb and to have fallen into a routine of watering the flowers every morning. I am more than a bit jealous as I cannot seem to keep a plant alive for very long.
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I decided that I needed a break from my usual podcast routine and that I should find something new to listen to for a change of pace. After poking around my hard drive, I settled on the audio drama Bronzeville.
I had enjoyed the first season when it came out but had mysteriously never gotten around to putting the second into my earholes. There was no way the second season would make sense without listening to the first one again and so I set out to listen to both.
Although it concerns the titular Chicago neighborhood in the 1940s, it begins in Arkansas where a young black man, Jimmy Tillman, stabs a white man in self-defense and flees northward. He ends up in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and lands a job with the Copeland family who run the numbers game – an underground lottery - in Bronzeville. They inherited the game from Curtis "Eyeball" Randolph, voiced by the magnificent Laurence Fishburne, who has gone legit and become a banker.
The show dramatizes the problems that the Copelands run into and the attempts by the African-American denizens of the neighborhood to carve out their own space and live their best lives in the face of the racism of the time. The family not only has trouble with the city - da mayor, the cops - but also with other gangsters who are from St. Louis.
I was reminded of the connection between the 2 cities. From what I've read, it was quite a rivalry back in the second half of the 19th century. St. Louis was the Gateway to the West and was situated on the shores of the Mississippi River and Chicago was its regional competition. The short story is, if I recall correctly, that Chicago invested in rail and became the Big Cheese in the middle of the country leaving St. Louis in its dust. I've also read that monied interests out East were reluctant to invest in St. Louis because Missouri was a slave state while Illinois was not.
Today, the rivalry seems to exist mostly in baseball with the Cubs and Cardinals taking the parts formerly played by rail barons and steamship tycoons. Amtrak connects the cities with multiple trains a day and the route was recently given an upgrade to make it competitive with driving so the regional economic connection still remains, apparently.
Sadly, today St. Louis is in a bad state. While I enjoyed myself when I was there back in 2017, there were abandoned buildings aplenty as people continue to flee the city. In fact, its population is probably just barely above Madison's these days.
Now, not every Copeland is involved in the family business. Little sister Lisa is a newly-minted college grad and her older brothers do everything to keep her out of their shady dealings.
Lisa is voiced by the lovely Tika Sumpter who does a fantastic job.
Lisa goes from a young woman seeking her way in the world away from the dealings of her brothers to being absorbed into the family business where she kicks ass and takes names. Do not mess with Lisa Copeland!
I think I may have developed a crush on Ms. Sumpter…
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For a couple weeks after my return, I sampled the goodies I had brought home and did some baking. For instance, here’s that loaf of einkorn bread I bought at the Dells Mill gift shop.
It had a crumbly texture, was tasty and was also indistinguishable from bread made with the hybridized wheat we are used to. Einkorn is truly an ancient grain. Thought to be the first wheat humanity ever cultivated, it dates back in our diets some 10,000 years. I have read that its gluten content is not well-suited for bread so I dunno how the Amish baked this loaf. Perhaps it was cut with bread flour. Or the crumbly texture is simply the result of being low on gluten.
The legend is that einkorn went out of fashion, with we Westerners, anyway, and basically disappeared from our culinary map. Then, in the 1970s, some proto-foodie discovered that it was still being used in eastern France by people who lived in a secluded valley and still clung to the old ways instead of wearing flares and big collars as they pulled bits of steak from a hibachi grill and dipped them into fondue pots. Einkorn hasn’t attained the foodie cred of, say, quinoa, but I did notice it at the store recently.
I also bought a loaf of cranberry wild rice bread up north. Very tasty stuff! I love the earthy taste of the wild rice and that hint of tartness from the fruit.
And while I am on the subject of bread, I’ll note that I baked a loaf of rye with some of those rolled rye berries that I had bought at the Dells Mill thrown in. It was that recipe I mentioned a few entries ago with cocoa powder and molasses. I am pleased to say that it turned out alright.
You can see the bits of rye on the crust. A hearty looking loaf, if I do say so myself.
While up in Spooner, I noticed a chocolate factory had opened called Mayana and so I bought a couple of their bars at the local supermarket.
These were very thick and smelled tasty. They certainly drew Grabby’s attention.
I liked the shortbread base, I loved the chocolate coating but that was just too much caramel for me.
Lastly, because I love my co-workers so much, I bought them a couple bags of poop-themed candy.
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One day I was doing some internet searching for recipe ideas and hit on the idea of lemongrass chicken. A marinade was prepared and, the next day, the grill was fired up. I was fortunate to be able to serve a glass of lemongrass pilsner from 3 Sheeps Brewing up in Sheboygan with it to complete the theme.
I was quite pleased with how those chicken thighs turned out. The lemongrass added its floral lemony flavors while the grill added its charred, smoky goodness. The fresh jalapeno was icing on the cake. Oh, and that pilsner was mighty fine too. It was light and crisp with a nice, sprightly flavor that complemented the lemongrass from the chicken and the chilies as well.
For reasons I cannot recall, I recently decided that I wanted to cook with plums. It may have been a desire to tweak my German grilling marinade recipe and plums just sounded Central Europeany. So I took the usual mix of dark lager, grainy, brown mustard, and a proprietary herb & spice blend** and then added fresh plums. Pork chops soaked in this stuff overnight.
The results were mixed. That is, the chops tasted very good but the fruit was barely noticeable. And so on the following Saturday when I was grocery shopping, I bought a bottle of plum juice and more pork chops and tried again.
Better. Kind of.
The plum was much more evident and quite tasty. But the beer taste was subdued so I am in the process of tweaking beer-plum juice proportions to maximize the flavor of both.
I then decided to approach this plum predilection from another angle: prunes.
A co-worker of mine loves to smoke meat so I inveigled my way into a batch of smoked prunes. He’d never attempted to smoke fruit before so we were both in terra incognita. Hic sunt prunes!
At work one day I was presented with a small bag of prunes.
I took about half the batch, diced them up, and threw them into a bowl of stuffing which was promptly, um, stuffed into a pair of thick pork chops.
The chops then spent some quality time on the grill.
I felt they looked and smelled quite tasty and was eager to try one.
The verdict?
While extremely delicious, the prunes needed more smokiness. I think they had spent about 2 or 2.5 hours in the smoker and I believe doubling that would do the trick.
Practice makes perfect, right?
Lastly, on a food adjacent note, a friend and I took the ancient microwave that was mounted on our kitchen wall and sent it to appliance heaven. While not older than me, I did look up the serial number and found that it was like 40 years old or some such thing. Carter was still president when it rolled off the assembly line.
The city will dispose of unwanted microwaves but for a fee. I discovered that one can no longer go to a library, pay the $10 or $15 fee, and get the requisite sticker needed to properly dispose of these things. It must be done online. This harkens back to my commentary about the Art Institute going cashless in a previous entry. It seems ridiculous to me that a city government would require a credit card and an internet connection in order to dispose of garbage correctly, to keep stuff out of our landfill that doesn’t need to be there.
Rant over.
After dismounting the microwave, we were treated some vintage wallpaper.
If you look at the lower right by the outlet cover, you can see some of the newer wallpaper peeking out.
Our house was built in 1950 so I would guess that this kind of stuff was de rigueur in the late ‘40s. In my mind’s eye, I can see the mom of the family surrounded by this wallpaper as she pulls TV dinners out of the oven for the kids as chipped beef simmers on the stovetop for her husband. And you know there was a Jello mold in the refrigerator for dessert.
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Bonus photo. You might recall in an earlier entry that I went in search of and found a geodetic survey marker just south of Osseo when I was coming back to Madison from my vacation. Well, I looked on the USGS map and saw a smattering of them around Madison and discovered that one was quite close to a bus stop that I use.
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