The Corona Diaries Vol. 88: The proof of the brownies is in the eating.

(Listen to the prelude.)

(mid-April 2023)

The third of April is a red letter day in our house as it’s our youngest cat, Piper's, birthday. And this year she turned the big 1-0.

Here she is as a wee kitten. I remember well going to the cat adoption lady's house and seeing her newest litter. Piper was so new and so small and zipping around the room like a madman. Or madcat, rather. She'd charge at me as I sat on the floor and then carom off my leg before launching an attack one of her siblings or maybe a defenseless pillow.

And here she is on her big day 2023 trying to relax in one of our plush cat houses and looking irritated that one of her humans is sticking some device in her face. "Go away, hoo-man!"

Of course I gave her plenty of extra treats to celebrate. I tried to get a photo but she nommed them down too quickly to get a decent picture with my very basic phone camera.

We hope to have her for many years to come and, with all of the money I pay the vet, I expect we shall.

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Earlier this month I was poking around the websites of local bakeries to see what my rye bread options were when I discovered that one of them offered rye brownies. I pondered this miracle food and suspect that one of those cartoon clouds appeared above my head as I did some quick culinary ratiocination. I came up with:

rye flour + dark chocolate = manna from heaven

So I set out to conjure some of these magical treats in my kitchen. I began by assembling a double boiler and melting the chopped bittersweet chocolate cubes and extra dark chips.

As the chocolate melted, I mixed the eggs, butter, sugar, and whatnot.

Everything got thrown into the same bowl and mixed together. I poured the batter into a pan and it looked rather half-assed, truth be told. “But,” I reasoned, “appearance is no measure of taste. Never judge a book by its cover and whatnot.”

The old adage was right. The brownies may have come out of the oven looking like my cat's (not Piper) diarrhea, but they tasted incredibly delicious.

I sampled, of course, but took the rest to work. I am just not to be trusted with brownies.

The whole brownie thing threw me off of my original task which was to find rye bread. While rye is less common, it's certainly not impossible to find a loaf of it in these parts. I think it's more the case that you have to get to a bakery for a good variety as grocery stores don't stock a lot of quality Central/Eastern European breads. Can I go to my local supermarket and find a pukka loaf of rye bread that my German, Ruthenian, and Polish ancestors would recognize and be proud of?

Yes.

Is there more than 1 or 2 varieties that fit the bill?

Nope.

And so, in the end, I decided to just bake my own rather than running around town trying to find the perfect loaf. I began by retrieving the bread maker that a cousin had given us from the basement. I gave it a good cleaning and then set to work.

The recipe in the manual for rye bread is quite lame, in my opinion. It called for a mere ¾ cup of rye flour but a whopping 2¾ cups of wheat. How is anyone supposed to taste the rye with that ratio? So I tweaked it a little bit.

Things went well at first. The dough rose as expected.

It smelled great too. And then I took another peek some time later and saw that it had fallen. Soon the bake cycle kicked in and I ended up with this.

Not exactly Martha Stewart level aesthetics.

Besides needing to have the flour ratio adjusted further, it tasted fine. Hearty and a bit dense with a rich, nutty wheat sweetness. It simply needed more rye. No doubt there is some arcane wisdom out there on baking bread which describes the best rye to wheat ratio, which wheat varieties taste like what, the best yeast to use, how to get a certain texture, and so on and so forth. My bready experiments shall continue.

In addition to baked things, I found myself with an inexplicable craving for pozole earlier this month. Pozole is Mexican pork and hominy soup. While I do not recall how or when, I nonetheless acquired a taste for it and have tossed around the idea of hitting all of the Mexican restaurants in the area to find out who does the best pozole.

I bought some pork and hominy thinking that I had the rest of the ingredients already. The recipe calls for dried ancho chilies which are boiled and then pureed before being added to the soup. Now, I’ve made pozole before and would have sworn that I had some dried anchos in the cupboard. But, when I went and looked, I found that I instead had a lifetime’s supply of guajillo chilies and had no idea why.

I tried in vain to recall what motivated me to buy those but couldn’t. My best guess is that they were leftover from an attempt to make mole sauce at some point in the dim and distant past.

Another trip to the store and I was ready. I made my pork stock.

As that cooked, I boiled, rinsed, chopped, and pureed until everything was ready to be thrown into the pot.

No, that cup of coffee was for the chef, not the soup.

Once the pozole was cooking, I thought it looked nice and hearty with chunks of stuff everywhere. It smelled great too.

I cooked it long enough for the marriage of the flavors to be consummated and then served myself a bowl.

It turned out very well and I was happy that I hadn’t gotten lazy and simply bought a can at the store. That stuff isn’t bad but it doesn’t have all the onion and jalapeno in it. Plus, I think my version has a more piquant chili taste to it, if I do say so myself.

Lastly on the food front, I’ll note that I recently discovered that the Wisconsin Brewing Company out in Verona, a Madison suburb, had brewed a Grodziskie once again and had it available in their taproom. I managed to convince a friend of mine to head to the brewery with me for a couple so I’d have some company.

Grodziskie is a Polish style of beer that dates back centuries. It’s traditionally brewed with 100% smoked wheat and “should” be light in body and color with a good dose of fizz and a nice hop bite. Usually it’s low in alcohol but that can vary according to the brewer’s taste.

It was delectable! Light, smoky, fizzy – I wish they’d brew it more often than once every couple of years. My only gripe, which really isn’t much of a gripe, is that I wish it were just a tad hoppier. A minor quibble. I wonder what would happen if some of that wheat were to be swapped out for rye...

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Bonus photo. It was Easter not too long ago so here’s a rabbit I saw in a backyard. I am used to seeing what I think are Eastern Cottontails so I have to wonder if this was someone's pet that that was set free or if it escaped like a scene from Watership Down.

(Raise a glass and watch the postlude.)

The Corona Diaries Vol. 25: Frisson From Finally Getting Flooring!

Early July 2021

I am very pleased to say that, as I type, we finally have a kitchen floor!

It's not quite finished – the base, transitions, and end cap have yet to be installed – but we have a floor and the appliances are back from whence they came. And the removal of all the old asbestos flooring has left a ¾" gap between the door and the kickplate so I need to buy a door sweep otherwise the cats will be extremely busy hunting down intruding mice, chipmunks, and all manner of critter. It's been over 2 months since the old floor went away. Soon we can use the new dishwasher. The end of this saga is nigh. I can taste it!

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One evening a couple of weeks ago, neither the Frau nor I wanted to cook so we decided to go out for dinner. She was keen on Mexican food but where to go? We no longer had a Mexican restaurant nearby. El Poblano used to be just a few blocks away and I think I noted in an earlier entry that they closed shortly after the pandemic started and left town. To our shame, we hadn't taken the time over the past 15 months to visit them at their new home with their new name, Las 3 Hermanas. Well, if the tacos and enchiladas won't come to us, the we will go to the tacos and enchiladas. Thusly we headed out to the town of Marshall to check out the new version of an old favorite. 

Marshall is a small town about 15 miles east of Madison and it's a beautiful drive through rolling hills and past multiple horse farms (and Georgia O'Keeffe's birthplace) down County T to get there. I used to have friends who lived there so I was a frequent visitor back in c.2002-2006. One of those friends was a Polish guy who originally hailed from Milwaukee's south side and we'd have Polock Fests which entailed drinking too much beer and bourbon as we made large batches of pierogi from scratch.

Las 3 Hermanas is on Main Street and was easy to find. My understanding is that it is owned by a couple and the wife, Diana, remembered us as we walked in. We chatted for a while as our food was being prepared. I am pleased to report that, despite the change in location, there has been no change in the tastiness quotient.

I looked at the cooler and was happy to see that a favorite of mine, chocolate flan, was available for dessert. So I ordered some to go. Seeing as this was our first visit to the new location, Diana made it a 2-for-1 deal which was most pleasing to our sweetteeth.

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After our trip to Dubuque, I found that I had the Mississippi River on my mind. This being the case, I figured I should, like any good Midwesterner, endeavor to know a bit about the mythic river that figures so prominently in our region's – indeed, our country's - history. I had my local purveyor of books order a copy of this for me:

I have not yet started it as I am still reading this:

Derleth lived in Sauk City, about 25 miles northwest of Madison, on the western shore of the Wisconsin River which flows into the Mississippi about 80 miles to the west. His tales here take place in the fictional town of Sac Prairie and its inhabitants. Sac Prairie is an amalgamation of Sauk City and the adjacent town of Prairie du Sac. I greatly enjoyed his nature observations, such as the migration of birds or the inhabitants of nearby wetlands. But the character sketches were a mixed bag, to my taste. Some were really neat and I could relate to the trails and tribulations experienced by the people in them and/or find great empathy for some of the characters as they struggle with loneliness and aging. Other sketches reeked of gossip and were less interesting to me.

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I've been to the cinema a couple times recently.

First, the Frau and I went to see Summer of Soul, a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival. These were concerts held on Saturdays from late June through August 1969 at Mount Morris Park in Harlem. While the performances were videotaped, the tapes languished in a vault for decades until they were dusted off for this movie. (More or less. I have seen Sly and the Family Stone's set floating around bootleg trading circles so collector types like me have seen some of it already.) There were many great moments and a lot of fantastic music in the movie but a couple scenes really stood out for me.

One was when Mahalia Jackson invited a young Mavis Staples onstage to sing "Precious Lord". It was simply wonderful and brought tears to my eyes. The other was Nina Simone's performance. While I do not know a whole lot about her, I get the distinct impression she did not suffer fools gladly and gave no quarter. Not only did she perform music, but she also read a poem and it was some potent stuff which, I guess, isn't surprising considering those volatile times. The poem was "Are You Ready?" by David Nelson, a member of the earliest incarnation of The Last Poets, a proto-hip hop spoken word group. Hearing and seeing Simone say, "Are you ready to kill if necessary?" sent a chill down my spine.

The second movie I saw was a screening of the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three down on campus. 

I don't recall if I'd ever seen it before but it's got Robert Shaw in it so I had to go. It was an old scratchy print which was almost a meta commentary on New York in the early 1970s. I found it to be a lot of fun and was much funnier than its reputation as a pure thriller would suggest. The gentleman who runs the cinematheque on campus noted that he contributed commentary to the Blu-ray release of the movie a few years ago.

On my way to the screening, I saw that the university's theater department was putting on a performance of Rashomon.

It is one of my favorite films of all-time and a good short story as well so I shall be going to see it.

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The bonus photo today is a pair of "headless" ducks. I presume they got their breakfast.

My House Smells Like Garlic

When the gates of sleep were thrown wide open this morning I smelled garlic. Just like when I laid me down to sleep last night. That's because pork machaca has been in the slow cooker since yesterday evening. Mmm...Now I'm salivating.