Last September Dell released the Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. Not long after, a few enterprising hackers figured out a way to install Mac OS X on the machine. I had been looking for a netbook to carry while traveling, so after following the progress of the install hack on the online forum I decided to take the plunge.
The Mini 9 is in short supply right now, but I was able to find one online at Microcenter for $350. It was the stock configuration: 1 GB RAM, and a 16 GB solid state drive. Via the forums I located a company selling a 32 GB SSD and 2 GB RAM for $80. When everything arrived I upgraded the hardware and began the install process. It’s very simple as long as you remember to insert the boot USB drive in the LEFT side of the machine and the OS X image on the RIGHT side. I wasted an hour figuring that out.
After another hour, I was done:
Once I was satisfied that everything was running properly (WiFi, webcam, trackpad), I made the final, crucial modification:
My mother’s parents hosted dinners for our entire extended Italian family on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Xmas. When my grandmother died, her three children — my mom, her brother, and her sister — each took on the responsibility of hosting one of the holiday dinners. Mom took Easter, and has been hosting it for more than 30 years.
Regardless of the holiday, the dinners all have the same basic menu: an antipasti course, a pasta course, a meat course, then dessert. The host is responsible for the first three courses, dessert is brought by the guests. Once I proved my worth as a cook, I began helping Mom in the kitchen with the Easter dinner, but in the last five years I have taken on the role of running the kitchen, helping plan the menu, and cooking the meat course.
This year Mom threw me two curves: 1) The dinner would be served a week earlier because my niece and nephew were competing in softball and basketball tournaments on Easter weekend. 2) Since there was less time to place an order, the traditional ham would be replaced with “some sort of roast pork” for the meat course.
Cooking a ham was easy. I’d order a freshly-smoked whole ham from Nodine’s Smokehouse, have it shipped to my sister’s home (where the dinners have been hosted since my parents moved to a smaller place), cook it in the morning, then warm it up in the oven after the pasta (either lasagna or canneloni) had been reheated.
Cooking fresh pork presented a timing challenge. Mom would still need the oven to heat the canneloni before serving it at 2:00 PM, but the roast was to be served by 3:00. Working with those constraints, I came up with a menu that I could make work in my sister’s one-oven, one-stove kitchen. (My aunts all had second stoves and fridges in their basements, relocated after kitchen remodelings.) I had to make sure the pork wouldn’t dry out in a warming oven, and the side dishes had to be do-aheads that could be reheated while the roast rested before slicing.
The final menu worked out as:
Antipasti, served at 1:00 PM
Canneloni, heated from 1:00 to 1:30, to be served at 2:00 PM
Roast pork and pork jus with mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, and haricots verts in lemon butter, to be served before 3:30
On Saturday night I made both kinds of mashed potatoes, storing them in foil pans in the fridge. I took them out on Sunday morning so they could come up to room temperature, which would speed up their reheating. Then I got to work on the pork.
I started with two whole pork loins (from Costco) which I cut in half and tied to keep then from flattening out during cooking. I prepared a brine of salt, brown sugar, garlic cloves, and whole crushed rosemary sprigs. I put the tied roasts in a large pot, filled it with the brine, and refrigerated everything for three hours.
I rinsed off and dried the roasts and seared them until browned on the outside.
I deglazed the pan with white wine and set it aside.
I covered the tops of the roasts with a paste made from garlic, rosemary, salt, and pepper.
I added the deglazing liquid and some chicken stock to the bottoms of the two roasting pans (two pans, two roasts on each). They went into the oven at 350°F, the same temperature used to reheat the canneloni, eliminating any wait to reach a new cooking temp. By now it was 1:30.
I filled the now-clean brining pot half full with water, covered it and set it on the stove to boil, then started the jus by heating three jars of store-bought gravy. The pans with the potatoes were set on the two rear turned off burners on the stove, where they would start to warm from the oven exhaust heat (why waste free thermal energy?).
After 45 minutes I rotated the pans in the oven — top to bottom, bottom to top, and both front to back — in order to ensure even cooking. When the roasts reached 135°F (checked with an instant-read digital thermometer), I removed them to a cutting board, removed the butcher’s twine, and let them sit under a loose foil cover for 20 minutes, during which time they would come up to 145°F from carryover heat.
The potatoes went into the oven to finish heating, the pan juices were whisked into the pork gravy, and the haricots verts were added to the boiling water. I melted a stick of butter, juiced two whole lemons, drained the beans, returned them to the pot, added the butter, lemon, salt & pepper, and let them stay warm in the pot while I sliced the roasts. (Is that last sentence as frantic as I felt?)
The potatoes, beans, and jus were put in serving dishes, the sliced pork was transferred to a platter. The time: 3:15 PM. Woo-hoo!
The pork was perfect: just past pink, still juicy, and subtly flavored with the garlic and rosemary. Our 25 guests loved it, asking if I’d make it again next year.
I felt like I had run a marathon. I had managed to pull this dinner off by relying on a few tricks known to most caterers:
Make the starches ahead of time and reheat them for service.
Cook the green vegetables at the last minute.
Modify a pre-made gravy with meat drippings and stock.
Brine the meat to keep it moist and to prevent overcooking.
But the most important factor was the same as the secret of comedy: Timing.
Di & I were invited to dinner with the rest of the staff of her startup venture. We asked Jackson, our neighbors’ son, to look after Miles. The two of them get along, usually playing video games until we return.
When we left, I had Miles set up to play Little Big Planet on the PS3. About an hour later, he decided he wanted to play a game on the Wii. I had forgotten to show Jackson how to switch inputs on the new remote, so he ran into some trouble. Miles demanded that he call Mom or Dad to find out how to fix the problem, but Jackson gently reminded Miles that we probably didn’t want to be disturbed.
The problem was eventually solved by Jackson calling his dad over to figure out the remote, but while they waited, Miles turned his back and sulked. Finally, he said “Bottom line, Jackson — if that Wii isn’t working soon, you won’t be babysitting here anymore.”
I often learn about the latest installment of Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist” column in The New York Times when the videocast shows up on my TiVo queue. I watched this video last night and decided to make it for dinner tonight. The recipe is very simple, but I had to go out to buy chickpea flour and half a pound of shrimp.
There’s not much prep work involved, just measuring out the dry ingredients, chopping scallions, and peeling and chopping the shrimp. (The shrimp shells went into the freezer. They sit in the skeletons/exoskeletons section, where animal bits go to become stock at a later date. Do I organize my food taxonomically? You figure it out.)
A half cup of chickpea flour, a half cup of all-purpose flour, a half teaspoon of baking powder, a third cup of scallions, the chopped shrimp, and a cup of water. Six ingredients, not counting olive oil, salt, and pepper.
I mixed all the dry components, adding salt and pepper:
I added all of the water and whisked it in, making a thin pancake batter. I stirred in the shrimp and scallions, then let the batter rest for a few minutes while I set a nonstick pan filmed with olive oil over medium heat. I had to add a bit more water to thin out the rested batter.
Half of the batter went into the pan:
After three minutes, when the edges had set and I could see bubbles in the batter, I flipped the pancake over using just the pan. We don’t need no stinking spatulas!
One more flip to re-crisp the top, and I was done (with the first, I immediately made the second):
Looks just like Bittman’s, doesn’t it?
The tortillita was crispy on the edges, a bit chewy in the center. The sweetness of the shrimp was offset by the savory batter. I forgot to add the chives, which would have improved the pancake, but not by much.
Miles loved it” “It’s like a scallion pancake, but better — because there’s shrimp!”
I’ll be making more of these with different seafood added. It takes less than half an hour from start to finish. Served with a salad it’s a perfect light meal.
Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is summarized by the author as “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the chapter “Eat Food: Food Defined,” he offers a rule of thumb:
Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
Part C of that rule came to mind when I saw this in my local Stop & Shop’s ice cream case:
Text on the side of the carton elaborated:
All-natural ice cream crafted with only five essential ingredients for incredibly pure, balanced flavor… and surprisingly less fat!
It’s a lofty claim, but, sure enough, the ingredient list was skim milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and cocoa powder. When I placed the carton in my freezer, I looked at the ingredient list for the nearly-empty container of regular Häagen-Dasz chocolate ice cream: cream, skim milk, sugar, egg yolks, cocoa powder. It’s easy to miss, but the order of the first two ingredients is reversed. Since they’re listed in descending order of percentage of final product, the regular, non-Five version had more cream than skim milk, and the Five had more skim milk.
That reversal is responsible for the lower-fat claim. There’s no butterfat in skim milk, it’s all in the cream, so less cream means less fat (12 grams vs. 17 grams). But less fat also means a less luxurious mouth feel. I could taste the difference between both versions in a blind tasting: H-D didn’t just skimp on the fat, they shorted the cocoa. “Milk chocolate” means “less cocoa powder than our regular chocolate.”
So it’s all hype. I’ll spend my five bucks on the full-fat version, or I’ll make my own. It still has only five ingredients, but it lasts less than five days.
For my first two undergraduate years I ate my meals in the dining room in my dorm, MacGregor House. I had a book of “points” — tickets I turned in for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The points could be used in any dining hall, but MacGregor was my preference because it was just downstairs from my room, and because it was the newest of the dining facilities.
The MIT Food Service was a separate department on campus; they had their own staff of nutritionists, menu planners, and cooks. As a result, the quality standard was higher than that provided by corporate behemoths like Aramark or U.S. Foodservices. We knew we were better off than the Harvard students, whose stories about their awful food were legendary: “Each dining hall has two vats, one full of meat, the other full of vegetables. One vat has green stuff, and the other has brown stuff. Unfortunately, the green stuff is the meat and the brown stuff is the vegetables.”
I had brown-bagged lunch through most of high school, so I had limited experience with institutional food. What MIT served seemed adequate. I understood that taste and presentation were occasionally sacrificed in the name of efficiency and scale, but I could live off the stuff. I avoided anything remotely “Italian,” knowing it wouldn’t taste anything like what my mother cooked. As for the rest, since they served meals I never had at home, I had no baseline for comparison.
Then I made the mistake of getting a job in the dining hall. I worked on the serving line, shoveling food onto friends’ plates. I cleaned the dining room when service was over. I also broke down the serving line, bringing unused food back into the kitchen to either be disposed of or saved. That’s when I learned how often food was reheated and re-served, sometimes two or three times.
I also learned how food was cooked for 500 diners at three services a day. Sauce was cooked in giant steam kettles, stirred with what looked like stainless steel canoe paddles. Frozen vegetables were heated in huge steam ovens that looked like the autoclaves in my cell biology lab. Everything was baked or steamed — I don’t remember seeing a grill or a stove in use.
It was all to much. I returned home the summer of my sophomore year determined to change what I ate and how it was prepared: I would learn to cook — how hard could it be?
I spent the summer at my mother’s elbow for every dinner she prepared. I asked countless questions: How much salt did you add? Why are you mixing it that way? How small do I chop this? The hardest question was always “Do you have the recipe written down?,” because the answer was usually “no.” Mom learned to cook from her mother, who learned to cook from her sisters, etc. Nothing was written down, there were no measurements more precise than “a pinch of this” and “a handful of that.” Baked goods were the only exception, since precise recipes were required to get good results.
About halfway through that summer Mom let me help her in the kitchen. (It was either that or stab me to shut me up.) By the end of my apprenticeship I had prepared a few family dinners that were deemed acceptable. Most importantly, Mom taught me how to make tomato sauce.
Before returning to MIT in the fall of 1979, I took a third of the money I had set aside for my meal plan and purchased some kitchenware: a set of RevereWare copper-bottomed pots (a choice I regret to this day — cleaning then is a bitch), a Sabatier 6″ chef’s knife, a wooden spoon, slotted spoon, and spatula, and a steamer basket. I bought two cookbooks: The Joy of Cooking (the 2-volume paperback set published in 1975) and The French Chef Cookbook. The rest of the money would be divided between dining hall points for breakfast and lunch on weekdays, and money for dinner ingredients.
I was ready to apply my newfound knowledge (and courage) to my cooking project, which would take place in my suite’s tiny kitchenette, quipped with a four-burner electric cooktop, a microwave oven, a sink, and a refrigerator. There was no real oven, which was eventually remedied with a birthday gift of a toaster oven. I bought some basics for the fridge (eggs, butter, chicken) and some basics for the pantry (spices, flour, sugar. oil).
To keep myself honest, I made some rules:
Learn at least one new recipe every week.
Eat all the leftovers.
If you ruin a dish, you still have to eat it. Burnt or improperly seasoned food is a powerful motivator to improve.
No hot dogs, hamburgers, mac & cheese, or ramen noodles. Canned soup was permitted if you are sick.
You may only eat the free pizza one of the two nights a week it is brought in for the editors at the school newspaper.
Clean up after yourself. There’s not enough room in the postage-stamp-sized kitchen for more than a few dirty pots.
I ate a lot of burnt food the first two weeks while I learned the temperature control differences between Mom’s gas stove and the electric cooktop. I ate a lot of chicken, running through the variations presented in Joy. But I slowly improved, and by December I tried one of Julia Child’s recipes. Things progressed to the point where my suitemates were offering to buy stuff for dinner if I would cook it for them.
In January, a friend and I taught a class for IAP (Independent Activities Period): “How to Cook for Company.” We bluffed our way through a boeuf bourguignon recipe cobbled together and scaled up from both Julia and Joy. It was such a success we were asked to teach a second class two weeks later.
I was at best an amatuer cook, but I was no longer intimidated by cooking. It would be years before I learned the difference between techniques and recipes, but I knew that I would improve with practice.
It’s been thirty years since I began the cooking project. I still have the Sabatier knife, although the blade is a bit thinner from years of honing, and I still have some of the RevereWare pots, although the bottoms haven’t been polished in months. I’m no chef, but I can definitely cook.
Mom called today to ask for advice on planning the big Easter Sunday family dinner. Cannelloni, roast pork, and all the trimmings for thirty people — I could really use a few steam kettles and wall ovens.
Another under the hood change today: While you were sleeping, I moved the blog to a new address: http://blog.belm.com. You were redirected here automatically (look at the address in your URL field), but you should update your bookmarks — the old URL, http://www.belm.com/blog/ will disappear in a month.
I’ve had truffles with a a few meals, usually added as an extra garnish. The last time I ate them I paid an extra $10 to have white Italian Alba truffles shaved on top of an appetizer. What was the appetizer? I can no longer remember, but it had truffles on it.
When I saw this post on Serious Eats, I took me all of a minute to decide that buying fresh, French, black, winter Perigord truffles for $99 was good deal. It’s a good thing I acted quickly, because the truffles were soon gone, to the chagrin of friends I sent the link to.
Yesterday I received a a chilled styrofoam shipping box with this smaller box tucked inside:
I had a moment in which I was sure they sent me chocolate truffles; that’s what the box looked like. But then I noticed the smell, that concentrated, earthy, fungal aroma I remembered from my meals. These were the real thing:
I wrapped each truffle in plastic wrap, then in aluminun foil, loaded them all into a vacuum-seal bag, and put them in the freezer, where they will remain in suspended animation until I need them.
What wil I cook with them? I have no idea yet. Probably something for Diane’s upcoming birthday dinner.
But until then I have truffles. From Costco. How cool is that?
1989 was not shaping up to be a good year for me. I had broken up with a girlfriend six months before, and the current object of my desire had politely but firmly rejected me. I moped around the house (I was renting a room in the house my friend Rick and his wife had recently purchased.), not really sure what I would do next. In an attempt to snap me out of it, Rick said “That woman you were chasing would have killed you with her triathlons and partying. You’d be happier if you found someone who shared your interests. Someone like Diane.”
I had met Diane in 1985; we played the same live roleplaying games at science fiction conventions. (If you didn’t know I was a geek before, you certainly know now.) She lived in Brooklyn, but whenever she came to Boston she’d host a get-together for the gaming crowd. She was studying law along with her boyfriend, who was at the same school. She’d call every now and then to let us know when she’d be visiting, of just to get updates on the Boston crew.
She was nice, she was smart, she was cute — but she had a boyfriend and she lived in NYC. Neither of us seemed to be single at the same time, so it never occurred to me to pursue her.
Not long after Rick’s “like Diane” comment, she called. Her now ex-boyfriend had just invited her to his wedding. (He had dumped her after the NY bar exam, while I was engaged to She Who Must Not Be Named.) She was furious — he was getting married less than a year after the breakup. “If I go to the wedding, it looks like I’m condoning it, but if I don’t go it will look like I can’t handle it.” she explained.
“I’ll go with you,” I offered. “I’ve role-played stranger parts; how hard could it be to pretend to be your new boyfriend? We can play it any way you want.”
“You’d do that?” she asked. “I’ll have to think about it.”
She called a week later: “I’ve decided not to go to the wedding. But I’ve been thinking about the ‘boyfriend’ part of your offer. Can we get together and talk?” I was heading to my parents’ place that weekend for Easter, so I suggested we meet in Milford (where Diane was living with her mom) that Friday evening.
We had dinner at a seafood place by the water, afterward we walked on the beach and talked for a few hours. I was smitten. Just before boarding the last train, I kissed her. When I got home I told my parents “I think I just met the woman I’m going to marry.” I just knew.
That was our first — and only — date. We spent all of our free time together after that, with Diane racking up 36,000 miles on hew new car with the drive to and from Boston every other weekend. I became a regular on the Boston-to-New Haven Amtrak run. A year later, she moved to Boston to live with me, and we’ve been together ever since.
On Christmas morning 1992, standing on the same spot on the beach where we had our first kiss, I asked her to marry me. Even though we celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary last October, March 25 holds special place in my memory as the happiest day of my life.
