Tea Leaves

My typical recipe for drinking chocolate involves cocoa powder, whole milk, a pinch of salt, and some vanilla. No sugar. Chocolate is supposed to be bitter. A pinch of cayenne pepper will serve, too.

But sometimes, once in a blue moon, on a particularly bad day, you have to do something different. Here’s one way to do it.

This recipe sprang from a fundamental misunderstanding about hot chocolate in Madrid. You only ever eat churros and chocolate at 4 in the morning after being out drinking all night. So of course, when trying to replicate the recipe I used Drunk Guy Logic. It goes like this:

Yum. Chocolate good. Thog like chocolate.
Chocolate thick. Thog like thick chocolate.
Thog wonder how pretty Madrid seÃ’orita make chocolate so thick.
Mmmmmmmmm, chocolate.
Thog think pretty Madrid lady probably just put lots of chocolate in. Yeah, that it. Thog sure.

You see, it never occurred to Thog that they used corn starch. What can I say. It was 4 in the morning.

So, I eventually figured out how to replicate the experience of Madrid chocolate, without using corn starch. There are a few key differences between my recipe and the authentic one. First, and most importantly, it is not served to you by a cute madrileÃ’o or madrileÃ’a. Second, it’s a bit more of a pain to make. Third, if you drink too much of it, you will go into a chocolate overdose seizure, and die.

Ingredients

• One large monopoly-board sized bar of chocolate. I traditionally use Callebaut bittersweet, because that was the last bar this size I bought. Over time, my taste has changed, and if I was doing this again, I’d get something with more cocoa and less sugar. Be warned that once you buy one of these monopoly-board sized, 11 pound bars of chocolate, you will own it forever. When you’re not looking, it regenerates used portions by absorbing nearby materials and metabolizing them. Keep it away from pets.
• A ball-peen hammer.
• A double boiler (or just two saucepans with which you’ll make a bain-marie).
• Milk.
• (Optional) a portable defibrillator.

Keep the chocolate wrapped in its paper. Have a friend hold the bar in mid air. Thwack the bar near the end with the ball-peen hammer, shattering it. Take off some large pieces — you’re looking for maybe between a half pound and a pound of chocolate — and put them in your double boiler or bain marie. Heat on medium, checking every 5 minutes or so. Try not to mess with it too much.

Try to not get any water at all (including condensation from steam) into the chocolate. If any water does get into the chocolate, it will seize up and harden. If this happens, don’t panic. The solution to water in your chocolate is, counterintuitively, to add more water and mix it in, until it flows again.

Once the choclate is soft and molten, add milk and stir. It should still be somewhat thick even after adding the milk; if you used a sufficiently stupidly huge chunk of chocolate to start with, and a small saucepan, you probably won’t be able to thin it out too much. Heat it through. Serve when the little pieces of chocolate that re-solidified when you added the milk are melted again.

When drinking this with friends, always make sure at least one person abstains. That person can be the one to call 911.

You might die. But you’ll die happy.

The search for the true and authentic culinary experience occupies the mind of all of the food obsessed people of the world. Real Chinese. Real cheese. Real barbecue. Real sushi. The list goes on and on. Entire magazines and cookbooks dedicated to the objectively correct or best way to cook this or that. There is even a world-wide semi-political movement whose solitary goal is to preserve the traditional food culture of Europe and beyond against the attack of the faceless corporations.

But Real Food is hard to pin down. People disagree about basic facts. In Eastern North Carolina, Real BBQ sauce is tomato-free. In Western North Carolina, it has tomatoes. Northern Chinese food uses a lot of bread and baked goods. Southern Chinese food is spicier, and has more rice and noodles. Many people claim, incorrectly, that it is proper to put ketchup on a hot dog. Others would have you believe that when constructing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you should put the peanut butter and jelly on different slices of bread. This is, of course, stupid.

On the other hand, Real Food is certainly not some completely subjective relativistic construction. There are things which are just wrong. Vegan fake meat tofu roast “turkey” dinners are wrong. Experiments in “fusion” cuisine usually come out wrong. You know the sort of thing I mean. You look at the menu and see Spring rolls Alaska (smoked Scottish nova lox, served with neufchatel cheese and Australasian capers, on a sesame-infused roll) with a hominy polenta remoulade. Your heart sinks.

Outside of certain areas of the country, barbecue is almost always wrong. Most of what is served as “barbecue” in Pittsburgh, for example, is actually just braised meat that has been chopped up and then simmered in some kind of gravy for days on end. What then ends up in the sandwich has no real relationship to meat much less slow smoked pork shoulder.

Finally, who can forget the endless parade of single-brown-sauce “Chinese” takeout joints that cover almost every mile of our great country. It may be hard to pin down Real Food, but it’s certainly easy to find the fake stuff.

I rambled earlier about how the search for new food experiences was at the core of my relationship with food and eating. I also think that this is the core of the answer to the question “Where does Real Food come from?”. For me, Real Food comes from that experience of discovering that there is this whole other group of people who have been getting the good stuff for their whole lives and you’ve been missing out. Real Food experiences change you in ways that normal food experiences do not.

One time we had some friends and their family over for pot stickers. The family is from Italy, and did not have broad experience with Chinese food. So I did the best I could to replicate my mother’s dumplings. I have gotten pretty good at it, but mine really still aren’t close. Anyway, I remember that their young son was not all that impressed by the pot stickers. But then, a few weeks later, we ran into our friends, and they had gone out to a local Chinese joint of ill-repute and ordered the dumplings. At that point, the young son was much more impressed with mine. I can only imagine that if he actually had the Real stuff over at my mom’s place, he’d be even happier.

I can remember dozens of food experiences like this one from my adult life. There was that first hit of a perfect cappuccino. The first time I got real smokey slow-cooked pork down in Carolina. Soft Shell crabs cooked just right. The bread pudding soufflé at the Commander’s Palace. Real raw milk cheese. Fresh oysters on the San Juan islands. Steamed live shrimp in L.A. I could go on all night. In each case, my view of the food world was completely changed by taking one bite of the dish. I would say that outside of music, this is the closest thing to the sort of transformative experience that brings people to religion that I have had.

The only reason I bring up religion is a great scene in a great food movie called Big Night that actually makes the point for me. The Chef at a restaurant is hoping to obtain the affections of the woman who delivers the flowers. So he is cooking something simple back in the kitchen, a sauté of vegetables and tomatoes, I think. He tosses the stuff in the pan with some oil and seasoning, stirs it around and then gives her a taste, and all she can say is: “Oh my God. OH MY GOD.”

His reply is something like: ‘God is right, because to eat good food is to be close to God. ”

This, I think, is where Real Food comes from. It is when you take that first bite of something new, and you are changed forever. It is the moment that separates the you that has not yet eaten the Real Thing from the you that has. It is the moment that you realize that while you might have missed out on the good stuff until now, next time you’ll know where to find it, so you won’t have to miss out any more.

If that is what it means to be close to God, then I’ll take it.

I just found out that like the PSP, the Nintendo DS has a delicious instant sleep feature.

Chances that either of the new next-gen home consoles have the same feature implemented in the OS and not in the stupid game: practically zero.

Chances that any of the next-gen games are really any better than Mario and Luigi: also practically zero.

My personal interest in buying a 360 to play anything but Madden 360: waning.

I, like a number of people, have a few days of unexpected leisure at my disposal in the days leading up to New Years.

So instead of me helping you, here’s your chance to help me: pick a relatively new “casual” game that you think it fun, and talk about it in the comments. Give me something new to play. Bonus points if it runs on both PC and Mac.

I’ll start the bidding by telling you that you that if you like words, you should surely go download Bonnie’s Bookstore. (I know a Mac version exists — I helped beta-test it — but it’s not available from that page for some reason. I’ve asked the author to clarify).

Wrapping presents.

I just wrapped a Christmas present, lumpily. I couldn’t find any scotch tape, so I used surgical tape. It looks exactly as bad as you might imagine.

I made two cookie discoveries in the Target today. This is a bit odd. You don’t expect to go to the Target to find out stuff about cookies.

My first discovery is that Target is the last local outlet around here that gets the good Carr’s crackers. I like the thick wheat crackers, especially with blue cheese (mmmm, Stilton). For some reason every local purveyor of overpriced yuppie food in town has stopped carrying them. Even the normally reliable Penn Mac did not have them the last time I was there except in the sampler pack. I hate sampler packs.

So I was in the Target picking up Fig Newtons for the trip home, and lo and behold there was a whole shelf of Carr’s crackers. When did Target become a local purveyor of overpriced foofy food?

While standing there and hoarding the crackers, I noticed something else interesting on the next shelf. “Key Lime” cookies. This stirred memories of cookies from my childhood, when I used to eat these round cookeis out of a green box that had fake lemon powder all over them. I now want these cookies. Happily, the “Key Lime” cookies were almost identical to what I remember eating as a child, except they are stick shaped instead of round.

So the mystery remains, what are these round cookies that I remember?

Twenty minutes in Google digs them up: Lemon Coolers.

Who else remembers these cookies? Apparently, they have been discontinued. Another casualty of the cut-hroat competition in pre-packaged artificially flavored cookies.

At least Target has the same thing now. I think I will now buy all my cookies at Target.

To make any consumer product, thousands of decisions must be made. Inevitably, no one can get all of those decisions right. Even the best-designed gadget or toy will still have some mistakes in design or execution.

Despite this, there are certain moves some companies make that go beyond bad, into the realm of the bewildering.

If I was feeling snarky — and let’s face it, when am I not? — I might use this space to take some cheap shots. For instance, I might opine that having Civilization IV — a turn-based strategy game played, largely, by old, slow people— require the latest, cutting-edge 3D video cards, was one such decision.

But there are better targets for my ire tonight. Because tonight, I screwed up. I tried to watch a DVD.

Over a year ago, psu wrote convincingly in this space about the stupidity of DVD menus. And that’s all still true: film companies still spend tens of thousands of dollars producing fancy animated DVD menus that nobody, anywhere in the entire world, since the very beginning of time, has ever wanted. The animated menus serve one and only one purpose, and that is to make me want to fly to Los Angeles so I can strangle whoever designed them.

But the people who come up with the animated menus might as well be saints compared to whoever designs the parts that come before the menu.

Look. I’m a fair-minded man. I am a capitalist. You want to put an advertisement before the main menu? Fine. You want to put two ads before the main menu? Be my guest. You want to put sixty-two ads before the main menu? Knock yourself out.

But if you disable the buttons on my DVD controller while you’re playing those ads, then it’s all over. The terrorists have already won. Don’t come crying to me when people all across the world are bittorrenting your movies. You deserve it. I hope they steal your stuff. I hope you don’t make any money at all. I hope you starve to death.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a DVD I need to take back to Best Buy.

Pete, as usual, has generated a lot of comment traffic with his recent rantings about whether or not it is the fault of the developer when a game on a PC is a crashy piece of crap. For the most part, the battle lines are drawn along the question of whether the PC as a platform is just too complicated and intractable to make an enjoyable and reliable vehicle for interactive entertainment.

The problem is that the PC is by its nature not a single platform. Every single PC is essentially its own unique platform with its own unique set of problems. This means that everything that you run on the average PC has the potential to become a crashy piece of shit, arguably through no fault of its own. What this means is that whenever one buys a game to play on a PC, it is implicit in the contract that one will also be beta-testing the driver and other system level interfaces between the game and the rest of the PC. As a result, even in products that are relatively bug free, a lot of people get crashes and other annoyances.

This may be a fact of life, and I can understand the engineering reasons that might make it a fact of life. But, one shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that it is OK. It isn’t OK. For example, I know multiple people who have had a game or the system crash while playing a certain game because of cooling problems in the PC. Why should I have to worry about the cooling architecture of the machine in order to play a game on it? I suppose some people want to engage in the meta-game of whack-a-mole to find the workable configuration on which many games do not crash. They can be my guest. I lost interest in that kind of thing around the time I graduated from high school.

Stuff should just work. If PC gaming wants to climb out of the grave that it is slowly digging for itself, it must come to terms with this issue.

But, I am not here to bury PC gaming. That’s been done in other places by other people who are probably better at it than me. I am here to bury the general purpose PC as a computing platform. I used to be skeptical of the notion that the world would be populated not by the general purpose computers of my youth, but by special purpose machines that could only do one thing and could not be upgraded or reprogrammed. What a waste, thinks the brain of the engineer when confronted by this vision. All of that hardware and I can’t even use it to write code? Why would anyone want that? Flexibility and programmability, it seemed to me, were the major leverage points that set my beloved machines apart from everything that had come before. Here was a machine that could do anything as long as you could find the right representation.

Of course, as we have all found out, flexibility is both the shining glory of the computing machine and the instrument of its downfall. We can hook the machines up on the network for instantaneous communication with others thousands of miles away. We can do the same thing and spread email worms and other pain at the same lightning speed. You can program the machine to be any kind of environment that you want, but what this means is that like PC games, what you end up with is a machine that not only never works, but will not tell you why it doesn’t work.

The Axiom of Choice states that to fight complexity, you limit flexibility. But for computers, this has never really worked. Many organizations have a vested interested in keeping the general purpose PC alive. Also, many people who buy computers are not after simple machines that work. They are after toys to tinker with, things to fix. These and other factors play into the entrenched position that the general purpose PC has in the world. I don’t think that most people who buy a computer to surf the web and look at pictures really want or need what we are selling them. But it’s all that is there.

However, this does not mean that we do not have more and more single purpose computing machines in our lives. Even though the systems used for computing have not been evolving towards a simpler future, something has happened that my past skeptical self did not notice. More and more single purpose devices in the world are really just simple computers, designed to do a single thing well and not crash all the time. Off the top of my head, here are the obvious and not so obvious ones:

1. Xbox, PS2, Gamecube
2. DVD player
3. iPod
4. My car (although my car crashes more than my iPod).
5. Tivo
6. My oven (horrible user interface)
7. My TV. Probably more raw image processing power here than in the game consoles or a high end PC. Does not crash as much.
8. My cell phone.
9. GPS
10. The cash register at the Giant Eagle. Well, OK, these actually run Windows, but I bet you can’t install software on them.

I also find that while my general purpose computers are as complex as ever, one way that I try to tame that complexity is by limiting what I do with them to a variety of narrowly targeted tasks. So, the iMac does nothing but run iTunes. My office machine is only used to write code, send email, and edit specifications. My laptop is mostly for photo processing, writing, and web surfing. And so on. This limits what I install on the machines and thus limits the complexity of the configurations.

It seems obvious to me that the next natural step should be to continue to simplify the general purpose computer to make them easier to use and easier to set up. An obvious place to be doing this is in extending the Tivo idea to the “living room computer” or “media center PC”. Of course, since engineers and PC manufacturers are building these machines, this is not what happens. Instead what we end up with is machines that are very flexible, but hard to set up and hard to run. In the long term, if PC gaming is any indication, this is the wrong tradeoff. Hopefully in a few years, I’ll be writing my blog rant on a special writing machine, and then reading it back on my web surfing tablet while playing Halo 6 on my Xbox 9. Dare to dream.

Current obsession: Travian, a browser-based MMOG. I am still in the honeymoon period, which means the game proper hasn’t actually started, since I have a couple of more days before the pillaging hordes can destroy my village. I’ll write a proper review then.

Travian looks like Settlers of Catan, but it isn’t.

Speaking of which, if you want to play Settlers of Catan, you should try AsoBrain’s Xplorers. Online Catan. They also have a fairly nice clones of several other games, as well.

Why, you might ask, am I going to write about movies that have been out on DVD for two years?

Well, new TV in hand, we sat down to watch some big movies. The biggest movies that we have are the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. When these were released on DVD, I originally picked up the extended versions, not so much for the extra film material, but more for the commentaries and documentaries. I’m a sucker for that stuff. I neglected, however, to buy the theatrical DVDs, except for The Fellowship of the Ring.

Having worked through the non-extended FOTR, and most of the extended TTT, I have to say that with the benefit of hindsight and time, the theatrical cuts are unquestionably the better films.

Now, this should not be surprising. Jackson himself repeats over and over again that the extended versions of the films are not supposed to be a director’s cut, or the canonical versions of the movies. The extra material was just there because they had shot it, and they thought that people would find it interesting even though for various reasons it did not make the final cut of the theatrical films.

When the extended Fellowship was released, it was pretty clear that the extra footage was glued on mostly for the fan boys and completist freaks than out of any consideration for the film itself. Every time you hit one of the extra scenes in Fellowship the film grinds to a deathly halt, and by the third hour you just want to get on with it already.

By comparison, the theatrical FOTR is tightly paced and while it is often leisurely, it never drags. The story always moves forward, rather than standing still. Exposition and development are deftly overlapped with the emerging story. You don’t really appreciate how carefully and wisely constructed the theatrical cut of the film is until you see what was taken out. So, in this way, the extended cut does its job. While a weaker film than the theatrical release, it does serve to provide you with insights into the original film that you might have missed the first time through. But, I never found much reason to watch it again.

The Two Towers surprised me though. With two years of shelf time, my opinion has completely changed. Originally, I thought that this was the weakest of the theatrical releases, and that much of the extra material in the extended version made it better. After a run through over the last couple of nights, I have to say that I was wrong. There are entire scenes in the extended film that do nothing but summarize the film that you have just watched. There are a few of the additions that do add to the context and background of major characters and storylines. But, they do not add that much, and I think that on the whole, cutting them was the right choice. Finally, there are various additions that are just complete drek (scenes involving stew, for example) and were justifiably thrown on the cutting room floor and probably should not have been brought back.

Overall, my opinion of the extended TTT is now much like that of the extended FOTR. I think that Jackson has achieved his goal of providing fun bits of extra detail and insight into the characters that inhabit the movie. And, having watched them, you can bring this extra knowledge to your appreciation of the shorter versions of each film.

However, I will no longer tell people that the extended Two Towers is more enjoyable. Because we are not even to Helm’s Deep yet, and I just want them to get on with it already.

Unrelated Note

The TV looks great with these DVDs, even using my crappy old 480i DVD player.