Tea Leaves

We’re going to talk consumer home products today, because I have a story to tell, and a recommendation to make.

Slate had an interesting article today where they reviewed a number of warm mist, cool mist, and ultrasonic humidifiers.

This topic is of interest to me because I bite my lips. And so, every winter, when the heaters kick on, the air dries out, and then my lips dry out, and then I have to walk around for a month with dry, cracked lips. I recently did the same analysis of humidifiers as did Slate, and came to a different conclusion as to the best possible product.

Most of the humidifiers Slate looked at were fairly high-end, like this Honeywell 3-gallon model. The idea, I suppose, is as follows: you have some friends over for a wine and cheese party after the Obama fundraiser at The Bedding Works, an avant-garde gallery located in an up-and-coming, if still a bit rough, neighborhood. After serving the last of the macchiatos and bidding farewell to most of the guests, it’s just you and that one special person you’ve been hoping to spend some time alone with. The one with the chunky glasses, and the half-cynical, half-naive bowl haircut that looks boyish, yet somehow feminine. Their day job is in graphic design, but their real passion is for community outreach. God. How I hate both of you.

Well, anyway, you and your new friend have a few drinks, and one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know you’ve stumbled into the bedroom, where your new hipster paramour takes one look at your distinctly downmarket humidifier and realizes that, well, maybe you’re just not a very good match. Slate’s plan for avoiding this problem is to drop $100 or more on a humidifier with good “feng shui.” That’s one way to do it, I guess.

My solution to this problem is to buy a penguin-shaped humidifier. The ad copy calls it “adorable”, and I am here to tell you it does not lie. It’s ultrasonic, quite quiet, dirt cheap, and easy to clean. Most importantly, every time I walk into the room and see it, I involuntarily get a smile on my face. Call it peng shui.

It doesn’t come with a filter, but I’ve been using filtered water and am very happy with the results as-is. My lips are no longer dry.

I suppose it’s possible there are people who would be annoyed by this humidifier’s level of kitsch, but I think its modern lines and clever industrial design obviate that. Besides, you don’t really want to be friends with people who don’t like penguins, anyway.

Personal to bbum: For just a little extra cash, you can get a Hello Kitty humidifier instead. But I think the penguin is cuter.

Pity the PC (or Mac) gamer. We spend thousands of dollars buying or worse, upgrading our computers so that we can play the latest high end games. Then we spend our time with those computers seeking out remakes of the classic games that we actually liked, but which don’t work on modern hardware or operating systems anymore.

The poster child game for this effect, for me, is Panzer General (and its fantastic sequel Panzer General 2). I suspect this game occupies that role for most of us who have been wargame fans (wargames are a fairly esoteric niche in the already marginalized world of PC games. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, I wrote an explanation of the genre last year). There is virtually no turn-based strategy game that comes out that I don’t buy, because I am — perhaps out of some desire to reclaim my youth — trying to return to 1997. I am typically disappointed. When I heard people talking about Commander - Europe at War, I experienced a familiar sense of dread. I was sure I was going to see another Panzer General clone, and I was going to be let down again.

Here’s the good news about Commander - Europe at War, a strategy game available for both PC and Mac. It’s not really anything like Panzer General. Here’s more good news: it’s really quite good.

Commander gives the player control of the Allied or Axis forces in 1939, and offers you a chance to lead your troops throughout the entire war. Whereas Panzer General presents combat in small, digestible (and brilliantly designed) scenarios depicting specific battles, Commander gives you a more-or-less uninterrupted picture of several theaters of operations, from the East Coast of the United States through North Africa, Europe, and Russia. This, to my mind, makes the game a different beast entirely.

I love Paris

It is however, strikingly similar to another game that was released a few years ago, Strategic Command, published by Battlefront. StratCom was, to me, a singularly frustrating game because it felt almost perfect, and that feeling of near-perfection masked (for a while, at least) what I considered to be serious flaws. Games that simulate historical periods walk a fine line: blow off historical realities and the grognards will criticize you for not being “realistic,” but hew too closely to them and you can end up making a boring game.

StratCom, I felt, bound the developing war so tightly to the historical narrative that I felt less like I was making strategic decisions, and more like I was playing with a slot car set with an “end turn” button. Commander overcomes this flaw swimmingly. I played through the opening years of the war and each time tried different strategic paths. Some of them worked out better than others, but it was fairly rare that I felt like i simply couldn’t succeed because, say, the game was designed so that I had to invade Belgium before capturing Paris. It’s a historical game, but one that gives you some flexibility. By pulling this off successfully, the game makes itself worth serious consideration by any fan of wargames.

The developer of Commander also created Legion Arena. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Like Commander, Legion was in a genre that is nominally overpopulated and, to be frank, moribund. Like Commander, it managed to achieve a surprising degree of freshness through simple and approachable UI and putting playability before historical accuracy. These are tradeoffs that some might disagree with, but I think they made the right call.

The game is good, but not perfect. In particular, the tutorial is sketchy to the point of being insulting, and the game’s UI, though simple, suffers from a lack of visual feedback for certain important actions. Despite this, the game accomplishes what it sets out to do. In my view, this is the fulfillment of the promise of Strategic Command.

It’s not Panzer General. But then, it’s not trying to be.

Commander - Europe at War, by Slitherine and Firepower, is available for the Mac, by Freeverse and for the PC, from Matrix Games. Both versions cost just under $50, and free demos are available from each publisher.

Disclosure statement: Both Freeverse and Matrix Games graciously provided review copies of the game for their respective platforms.

Long time readers of our humble writings will recall that we have no love for the Metal Gear Solid games. Pete says, and he is not wrong, that the games implement gameplay systems that are actively hostile towards the player and he doesn’t have time to play games designed by people who hate him. A couple of years ago, I had tried and given up on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for that exact reason. Then, while scanning my pile of old games looking for something to play after the holiday rush, I found I wanted to give the game another chance to see if what I liked about the game might triumph over what I hated this time. As it turned out, this is exactly what happened.

Playing the game again, I found myself confronted by the same evidence that Kojima hates me. Even with the new third person camera, the game is archaically difficult to control. I compensated for this by playing on Easy and either sniping or stabbing everyone to death as I traveled from area to area.

As the game progressed, I began to remember what I liked about it. In my mind, what makes Metal Gear fun is that in its design and construction it is always aware that it is just a game and it makes this clear to you too. The game makes almost no effort to integrate the game and the story. In the story, all the characters move smoothly and with great agility. They juggle revolvers, shoot enemies using ricochets and utilize various martial arts with great expertise. In the game itself, Snake doesn’t act coordinated enough to hold his pants, stand, and piss at the same time. He runs around hunched over with his arms folded up, so his hands sit near his face. Like a squirrel cracking open a nut.

The game is also full of “systems” that don’t make any logical sense. The surgery system comes to mind. The field surgery menu is like a deconstructed health pack. You hit A on top of the various items and your injuries magically go away. You can even cure yourself while under attack by hostiles, as if you could hunker down behind a rock and extract a bullet from your shoulder and then get right back into the fight.

Many players find this sort of thing unforgivable, but I found that in my second time through the game I was willing to embrace the game’s quirky design sense. I like it because it goes against the so called “no-crates” doctrine that dictates that the highest possible goal in the design of a game is to try and create an experience that doesn’t feel like a game at all. Rather, you hear designers go on and on about how they will completely integrate gameplay and narrative, or how they will build a “living” world full of freedom and emergent gameplay. I’m tired of slogging through dead living worlds and boring emergent gameplay. If I want that I’ll play Madden.

Metal Gear is refreshing because it throws these ideas out the window and gives you a game to play on the one hand, and a movie to watch on the other. Never mind that the gameplay is stunted and hateful and that the movie makes no sense and has bad voice acting. At least they are doing something different. In the end, rather than giving up on the game this time, I just let the incongruousness flow over me. I turned off my brain, gloried in the over the top B-movie stinky cheeseball cut scene collection.

My change of heart about Metal Gear illustrates an obvious point about critical writing that is too often ignored by the video game industry. The point is that a good critique should combine objective observations (e.g. you cannot aim your gun and walk at the same time) and subjective conclusions (e.g. Kojima hates me). In addition, it should be possible to come to different conclusions about a game even given the same objective observations about how the game plays.

My other recent experience with this idea came when my buddy tilton called me out for unfairly bashing Half-Life 2. I have generally found the Half-Life 2 series to be faithful to the elements that made the first game great, but for some reason the new games just don’t connect with me. I find it hard to care about the HL2 world and its characters, and I get bogged down in the tedium of it all. Interestingly, tilton feels the same way about a game I love: Halo. When I went to beat him up about what a gay lamer he is, it turned out we agree almost completely about how the games work in terms of combat, overall game design, and production values. These are objectively observable facts. Where we differ is what we conclude from observing these facts: I’d rather be in the Halo world, tilton would rather be fighting the Combine. I already knew he was a freak anyway, since all he really plays is WoW.

Ultimately, I think too much critical writing about video games is wedded to the idea that game reviews be an objective evaluation of the game as a commodity. No critical evaluation of anything is completely objective, and setting up an expectation of objectivity serves no useful purpose. In addition, too many consumers of video game writing expect reviews to be nothing but a feature checklist and a score. The result is that most writing about games tends to read like advertising copy from a catalog with endless droning about graphics engines, sound design, normal maps and texture resolution.

What we should be looking for is writing that precisely describes the experience of playing a game in a consistent and predictable voice. From these objective observations, the game review can then veer off into the land of creative opinion. This is something that Zero Punctuation does extremely well. In fact, his reviews work at multiple levels in parallel, combining little animations that both illustrate and make fun of gameplay that he doesn’t like with spoken text that eviscerates the crappy game design all at the same time. Yahtzee constantly makes me jealous because he works at a level that I will never achieve, and I hate him for it. Pete told me that he hates him too. But we were both kidding.

In the end, I have come full circle back to the same old complaint I always have about video game writing. Most of it is bad, and most of the rest is boring. I would like to see more game writing that is willing to throw off the chains of objectivity and take a strong point of view. Maybe go out on a limb and not discuss the quality of the physics engine just once. Who knows, maybe then even professional reviewers will be allowed to change their minds once in a while and embrace a game that they once gave up on. Why should I have all the fun.

There’s a certain question that makes straight men freeze with fear: “Does this outfit make me look fat?” Men hear this, and they are paralyzed in a moment of fight-or-flight panic, because they know, first, that they have to respond and, second, that there is no correct response. Women, so I’m told, often have the same reaction to being asked “Hey, honey, am I starting to go bald?”

The reason these questions are problematic is that they are sometimes not asked in earnest. Rather, they are the slippery tentacles of a chthonic and atavistic beast, feeling around for a tender meal. That meal is called validation. When that meal is replaced with something bitter and truthful, those tentacles can squeeze the life out of whatever they find, instead.

Those of us who play and comment on games are constantly surrounded by such tentacles. They come in the form of people typing the name of their favorite game in Google, and instead of finding a joyous community of like-minded believers, they find you. Or rather, they find your article. The one where you called their favorite game “a buggy mishmash of old clichés, retarded ideas, and adolescent wank-fest fantasies of gullible women in chainmail bras.”

When people discover that you don’t like their current obsession, they tend to get defensive. They deploy various arguments, again and again. Most of them are easy to ignore: “You must not be very good at the game” is a constantly-repeated refrain, or even better “You just don’t like (RPGs/Racing games/Sports games)”. The ever popular “You’re gay” never goes out of style, of course. And I’ve even heard, oddly, “You must not know anything about programming” several times.

But what I find more interesting, and more pernicious, are the arguments that rely on “Have you stopped beating your wife?” assumptions as to what the responsibility of a reviewer actually is. The most popular argument in this bunch is “This review is unfair because you didn’t finish playing the game.” That’s sometimes phrased in the marketing-speak of “This isn’t a review. It’s a ‘preview’.”

I’ve been putting off writing this article for a bit because I didn’t want to appear churlish and defensive myself, but then I noticed that Corvus’ review of the adolescent collect-loose-women-as-playing-cards RPG The Witcher was receiving this sort of criticism from grievously offended Internet wankers. That provides a good framework for me to talk about the issues without feeling the need to rise overmuch to my own defense.

The crux of the argument — and I am not being terribly liberal in my paraphrase — is: “How can you give a fair review of a game you’ve only played for 10 hours?”

Let me turn the question around: how can you not? If you haven’t managed to form a reasonably comprehensive opinion of a game in, say, 2 or 3 hours, let alone 10, it’s time to find a new hobby that is a little less mentally taxing.

There are a number of assumptions underlying this attitude that one is obligated to sit through every bit of content a game might want to inflict on you before criticizing it. Every single one of those assumptions is wrong.

The first assumption is that people who talk about or review games are necessarily interested in helping you decide whether to purchase the game. In other words, that the purpose of a game review is strictly utilitarian in nature. Some are. Many are not. It’s my opinion that analysis that approaches games as art, or at least as commercial art, tends to be more interesting than writing that approaches games as product.

The second assumption is that one must “finish” a work in order to have a valid opinion on it. I have walked out on several movies in my lifetime, and sat through more that I wish I had walked out on. I sat through every unbearable minute of Bad Lieutenant, but I promise you the last 90 of them served only to validate my belief that you are better off performing a self-appendectomy than watching it. The movie’s only redeeming quality was that by portraying an actual wank-fest, it managed to encode its own future criticism.

The investment required for most movies, however, is typically only a couple of hours, which means that reviewers can splurge a little and squander a couple of hours eating popcorn. Games are a stickier wicket. The Witcher, for example, promises (or, more accurately, threatens) “more than 80 hours” of boring, drawn-out gameplay. The idea that anyone — even someone who is being paid — should be forced to suffer through 80 hours in order to deliver the “It sucks” verdict that is obvious after 15 minutes is more than just wrongheaded. It is utter madness.

The third assumption is that what it means to “finish” a game is even definable. To take one specific example: I’ve been playing Mass Effect recently. My style of play is, to be perfectly honest, plodding. I can’t stand the idea of progressing with the main quest when I know that there is some irrelevant side-quest somewhere left unattended. The reviews I’ve read all focus on the interesting plot and decent writing, but I’ve noticed that the writing is (as one might expect), significantly better in the “main quest” than in the side-quests. I haven’t seen anyone comment on this yet. So my assumption is that various reviewers “finished the game” by powering through the main quest. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it paints only part of the picture of the game. My point is not that these reviewers were irresponsible bastards who cheated their readers out of a deeper understanding of the game, but that it’s not even clear what “finish the game” actually even means.

Pete today observed that for him, an interesting or useful review combines some amount of objective description of the game with subjective opinion. I agree with that summary. One wants the author to be thorough in exploring the text, but it seems to me that there is not, and should not be, any requirement of comprehensiveness.

If one is looking for interesting discussion and commentary on a game, then whether the reviewer has finished the game (whatever that means), is neither here nor there: writers can talk about what they experienced. And if one is only interested in a game as product, then “This game was so bad that I gave up on playing it” is, in my book, one of the most useful comments a reviewer can make.

Tying all of this up with a neat little bow, I will rise to Corvus’ defense: The Witcher is a misogynist fantasia created by people who hate and fear women. Anyone who willingly plays it is participating in the ongoing retardation of computer games as a medium, and is complicit in keeping video games, as art, in their extended adolescence.

That much is obvious on its face. And I haven’t even played the game at all.

Take that.

I’ve contributed a chapter to an upcoming book, ‘’Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games Without Frontiers - War Without Tears'’, edited by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher, or you can pre-order it from Amazon.

My chapter is titled “There and Back Again: Reuse, Signifiers, and Consistency in Created Game Spaces”, and builds on some ideas you’ve seen on this very weblog. As for the fancy title, well…just call me Umberto.

The grasshopper is a classic sweet cocktail that, typically, sucks. If you order it at a bar, you’ll get a concoction made from bad green creme de menthe, worse white creme de cacao, and cream or half and half. It will be undrinkably sweet, but to make up for being too sweet it will also taste bad.

The mystifying thing about the grasshopper is that it should be good. Chocolate and mint is a great combination. So we here at Tea Leaves have come up with an alternative recipe that is, we think, infinitely better.

Ingredients:

• 2 cl Marie Brizard white crème de menthe. This is an instance where brand matters. There are basically two crèmes de menthe in the world: Marie Brizard, and then the crap that you serve to people you don’t like.
• 2 cl half and half, light cream, or heavy cream, per your taste.
• 2 tsp good cocoa powder. I used Guittard cacao rouge

Put all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with lots of ice and shake vigorously for 30 seconds. Pour and serve. You’ll end up with something that looks like cocoa, but tastes like a mint sundae. This, it turns out, is not a bad thing.

The goal here was to avoid using crème de cacao, which is always, under all circumstances, disgusting. When I conceived of using cocoa powder as a replacement, I was fairly sure that it couldn’t possibly work. “The cocoa powder won’t dissolve,” I thought, “it’ll be all grainy, and if it does dissolve it will just precipitate right out.” At least in my test run tonight, that didn’t happen. The texture was pleasantly thick without being sludgy or grainy. As for precipitation, all I can say we ended up drinking this so quickly that it wasn’t a problem. You will end up with a residue on the glass which could, I guess, offend the delicate sensibilities of your friends.

If that happens, you need new friends.

Enjoy.

I’m not too much for spreading around YouTube memes, but I can’t let this one go without comment. It has to be seen to be believed.

The missing context is that the star of the show, “Ramon Razor Hard Gay”, is actually a fairly well known comedian and professional wrestler. So that makes it all OK and not at all sick.

I think.

My co-writer may complain bitterly that I infected him with the shopping virus, but from my perspective, turnabout is fair play. I have spent the past month mostly ignoring any game that doesn’t have “Disgaea” in its title, and it’s all his fault.

I finished the main storyline of the first Disgaea game, and then switched to the second game. It’s time to talk about it a bit. But first, let me tell you a little something I’ve noticed about our web traffic. A few months ago I wrote a fairly in-depth and critical review of Persona 3 called Ferris Bueller’s Day Offing Himself. Tweaking the nose of the world a little bit, I gave the article the slug “Persona 3 Hentai”, because of a throwaway comment late in the review.

That article has inspired more comments than any other in recent memory. Much of that article is from people who disagree with my review. Nearly all of that traffic, including the comments from people telling me that the save system is perfectly reasonable because “You can [save the game] within 30 minutes if you run past the enemies[…]” comes from people who followed the cheesecake picture from a certain search engine’s image search.

Yes, I’m bad.

So because of the immense amusement value provided by this steady stream of passers-by, let’s just take a moment to admire this cheesecake image of semi-protagonist Etna. There. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk a bit about Disgaea 2.

On a purely technical level, it is a “better game” than its progenitor (which I initially discussed last month). The same basic turn-based game mechanics from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness are carried forward, but everything has been supercharged to be even more ridiculous. Characters level up faster. There are more optional areas and “extra stages,” and new mechanics have been piled on top of the old ones. I’m nearly done with the main story, and it is already apparent to me that this only covers perhaps a tenth of what the game has to offer. You could play Disgaea 2 for a year and still not have time for anything else.

And yet…and yet. There’s something about Disgaea 2 that leaves me a bit cold compared to Hour of Darkness. I don’t like the story quite as much, or the characters, and somehow the additional brightness and sharpness of the rendering has the completely unintuitive side effect of making it harder for me to see what I’m doing. I don’t quite know how to quantify this: taken individually, each element of the game looks better. But when they’re all put on the screen at once, my eyes simply slide off of them, like a patient’s body rejecting an organ transplant. This might simply be because I had been playing Disgaea 1 for several weeks, but I’d think if that was the case I’d have adjusted by now. I haven’t. Parts of the game, particularly the “birthday cake levels” in the item world, are so unwatchable to me that I just want to finish them as quickly as possible, and then avoid ever having to see them again.

Counterbalancing this is a very attractive truth: Disgaea 2 is, in some ways, the anti-Fire Emblem. It’s a turn-based strategy game that very, very explicitly allows you to choose exactly how difficult your next battle or set of battles will be (Literally. Don’t think a given map is challenging enough? Visit the Dark Assembly and pass a “Stronger Enemies” bill.) Apart from the somewhat inconvenient save system — you can’t save while in a battle — they nailed nearly every aspect of what makes games of this type addictive. Fun character design, challenging strategic gameplay, and a seemingly limitless ability to increase R. It turns out I’m willing to forgive a lot (including the ugly visuals) in return for those virtues.

In conclusion: hey, Pete, you should totally buy that Hattori HD Damascus Santoku. Buy two. They’re worth it!

Tonight I am upset with my co-writer, although it’s not really his fault. It all started when we had an innocent conversation over lunch where peterb told me his dad was going to buy him a cooking knife for his birthday. Until that point and time, I had thought about cooking knives perhaps three times in the last fifteen years, and each time it was to plot how to make my friend Erik sharpen my knives for me. For these fifteen years, I have used a nice 8 inch chef’s knife for everything in the kitchen, and it has always performed well without complaint. There is arguably nothing in this world I need less than another knife.

But, I had contracted the shopping virus from Pete, so now I am doomed to shop until it either dissipates on its own or I buy a nice Shun Classic Nakiri that I don’t need.

And I’m not the only one he got either. At least one other guy at work saw Pete’s post and the only way he could make himself stop reading the knife forums was to buy two knives. Apparently some of our other readers had this reaction too. The shopping virus propagates easily from dork to dork. The average dork is already inclined to shop for things he doesn’t really want or need, and all it takes to push him over the edge is for someone he trusts to put a shiny picture and some effusive text in front of his face.

This is how I found myself surfing around trying to figure out whether a Nakiri is a single bevel or double bevel knife, and trying to find one with a nice classic style round handle and that almost painfully shiny “Damascus” finish. I mean, just go look at this knife porn and tell me you can resist it.

As in most aspects of modern life, the Internet, makes this worse. The Internet, as we have seen before harnesses and amplifies the power of the dork hivemind into a force of overwhelming power. While they tell you that it is the most powerful information repository that our civilization has ever seen, the truth is that the whole thing is about collecting the shopping virus into various concentrated areas and infecting the innocent passer-by. While they tell you that what they are building are rich online communities for people that have common interests to gather and share knowledge, it’s really all about kibitzing and a shared shopping experience. This is true across the spectrum of dork and non-dork interests. Pick any large scale “community” web site (photo.net, the knife forums, Gamers with Jobs) and what you will find there are people all interested in buying the same stuff. Why do you think Microsoft is so hot to push Xbox Live down your throat? So you are impelled to buy the same game as all of your online friends at the same time so you can “meet up” online for the multiplayer. Why do you think Amazon is so hot to constantly build and rebuild their “community” features? It’s all connected.

So I tried to resist but failed. The final straw was when my mom noticed that the Chinese cleaver I hardly ever use, but keep around because I’ve had it since I was a kid, was in fact worn out. Now I could convince myself that I “needed” a replacement Then I saw one of the Shun Classic knives at a store, and it was shiny and beautiful and just the right size. And then my doom was upon me. It’s probably only a matter of time.

But, on the bright side, at least I can show the knife to Pete. He’s been bugging me about trying it if I buy one, ya know, just to see what it’s like.

I wrote, some years ago, an article about rum and its many uses. In it, I mentioned that I don’t understand hot buttered rum, because I’ve never found a recipe for it that resulted in something even remotely drinkable.

Nat provided me with a recipe at the time, but it just didn’t work for me somehow. This week, however, he lent me a copy of David Wondrich’s awesome book Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail To Whiskey Smash, A Saulte In Stories And Drinks To “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar. While flipping through, I saw his recipe for hot buttered rum. “Worth a shot,” I muttered to myself.

It’s fantastic.

The recipe is simplicity itself:

• 1 teaspoonful of sugar
• 1 Wine-glass [2 oz] of Jamaica Rum
• 1 Teaspoonful of spices (allspice and cloves)
• 1 piece of butter as large as half of a chestnut

Fill tumbler with [3-4 oz] hot water.

I’ve tried to make this drink tens of times based on various internet recipes, and it’s clear that it’s one of those alchemical mixtures where getting the proportions even a little wrong results in something horrifying. This recipe works. It’s balanced, has a nice texture, and is delicious. Thanks to David Wondrich, Jerry Thomas, and Nat for setting me straight.

I’ll be picking up my copy of Imbibe! this week. It’s a wonderful reference, and the historical discussion of the evolution of the cocktail from the protoplasmic punch through slings, fizzes, and cocktails makes for fascinating reading.

If you buy the book via the Amazon link above, Tea Leaves gets a kickback, which I promise we will spend only on booze. That’s how dedicated we are to you, our readers.

Since I’m discussing one hot drink here, let me mention another: oyawari. Simply hot whiskey and water (itself mentioned in Wondrich’s book), you can read step by step instructions on how to make it at one of my favorite liquor-related blogs, Nonjatta. I read Nonjatta to torture myself, since of all the hundreds upon hundreds of fine Japanese whiskeys they discuss, only one is available in the United States. But distance lends enchantment, and someday, perhaps, the global economy will come to my rescue.

Thanks to the generosity of my dad, I now own a really nice chef’s knife, a Kumagoro 210mm gyuto.

Gyuto - “Cow knife”

Dad decided to give me the gift of a sharp cooking implement for my birthday, on the condition that I research it and pick it myself. I suspect this was his own way of defusing his own lust for an ever-increasing number of knives.

There are a number of internet forums (of course!) discussing cooking knives, knife sharpening techniques, and accessories. At knifeforums.com you’ll meet any number of folks whose passion for collecting knives is exceeded only by their passion for talking about them. The forums at egullet.com are equally helpful.

Particularly useful in my search was the knives section of cookingforengineers.com, although I ended up going off their list; I wanted a “wa” style handle, and I’m a total sucker for the hammer finish on the Kumagoro. I was also intrigued (read: hypnotized) by the Damascus layers on the Hattori HD, but the particular model was want is out of stock.

The common wisdom is that European style knives have a symmetrical bevel, or edge, whereas Asian knives often have an asymmetrical, or sometimes just a single bevel. For this knife, I selected a Japanese-made knife that (apart from the handle) still has a very European form factor. I’ve been cooking with a modest Henckels set for years, and don’t want to throw my technique out the window. For my next knife – as if there’s any question that I’m getting another? – I’m considering something with an assymetrical bevel. I’m also thinking about the Shun Santoku that Alton Brown recommends.

There are those, including the New York Times, who claim that the only knife you need is a cleaver, but this just doesn’t seem to work out for me. I’m used to chef’s knives. And it has to be an 8″ chef’s knife. 10″ knives are for poseurs.

Yes, I’m joking. What knife one uses is, in the end, largely a matter of personal taste. But I am never one to pass up the opportunity to engage in overly detailed discussion on the minutiae of whatever is obsessing me at the moment. So with that in mind, let me throw this open to the floor. What’s your favorite knife? What are you using in your kitchen? What, if money was no object, would you like to be using?

Bonne cuisine!

In a special report, here is a summary of the breaking news over the past few days:

Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Obama Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Edwards Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Money Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Clinton Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Huckabee Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Romney Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa

Can someone please explain to me why every few years the “news” people engage in this collective mutual masturbatory spoogefest over the opinions of a couple of hundred thousand people in the middle of nowhere?

We now return to our regularly scheduled weblog.

It’s awesome, except for how it sucks.

Recently my pot stickers have been bothering me. It was a texture problem. The filling tasted right, but was not solid enough. Ideally the filling of each dumpling is an independent little meatball that just happens to be sitting inside the doughy skin. Mine were not like this, they were sandy and insubstantial. Clearly I had to ask my mom what was going on.

So when my parents visited over Christmas this year, we investigated my methods, going over each step of the process. It turned out that the problem is outlined in my original post on this subject, here:

7. Put some cabbage into cheese cloth and squeeeeze as much liquid out of it as you can. This is critical. Keep the juice in a bowl. Salting the cabbage a bit will draw out the moisture and make this easier. Repeat this until you have worked through all the chopped cabbage.

When you have all the cabbage squozed, and you are ready to start filling, start mixing the cabbage into the pork. The mixture will dry up a bit. Add a couple of tablespoons of the cabbage juice back into the pork.

We had been chopping the cabbage too small, but that was not the main issue. The main issue was adding the cabbage juice and the cabbage at the same time. You don’t want to do this because the liquid will not have time to be absorbed by the meat and the filling will be too wet. You want to add the cabbage juice to the original soy sauce marinade and then make sure the pork sits long enough to soak it up. Let it sit in the fridge this way for a while, at least half an hour or so. If you do this, then the pork will not be too wet when you fill the dumplings and will hold together better after cooking.

Using less cabbage and cooking the meat a bit longer also helps. But we tend to prefer more cabbage than less. So it’s a tradeoff.

Happy new year.