The garlic of the world is so powerfully good right now, I have been going through at least a head per day (though admittedly they are of the teeny farmer’s market variety). I found some recipes in a book on Japanese pickle making that involve sticking lots and lots of cloves of garlic in miso and in honey (but not together), so I did that in hopes of having some decent garlic to eat in the winter. A few years ago I realized that at some point wintertime garlic became inedible—rubbery and sulfurous with a flavor like dirty pocket change. I just quit eating it out of season because it wasn’t worth it. Someone told me that nearly all the garlic on the market now is grown in China, and is bred for shipping rather than flavor. You can tell. If not by the flavor, by the post supper quease and morning after armpit stench of everyone at your feed trough the night before. The honey garlic is particularly pretty. I tasted it the other day, and while it was very good, I don’t think it’s ready yet. The honey is fizzy and fermented and golden and the outside of the garlic is soft and sweet as though it’s been cooked, but the inside is still a bit macho for eating straight. Speaking of macho (and quién es más), my mum used to make an evil brew in the winter called Fire Tonic or Super Tonic or something. It had hot peppers, ginger, garlic, an iron pentagram, and the still beating heart of a virgin steeped in cider vinegar. I seem to remember it being foully effective at curing colds, though my sisters and I never liked to risk the side effect of chest hair everyone goes gleefully on about. But now that I’m an old wife, maybe it’s time to start keeping something like that around.

I am starting to be a bit sensitive about my recipe free lifestyle but really people, you should all pipe down (a blop is an excellent unit of measurement) and just eat while you can because sometimes I make very fine things out of whatever’s in the house and unless the circumstances repeat themselves precisely, the meal’s a one off. This weekend it was a simple posole sort of soup out of a flavorful but very gristly lamb roast, oversize novelty corn, and an exceptionally fine guinea hen stock. (The Violet Hill people have sold me on guinea hen instead of chicken lately.) I didn’t have any cabbage and I don’t love lettuce in soup, so I served it with things from the garden—amaranth greens, chopped onion, tomato, lime (from my garden in the way the Mexican takeout from around the corner comes from my kitchen), and oregano. The immature aji amarillo from the garden didn’t provide much in the way of heat, but they were tasty… What else? Oh—a cold pureed soup made with the same stock base, avocado, lime, garlic, hot peppers, oil and herbs with lots of chopped tomato and some more olive oil on top. Very much like eating a bowl of avocado salsa. Good for supper with beer and a boiled egg, as are most things. And I sort of invented a dairy free ice cream to accommodate junior’s dairy allergy. Everything goes in the blender: a can of coconut milk (In my vast experience with coconut milk as a dairy substitute in the last two years, I can say that organic usually tastes a lot better), two egg yolks, a good quarter cup blop of ghee (Some people who are allergic to casein can eat ghee since the protein part of the butter is gone. The concentrated butter flavour gives a nice creamy complex dairy-ness and cancels our some of the coconut.), vanilla, a pinch of salt, honey to taste (start with a quarter cup and keep adding until it’s sweet enough. Every honey is different so it’s really impossible to give precise measurements when it comes to sweetness or wetness. Beware recipes that do. In this recipe honey is superior to sugar in that it’s adds a bit more of the kind of depth that dairy has.), and cocoa powder to taste. This ice cream will hold a lot of cocoa. You can get it really dark and intense without it starting to taste at all powdery. It shouldn’t taste obviously coconutty either. When it seems right, put it in the ice cream maker, etcetera, etcetera, until the eating part, when you eat it with gusto. Hey—that’s pretty close to a recipe!

And before I forget:

Category 4 cynicism at Slacktivist.

A bioengineered mouse tooth. (And the original article.)

The Internet mapping project.

Baker’s Keyboard Lounge is in danger of shuttering… Oh, Detroit.

Chris Foresman at Ars Technica on the blue light special Mac rumors.

And since I’m still thinking about alphabets, some photos from the Alphabet Exhibition of Hand-Drawn Lettering and Experimental Typography and some nice crazy hand lettering.

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When I was pregnant, I experienced some pretty odd perversions of flavor. I couldn’t gag down meat or fish to save my life. The first time I realized what was happening, I was eating breakfast out with friends and ordered a plate of the house cured salmon. It arrived in all it’s vivid capery glory and I heaved a great forkful into my face and started chewing. It was like biting into a sewer. I had to sit perfectly still to avoid vomiting on the table. I knew that if I so much as leaned forward to spit into a napkin, all would be lost. I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead and finally I sucked in a shuddering breath and gulped the vile bolus whole. By then everyone was staring at me and asking if I was okay. When I recovered myself I panted that the fish was rotten and warned everyone not to touch it. They immediately fell to, picking up their forks and eating with gusto, mmming and oohing and telling how delicious it was. I can’t tell you how odd it was to watch everyone lapping up that putrid salmon. Anyhow, after I realized what was up, I tried to gag down the odd protein shake, but since I’m suspicious of food or supplements that aren’t really food and didn’t bother to research other options, I didn’t end up compensating very well. (I think I had this fruity idea that my body knooows what it needs, though if I’d so much as bothered to cock a skeptical eyebrow, I would have realized that may be true, but that my body’s evolutionary imperative to suck the life out of me and stick it in my baby wasn’t really the best thing to fall back on in the battle to keep my teeth another ten years.) I’m sure that a knowledgeable vegetarian could have done better, but I ended up really wiped out afterward; and a year and a half later, still have a more powerful appetite for red meat than I’ve ever had in my life. As a result, I’m finally getting a bit more accomplished at cooking meat, instead of just cooking with meat. I used to eat it regularly, but it was more in the form of little scraps of bacon chopped over roasted endive or something, rather than a hearty slab of flesh situated in a position as exalted as the pile of vegetables next to it. If it weren’t for my love of innards and feet, this would get incredibly expensive. In fact, it still does, though I don’t really feel bad about spending on food (Though Mint makes sure I know my grocery bills are way out of line with everyone else’s. Hey Mint! What about my invisible car payments? How do those measure up? Oh snap! Oh wait, I want a car. Oh, well, snap, I guess.), though I worry a lot about the class issues in our country surrounding real vs. fake food. (Tangentially, I’m pretty tired of European critiques of American culture. It’s becoming ridiculous. There’s plenty to critique but more and more the criticisms and analyses miss the point so profoundly as to just leave me with my mouth hanging open. It’s like being called by someone else’s name. I’m looking at you, Granta Magazine. You’re still reeling from the pointed un-renewing of my subscription, aren’tcha?) I’d argue that raising American wages is less important than making things like health care and education affordable here. That would allow us to scramble out of monstrous amount of debt and begin to spend the greater proportion of our incomes necessary to consume wholesome food sold at a fair price. And with that, an end of winter recipe for lamb hearts, which are not very much per pound at all:

Clean the hearts under running water to get all blood out, then pat them dry. Cut away all the fat (it gets tough and unchewable), tough skin, and valves; then open them up and cut away the tough stringy bits of muscle inside. Put them in a bowl to marinate in some white wine or vinegar with a good amount of garlic pounded with salt. Twenty or thirty minutes is plenty for lamb hearts. (This recipe works nicely for beef heart as well, though you’ll need to let them sit longer.) Meanwhile, slice a red onion very fine and let it lounge in a bit of white wine and salt. (I usually have a container full in the fridge because these are so mellow and delicious on top of pretty much any pile of raw green things. You just add oil and voila, salad dressing!) When the hearts have marinated long enough, sear them quickly on a really hot pan (I bet they’d be brilliant grilled like anticuchos too), then let them rest while you reduce the marinade to a sticky deliciousness. Cut the hearts into slices. They should be pink on the inside, and very tender. Then toss them with slices of oranges or tangerines (Everyone has a box of Clementines on the counter in the winter, right?), the onion slices, the reduced marinade, some oil, and a lot of parsley or other slightly bitter herbs.

Classy. Oops.

I found José N. Iturriaga de la Fuente‘s Las Cocinas de Mexico I and II online six or seven years ago and started translating parts, both as an exercise and because they are fascinating. I’m still working on them now and then. (I have a idea for a book that includes parts of the translations in combination with stories and recipes from people who live here now.) Besides the tender detail of the documentation, I love how the personality of the author emerges in the hastily described but painstakingly accurate text. There’s an elocutionary quality to the writing that I find endearing. He has an almost imperious voice that, just as it seems about to veer into pedantry, meanders instead off on a whimsical aside; for example, mocking the delicate souls who refuse to pronounce culantro because it contains the word culo (ass), or inserting some snide aside at the expense of anyone too classy to eat good old fashioned street food. He is a brilliant generalist with a background in economics and history, who was appointed to the Mexican National Council of Culture and Arts in the nineties. There he organized a gigantic effort to discover and document traditional Mexican cuisine, from street food to long lost texts and secret family recipes. He rallied an astonishingly large research staff to whom he emphasized quantity and completion over fine tuning and perfection. I have a note in an old journal (the only direct quote from an excellent biographical article by Corby Kummer, which doesn’t seem to be online any longer) that reads,

“The worst enemy of good things,” Iturriaga kept telling Marcelli and his other collaborators, “is perfect things.”

This is from the man responsible for some fifty four volumes of gastronomy documentation, including the Colección de Recetarios Antiguos. (I wonder if he teaches at the University of Gastronomic Sciences?) I cannot hear this message too many times. Artificial deadlines and their papery definition of completion are the best way to stay practiced and the surest way to inch in the direction to the perfect and complete… And speaking of writing online, a very funny tableau at the Freakonomics blog at the Times. Note the list of pointless, meandering, or downright inflammatory comments with sly and unhyperlinked links!-links!-links! beneath the entry on how bloggers are rewarded for reciprocity within their networks. (Read: only bloggers read blogs, which I suppose it more true in some circles than others.)

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Strange Maps, an hugely energetic collection of maps with notes, research, and all sorts of speculation. (via Neil Wehrle. Hi Neil!)

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From Hawthorne’s American Notebooks:

Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.

What were the contents of the burden of Christian in the “Pilgrim’s Progress”? He must have been taken for a pedler travelling with his pack.

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An article on designing for MS Surface which barely gets at the interesting part, i.e. multi-user interactions, and all the social and athletic possibilities there. The table part with the coffee cups and place settings and high chair and chandelier is just silly. It must have something to do with this dishonorable instinct many humans have to turn anything into a lamp or stick a browser on the front of the fridge. It doesn’t do, fellas.