Monday, April 14, 2003

Hello, gentle readers.  I haven't eaten any more chickens, and have no plans to do so in the future.  My indulgence of last week aside, I'm a reasonably accomplished vegetarian cook, hardly ever eat at restaurants that don't have good vegetarian food, and I certainly don't want to begin bringing animal carcasses into my home, and mucking about with that!  That said, I've cooked exactly one meal since moving into my new house, three weeks ago.  Everything is in boxes while we renovate the kitchen, and I can't find my chef's knife, which means preparation, of even the slightest complexity, is almost impossible.  I don't have a food processor, or a mandoline, or any of those gadgets.  I have a Wusthof 8" chef's knife, which I sharpen obsessively, and with which I have become quite handy.  My Cordon Bleu-educated friend, Patrick, taught me many knife skills during his last visit, and now I can julienne, mince, dice, chiffonade, and so on with speed, efficiency, and no small amount of flair.  I find cooking very contemplative and peaceful, and it pleases to me to engage in a process that yields pleasant results so quickly - there's not much of that in life, I find.  I'm a poor baker, but I'm learning those skills as well, and I sprung for a reasonably fancy gas stove for my new kitchen, which I have yet to use in any real way.  The best food-related skill I've learned is how to read a recipe and decide if it will be any good.  I find many recipes too bland, and although I can often think of ways to make them more robust, I often just skip the ones that seem boring.  A lot of vegetarian recipes involve incredibly complex,  time-consuming preparation, for results with very uninteresting flavor.  It's best to find a good, omnibus-type cookbook, and stick with it.  I like Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone very much, and recommend it highly.  It has a good section on using the knife, and a section of recipes listed alphabetically by vegetable, which allows one to cook seasonally, and make something good with what's to hand, or picked up at whim at the farmer's market.  Every soup I've made from the book (and I've made dozens) has been superb, and after a few attempts, I discovered that I'd learned to make a quick stock and soup from the week's vegetable leavings.  Now I make soup almost every weekend, before I grocery shop, just to clear the vegetable crisper. And I get lots of kisses from my soup-loving girlfriend, to boot! I've nothing against complexity, by the way, but in all things, I expect reward equal to the effort extended. I watched Kundun this weekend, possibly ending a long and exclusive run of Scorsese DVD-viewings in my household.  This was a very fine movie, and a truly excellent example of visual storytelling.  All the actors were charming, and there was no Kevin Spaceyesque emoting or scenery-chewing.  I also found it very timely, given our current engagement in Iraq.  There's a scene in which the Dalai Lama is listening to the radio with his advisors, and the announcer states that the Chinese have liberated Tibet from the dictatorial impulses of the Dalai Lama's government.  I found this use of the phrase "liberation," employed as it was here toward the rhetoric of imperialism and aggression, pretty interesting.  I was also happy to see that Scorsese depicted the deep vein of strangeness that runs through Tibetan Buddhism - there was a scene depicting a sky burial, and several scenes featuring an oracle who entered into a trance before delivering his predictions.  That was good - I've too-often conflated all strains of Buddhism into one airy, austere, whole.  I only began to understand the distinctions on first hearing some Tibetan chant, which is just downright bone-chilling.  Of course, I use the term 'strange' advisedly.  I don't want to engage in some cultural relativism that compares chopping a corpse to bits, mixing it with feed, and throwing it to the birds with pumping a corpse full of preservatives, putting it in a metal box, and burying it in the ground, and then draw some conclusion that one is more odd or incomprehensible than the other.  I suppose this boils down to differences between the notions of resurrection and reincarnation, respectively.  In reality, the Western way seems to preserve the notion that there is some essence of self residing in the body - unnecessarily, and perhaps even harmfully.  Speaking of the rituals of death, at least elliptically - I absolutely do not understand the praise heaped upon Six Feet Under.  I sit down, every Sunday night, with my girlfriend, and attempt to watch it.  All of my friends love it, and I suspect we subscribe to HBO for the exclusive purpose of allowing my girlfriend to watch this show.   Every week, I get bored or annoyed, and pick up a newspaper or book instead.  It's very, very pretentious, and very, very bad.  It reminds me of the fake soap opera David Lynch used to cut to, in early episodes of Twin Peaks.  I hated the previous offering, American Beauty, from the same writer/director as well.  I really dislike unnecessary exposition - I find it insulting and banal.  In Kundun, to contrast, Scorsese managed to show the Dalai Lama's ties to modernization, as well as to his past, in one shot of the current Dalai Lama wearing his predecessor's (i.e. his own) wingtip shoes under his monk's robe.  I got it, my girlfriend got it - we talked about the movie this weekend, and both remarked on that scene, how much it moved us, and the volumes that were communicated in that 15-second shot - and any discussion, any acting, would have been completely extraneous.  That's all!  Goodnight, gentle readers. 6:23:08 PM