Sideways Glance

Alerted to this site by friends who immediately thought of Libellus at the mention of summer seersucker, I made haste to inspect the newest re-invention of the traditional warm weather garb of Louisiana gentlemen, crooks, and politicians.  The Suckerlab offers only a few items in two colors of the classic cooling fabric: trousers, hoodies, shorts.  Typically, the color stripes are arranged vertically in the garment, but these turn convention on end, offering potentially scandalous horizontal patterning.  But nothing goes better with a balmy Louisiana summer....except maybe a dirty martini (but who says you can't have both?).  I rather like these trousers, but were I of portly stature, I would loathe them, opting for my traditional blue and white suit with tan and white spectators.  Pocket and waistband facings are of orange fabric.  At least in the case of the pockets, the contrasting color is visible.  All this said, were I ever to wear these re-designed favorites, it would only be for the most casual of settings, since the trousers in their slouchy relaxation resemble pajama bottoms rathers than legit trousers.  The shorts version of these is perhaps the more prudent choice.  For warmer months, there is also a corduroy incarnation which like its seersucker counterpart, turns the pattern on its side.  These and other edgy designs at http://www.betabrand.com/. 

    

The Commutative Property

It's a basic mathematical concept most of us learned in elementary school, that by adding 3 and 2, for example, the sum will be 5.  By the Commutative Property,  adding 2 and 3 also equals 5.  As it turns out, this identical concept can be applied when common sense fails and the brain synapses refuse to fire.  Last Sunday I hosted a function at my shop which required the offering of a modest spread of sweets, savories, and mild potables derived from grapes.  As my sweet, I opted for the general crowd pleaser in South Louisiana: the petit four.  In Lafayette, the best miniature cake cubes have for generations been procured at one place: Keller's Bakery.  However, and especially now since the block of Jefferson Street downtown where Keller's is located has been torn to hell by construction for the past 6 months blocking easy access to the place, the title of best petits fours now goes to Rousses Market in Youngsville.  Although there's a Keller's branch in Youngsville, it's on the opposite side of the village from the Maison -- and as the streets are arranged here,  it's not an easy journey to travel laterally.  Rousses is both convenient and the bakery is -- permit me to step aside should there be a sudden clap of thunder -- superior to the age old Lafayette confectioner, at least as far as petits fours are concerned. They are moister, more flavorful, more colorfully decorated, and noticeably larger than the Keller's variety.  So, for my function, there was no question as to the source of choice.   Just in case there was a run on them (which could happen, given that most local high schools were matriculating this weekend), I found it prudent to call in a pre-order for a late afternoon pick-up.  Here is the verbatim exchange with the clerk at the bakery:

Libellus: I would like to order 2 dozen petits fours to be picked up at 4:30 this afternoon.  Is that possible?

Bakery: No, sir. We need at least 24 hours. 

L: I see.  So I wouldn't be able to order those today?

B: No, sir. 

L: Well, how many petits fours do you have on hand at the moment?

B: We have at least 4 dozen. 

L: Very good.  Would you please reserve 2 dozen of those?  I will be there at 4:30 to purchase them. 

B: Yes sir. I'll set them aside now. 

L: Thank you. 

Despite the superior quality of the petits fours, those who prepare them may not shine as the sharpest spades in the shed.  Nonetheless, a bit of uncommon sense makes for great conversation at the buffet.   

The Rustic Caesar

Perhaps it's my fondness for most things Classical, but more than likely it's because a pedestrian green salad with the typical ho-hum Italian dressing is boring.  Nothing beats a good Caesar -- just ask the Gallic tribes.  My rule: the creamier and anchovier the better.  Hilary from Channeling Ina has published an extraordinary Caesar recipe which relies solely on the anchovies contained in the Lea & Perrins' -- so no extra fish chopping required.     



Channeling Ina: Crock Pot Love: "As a busy mom I am always in search of a great crock pot recipe. Being a tried and true cajun lady I just cant get over some of the bad cro..."

Trees




The original: Blaine's Tree

 


Libellus' Tree









Painting With a Twist was our venue last night, along with a sizable group of friends to re-create an original painting.  Some time ago, Blaine had attended a painting session there, and his rebellious, non-conformist nature inspired him to fill his canvas with his own creation: The Confetti Tree, which was taken on by the franchise to be offered as one of its regular models.  The premiere was last night.  Our "Twist" of choice: an expert re-make of our favorite specialty Martini, the "Happy Raspberry Surprise".   



Not for Knots.

Scanning through the men's section of the Interweave Knits website I came across this.  Doesn't he look cute in his fabulous knit neckties?  Were it not for the hair, I would swear the photos were from the mid 1980's. I confess, I did own several of these....when I was 16 -- and that was 1985.  Seriously?  Knit ties?  With the price of the cashmere lace weight required compounded by the mind-numbing repetitive stitching it will take to produce a bulky strip of fabric that, in the end, will resemble a goiter even when knotted in a four-in-hand, I'd rather spend the extra bucks and head out to the nearest Versace boutique for a fine silk creation that stands up to a full Windsor.    

The Klops Experience

Klops

One of my favorite meals growing up was something rather mundane in form, a simple meatball affair.  But with such foods: the secret is in the sauce. Königsberger Klops, it's called.  A dish named for a German city that's now in Russia.  And when I was a kid, that fact was always brought up at the dinner table whenever Klops was on the menu.  "And of course now the damn Russians sit there," my mother would start.  "The Russians in Königsberg, the Pollocks in Danzig, the French in Strassburg.   What a shame."  That's when my attention would turn to the capers floating in the creamy gravy.  The shrinkage of the German Empire from the moment Bill left his Under den Linden digs at the dawn of Weimar up to the final map redraw after Yalta was a cause celebre at home  -- a major cause celebre -- and Klops would evoke a barrage of opinionating.  Enduring the barbs of postwar politics was worth a bowl of Klops, though.  I made it for us last Saturday, but instead of the de rigueur boiled potatoes beneath the sauce, I would make potato dumplings -- Kartoffelklöße.  My Saturday is generally done by 4pm.  I would have roughly an  hour to assemble the ingredients, get them home and complete the prep work, in order to leave for Blaine's house by 6.  The Albertson's near my shop, I knew, had a good European food section -- at least they did the last time I had seriously shopped there, a couple years ago.  Front row parking -- a bad sign? Shopping carts lined up at the door.  I test drove three before I settled for the fourth that, like the others, featured the cliche broken front wheel.  I carried a neat list of items.  Moving through the veg department, I gathered all I needed.  Rounding the corner to where the Euro section used to be, I found an inexhaustible selection of Mexican food items neighboring an equally extensive selection of Asian foods.  The die-hards will go through the trouble to grate potatoes and prepare a goopy paste for the dumplings.  My mom always used the Panni mix, and I am a firm believer in carrying on tradition.  Al's used to carry the mix.   I would assume a previous manager had perhaps enjoyed a lengthy tour in Germany as a GI, which guaranteed his customers a healthy choice of Oetker cake mixes, unique canned goods, glass mugs of low-end beer hall mustard, cans of herring in dill sauce, Wieners in jars, and potato dumpling mix.  The new guy I suppose was more a soy sauce and refrito type.  Euro foods: all gone.  Even the Matzos were gone.  A whole shelf of colorful Santeria candles to light curses on my neighbor, but no potato balls.   There I was, aimlessly pushing a squawking cart full of food for the weekend through a labyrinth of products I didn't need.  It must be somewhere else, I thought.  So, then begins the quest.  Every aisle, every end display.  I was on a time limit, and what had turned into a quick trip to pick up a few things had turned into a goose chase.  And this bonus: every idiot with poor spacial usage skills was shopping at that particular Alberton's this afternoon.  The spacey lady who parks her cart and screeching, untrained urchin in the middle of the aisle to hunt for Lesieur peas ten feet away.  The obese chip eater stocking up on provisions who sees you pushing your cart down the aisle, yet somehow manages to wobble into your path. The feeble senior patting down the lane who decides to wedge his cart between one side of the aisle and the jutting display of Gladware containers to set up a roadblock until he's decided whether the poptarts or cream of wheat is more suitable.  Frustrating.  All this and still no Panni mix.  Why didn't I just go to Rousses?  Why?  Instead, I wasted 45 minutes in grocery hell.  The end of my rope was close.  Seconds later, I slipped off the end: I abandoned my cart filled with everything except a key food item.  Right there in the aisle by the ramen noodles.  I just left it standing there, walked out the store back to my car, and drove to Youngsville.  Rousses is near my house anyway.   Within 20 minutes I had reassembled everything I had been pushing around Albertson's and had located the Panni.  In addition to dinner, I had bought items for breakfast.  I would prepare asparagus and leek quiche with an open faced  Wasa crisp bread topped with prosciutto and herbed brie.  The coast was clear.  The exit was in sight.  The cashier in front of me was ringing up the a small order, so I slid into her lane and set out my treasures on the giant rotating disk.  The guy before me was buying a box of sushi prepared in the store and a couple other random things.  "Is this sushi?" the clerk asked.  "Yep." "You like that?" "Yep." "Never had that."  I was doomed.  I had encountered the chatty Cathy checkers at Rousses some time ago, but had thought that the annoying practice had been addressed.  I prefer a friendly, businesslike checker over a curious and inquisitive one who comments on your items.   If sushi man couldn't escape the third degree, my order would announce the circus had come to town.  "Are these leeks?" "Yes."  "Thought so."  "What is this?!" "Prosciutto."  "What's that?" "Ham." "Oh." "Is that cheese old?" "No, it's crusted with herbs." "Looks old to me. You eat that?" "Yes." "You making a pie?" "No." "Well, you have a pie shell, thought you was making a pie." "No, no pie". "I hate asparagus." "OK."  "Mashed potato mix?" "No."  When I was ten,  a humble wad of ground beef could evoke emotional polemic from the displaced.  Thirty years later, it turns out, a muddy mine field still extends between a hungry boy and a bowl of spuds and meatballs.  Send an unsuspecting friend to shop for you, then when he gets home frustrated and flustered, do this with the items he unpacks:       

2 lbs ground meat

1/2 onion, minced

bread crumbs

salt & pepper

1 egg

2 cups beef broth

4tbl butter

4 tbl flour

1 small jar of capers

juice of a small lemon

1 egg yoke + 2 tbl water

Combine first 5 ingredients.  Roll into meatballs. In a large skillet, prepare a blond roux.  Stir in the broth and add the meatballs. Cover and let simmer.  Add capers.  Turn meatballs occasionally.  When the meat is cooked and slightly browned, add lemon juice.  Combine egg yoke and water, temper with sauce and add to skillet.  Serve in bowls over potatoes or potato dumplings.          

     

Bunny Tracks: cum odore suavitatis ascendat...

Of course there's the appeal of the cuteness factor here, but besides that, the chocolate bunnies and other sweet goodies embedded in this ice cream have made it hands down my favorite pre-packaged flavor.  Lately, I've become a major fan of dessert, and tonight I insisted we have a little sweet after our meal of delicious panini.  Off to Albertson's for some random items and a confection.  I concede that it was already rather late as bakeries go -- about 7:30pm -- so granted, the grocery store bakery had a distinct East German ambience: empty shelves featuring oddball, mismatched cake slices, weather-beaten cream pies abused in their plastic containers from a day's maltreatment by customers shuffeling them in their stacks, many with iceing smeared against their plastic windows blurring any hope of visual identification.  A cake and pie orphanage sparsely populated with candidates whose immediate adoption at their age would be rather unlikely.  Sad.  Blaine suggested the freezer section, then as we considered the fashionable and trendy cakes pictured on the frozen boxes behind glass, ice cream came to mind.   We saw all the typical flavors, but then...Bunny Tracks.  Blaine had enjoyed this stuff before.  I'd never heard of it, but one read of the ingredients kept me from returning the container to the confines of the freezer.  And even better: this is not a seasonal affair, despite its Eastery name, thank goodness!  No need to purchase toppings, whipped cream, fruit and such to doctor a pedestrian plain vanilla.  Bunny Tracks is all-in-one ice cream bliss.  I confess, if left alone with a tablespoon, a container of this dairy ambrosia and a complete set of Fawlty Towers DVD's, I could most glutonously polish off  every morsel by the time the first disc played out.  Back in my early 20's, a bachelor prone to bouts of unbridled culinary hedonism,  it had been rumored that I might from time to time have been inclined to such spontaneous dessert consumption.  Yet having doubled my years since then, and now enjoying the company of a loving and stable partner, I have put off childish things in favor of savoring the sweetness.  Bunny Tracks ice cream is best enjoyed in pairs.  One bowl for you, one bowl for him.  Or, one big bowl and two spoons.     

What it is

So I'm starting off this week with a poem by Erich Fried (1921-1988).  Almost all of Fried's works are very simple in form like this one, but they pack a punch.  Each is like a little vial filled with a concentrated essential oil.  I first was introduced to his poetry in 1994 during a German language and literature convocation in Taos, New Mexico by Austrian librarian and Fried expert Volker Kaukoreit.  During a seminar, Kaukoreit read this poem, and it has captured my heart ever since:  "What it is".  

Was es ist

Es ist Unsinn
sagt die Vernunft
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe

Es ist Unglück
sagt die Berechnung
Es ist nichts als Schmerz
sagt die Angst
Es ist aussichtslos
sagt die Einsicht
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe

Es ist lächerlich
sagt der Stolz
Es ist leichtsinnig
sagt die Vorsicht
Es ist unmöglich
sagt die Erfahrung
Es ist was es ist
sagt die Liebe

It is nonesense 
says Reason
It is what it is
says Love

It is misfortune
says Calculation
It is nothing but pain
says Fear
It is hopeless
says Insight
It is what it is
says Love

It is ridiculous
says Pride
It is foolhardy
says Caution
It is impossible
says Experience
It is what it is
says Love 

Uomo della gleba

Having spent a sizable chunk of my days in the Ivory Tower -- first in academia, then in the ecclesial version of the same -- here's how it is: living life in academic confinement, there's no hard work in arriving at a belief that what's really important is the echo off the elephant tusk fortifications that 1) keep one insulated (etymology: Latin, insula, -ae, island) from the barbarians at the gates, and 2) can foster the sort of ego-building that encourages one to inscribe the words Pontifex Maximus Jovis Optimi Maximi after one's signature.  If you've ever given a paper to a room of academic collegues, but then re-examined the scene from a standpoint outside the Tower, the whole affair seems a farce.  Behind the desk, reading 20 pages of esoteric bilge to 50 philologists is (what the rude swain would call) nothing short of an invitation to a pissing contest.  While sifting through mounds of block quotes and supported theories and propositions, the audience are hard at work, not listening, but preparing questions to refute and debate.  Not because they're interested in what the reader has to present, but because they're pissed that they hadn't thought of this all themselves.  How silly it seems now, looking back, reading a load of crap to just such a crowd assembled in a Gothic wood-paneled hall at Yale about tangential fantasy worlds in a particular work of German Romantic literature, when, down the street people still waited in their cars at the McDonald's drive-through, a kid somewhere ate the cream center from her Oreo before the chocolate cookie part, and someone's dog relieved himself beside a tree.  Life went on regardless whether there ever existed a frame story, a magic crystal, or a mystical passage through a secret cavern.  The Tower's echo and re-echo had caused us to levitate (or at least believe that we could) several inches off the floor, and what all else went on outside didn't have much consequence.  The Ivory Tower rewires one's thinking, a fact that becomes very obvious indeed when one leaves the sacred precinct of Most High Jove.  I did.  And what I found was a life rather quiet yet still quite logical.  Not so much in a philosophical logic sort of way, but in a common sense logic sort of way.  The world Outside is a place not where literature is lobotomized and autopsied, but where it lives and functions as a reflection of life, if not life itself.  Instead of chunks of gold, I discovered what I had been all up in arms about was really beautiful clods of earth, and that I was not a demigod of literary analysis, but actually a man of the field, what one of my Latin profs had called, as we sat reading Cicero's defense of Milo, uomo della gleba.  Applying high flung ways of thought within a context extra muros I've come to realize is about as effective as attempting to use a German hairdryer in the United States.  The plug just doesn't fit, and even if it did, there wouldn't be enough juice in the line to make the thing operate.  It's been a while since I've been from under the yoke, so to speak, but old habits die hard.  Now and then, I still find myself wanting to chase butterflies, letting my mind wander into wacky hypotheses and the various means of proving them -- not so much now in hopes of winning a laurel, but just to exercise that part of the brain that's often about as useful as the Windsors of Buckingham House.  And that's the sort of thing that can get me into trouble.  In the Ivory Tower, when a misstep happens in the logic department, you usually find a colleague who still thinks like you do, so you both haul off to a coffee house to hash things out, and at the end of the day, the theories should point to the fact that you were right all along.  The tail, as it were, can be shown to wag the dog, after the consumption of just the right amount of black coffee.  If any concept can be described in words, a creative mind can, and with enough motivation, demonstrate that even a circle is square if certain conditions are favorable.  On the Outside, instead of coffee and rhetoric, there's a special confection that's bitter to eat, but sweet when you learn the lessons that constitute the goopy filling.  It's called humble pie.   I'll take another piece, please.  It tastes especially earthy this week.