From Whitestone Road

Santa Anna's guilt leather black beard mausoleum.
Brothers' town pocket dragged'n'bound forgotten trust.
Oklahoma baby bridge yellow painting hanging.
Your mother's cuffs slip fall slowly beneath pipes.
Friends seeping dream under Angie Beck neck pain.
Reading olive frustration tomorrow account low.
Payment canyon carrot stars above the campsite.
Mesquite road abbreviation tearful lake fire.

Santa Anna's golden hair, a campfire backpack ridge.
Brother carefully limns; watched forever.
Oklahoma museum tickets airport architecture.
Your mom's quiet march through the church.
Friendly exchanges for now slip, chuckle, pop.
Reading peacefully until a thought rises.
Payment unnecessary she told me, kneeling.
Mesquite brush can't light up - no moon.

Santa Anna, like the morning's last dream (for once!).
Brother like the blood we share, bones and clothes.
Oklahoma at night stirs us up - twists and churns.
Your mom wore a pin to the demonstration.
Friendly bets about the depressing occasion.
Reading stopped and the pig's snout crumbled.
Pay as you play but play all you want.
Mesquite highway burial, the lights and the bridge, the snares and the sounds after. The ghosts in the breeze held tight against the wind. Two figures moved up the line and the moon stayed behind the one cloud in the sky, and I thought to my brother, "how did we end up here?" And he thought back, "we're standing still." So I addressed the situation 42 Whitestone Road: "ha-d'ya mean it cheerp?" I had never heard this accent before so I had to ask for another swig of it. "Kai get anoffer?" and kind of raised my bottom lip a touch. "Ayyh"

Sigh, of course, I couldn't hear anything over the roar of the CHP choppers. I know, I should've given you that information up front. Sometimes I get all clandestine on ya. Oooh, shady like a how-does it sound? I stood quietly because I wanted the moment to last. I expected it would - "much obliged" I muttered, "much obliged." I thought of these things and I thought how weird stuff feels.

Something's so easy about the oldern days. It's as if they weighed so little and there were no hardships, right Peter P.? I missed that decade and now the days are porky messes, spooky bass notes all the way down in the scales at the end of the piano where I let my cousin sit and see the crumbs under the keys, and inside: God's light. Inside: it was cold but verdant, the opposite of temperature, colored green and alluding unequivocally to Fridays when I wore shorts out in the blustery evening air. These precautions are for you own good, everyone yelled. Everyone's always yelling and if they're not than I am on the inside.

"Me and Frankie, livin' and drinkin', nothin' feels better than blood on blood.
Takin' turns dancin' with Maria, as the band played Night of the Johnstown Flood."

No Flowers

I would like the cross-section of a piece of Sicilian Easter pie, taganu d'aragona, as a tattoo on my arm, and I'd like to have a stained old piece of parchment paper with the recipe. When I make mini-quartered ones to test it out next spring, I'm going to substitute a (slightly) more common sheep's milk cheese, like caciocavallo. I'm sure I'll make the meatballs too tough, so I'll try not to. I'm probably going to use ditali instead of rigatoni because I'd rather fall from a green awning on a quaint little cobblestone sidestreet trying to fix a gutter. The ice from the winter made it that way, screamed an old aunt. Everyone rushed around holding towels. Rosa knocked over a wooden chair as she lunged for a box of bandages. A few jars of lentils spilled out onto the floor. One of them fell off the table and shattered. All the men tried to straighten me out on the ground, it made sense I guess.

I had broken my neck though, so in some ways bandages and a makeshift gurney really didn't help. All the blood from my heart gushed into places blood doesn't belong in the human neck because a couple vertebrae had punctured a major artery and tore half a dozen muscles and fat tissue. I coughed and squirmed unconsciously, and my blood started to trickle onto the street. At first it filed dutifully around each stone in the recessed paths that outline each stone. After a few seconds the blood poured over onto the (mostly) smooth surface of the cobblestones. I have B negative blood, and I don't recall but I don't think blood type affects the color of blood, it's probably all the oxyhemoglobularization and whatnot.

My brain let me think of a few things as I lay there about to die. For one, it let me think about the situation, which I quickly accessed as quite bad. Under less severe circumstances, I think the pain and the realization would've knocked me out or caused me to lose control of my bladder. But this was a difficult time. I had about twenty seconds of thoughts before I passed. As I mentioned, I spent the first twelve seconds panicking about all the blood and the frantic people and the feeling of complete detachment from everything below my chin. In retrospect it was foolish to spend 60% of the rest of my life worrying about dying. I mean I think 10-15% would've been a more reasonable portion.

That way, I could've used nine whole seconds thinking about [my most basic pleasures: soup, egg sandwiches, listening to loud music, gingerbread lattes, relaxing with [the golden girl of my dreams], etc.]. Then! I could've used about three seconds to think about things I've never done, like climb Mt. Everest, watch Star Wars, figure out why people believe that soccer is fun, or take a picture with Bruce/Rafa/Jamie/Dave.

I don't really know how the last five seconds would play out. I don't think you can plan that. My guess would be that I'd think something idiotic like, "hey I never gave so and so a chance." Or, "Rosa is so stupid what is that stupid towel going to do my backbone is sticking out of my shoulder." Or, "Dear God, please send me to heaven even though I [the big sins]."

I'm a big fan of "what went on while" another event happened. I guess it's a little ironic. That presupposes that I would've described something like, ahem, then the blood trickled down the small street in the direction of the coast, where [XX] and [XY] embraced serenely.

I should take this out now. It's almost ready.

Alert! New and Full of Intrigue

So there they was. They sat and laughed and made blow-up noises. And little tires screeched and glorious people operated machinery and we laughed so heartily. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time, even though I laughed harder when I recollected all the jokes. And I thought, "This is a daydream."

So the man with the plan said to me, "listen, man. You gotta keep walkin, keep movin' on and on and along." A wind like none other filtered through my decrepit little screen and brushed my stubble and I thought, "this is a fantasy." A wind like no other said, "you did that last time and look where you ended up."

And I thought, "this is rich. Now I'm walkin'." I walked past a few stores that didn't have anything in stock that I would buy. They had plastic brooms and these tall plastic buckets of cleaning brushes. I saw a girl wearing a short skirt on the corner and sneakers on her feet. What a deal! So I thought, "I need to get my things organized."

The Stories Are All True!

I love this sentiment:
Ma nooooo !!! L'uovo lo devi far cuocere almeno un pochetto... :(
Peccato perchè sarebbe stata veramente ottima...
Manca poco dai :)

And this one:


These pages are brilliant:

http://www.thepauperedchef.com/2007/03/pasta_carbonara.html
http://www.gennarino.org/carbonaraen.html


My take on carbonara:
There's not much to debate about carbonara having something to do with coal in Italy around the world wars in the 20th century. It was either a dish that became popular within coal-miner communities and/or a dish that reminded the Italians of coal miners. The word's root is definitely "coal," and "alla carbonara" means "in the style of the coal miners."

Some say that the black specks of pepper look like coal, thus the name. Others say coal miners got bacon from the Allied troops as they rolled up the Italian peninsula in WWII. Others conflate the two theories, and I'm down with that too.

I appreciate the spirit of the dish on many levels. First of all, it's one of those great peasant concoctions that carries with it all kinds of dignity and innocence and simplicity, and I eat that stuff right up. It's also quite challenging to get just right. For a pasta recipe with only four ingredients, this is a really tough one to pull off. Plus, my formative years in carbonara-making include late-night weekends in college and that's always a pleasant nostalgia.

I've made it for as many as ten people and I've made it a ton on my own. I've made it with bacon and pancetta and guanciale. I've made it with all different types of onions. I've made it with sweet sausage, with deep-fried zucchini, with peas, with scallions, with chives, with arugula, with asparagus, etc.

Anyone who serves you pasta, pork, and egg with cream is not serving you carbonara (this sentiment is repeated all over the Internet, as it should be). Carbonara is pink, yellow, and black.

Steve's Spaghetti Carbonara
Properly serves 4
Serves 3 if you're a close friend of mine

1 lb. bacon, diced a thumb's width at a time
2/3 lb. spaghetti
1 egg per serving

salt
black pepper
grated pecorino romano
extra-virgin olive oil

1. Fill pot with water, salt aggressively, transfer to stove on high heat.
2. Bring water to a boil, drop in the pasta, stir immediately.

3. Over medium heat, place bacon in a large pan with a little olive oil, stir occasionally.
4. Once the bacon looks a little crispy on the edges, turn the heat to its lowest.

5. Meanwhile, separate the eggs, keeping the yolks whole in one small mixing bowl, and letting the whites fall to the bottom of each serving bowl. Season the whites with coarse salt, black pepper, and pecorino.

6. Once the pasta has cooked about 2 minutes less than the package instructions, crank the heat in the bacon pan to high. Begin transferring the spaghetti to the bacon pan using tongs. Stir briskly, flip it around, stir some more. Distribute the spaghetti and bacon to the serving bowls, create a small nest in the center of the spaghetti in each bowl, and drop a yolk in it.

7. Quickly top with a shower of black pepper, a little grated cheese, and a splash of olive oil.
8. Instruct your guests to stir the yolk into their bowls, and enjoy!

Some words on my recipe (from original post):
I use bacon because it's the easiest to get and because it's delicious. It's much better with thick chunks of pancetta, and it's absolutely majestic, and truest to the original dish, with guanciale (pig's jowl/cheek meat).

The egg will cook, I promise. The water is boiling at 200+ degrees, and the pasta is well above 160 degrees (the federally recommended temperature for cooking "egg dishes"). You're taking a single yolk, breaking it up, and mixing it with boiling water and strands of piping hot noodles, it's going to cook! Also, this is why you use tongs to take the spaghetti out of the water - so you reserve some of that delicious boiling water.

You need a big saute pan/skillet for this operation. If the pan with the bacon is heaped up in more than one layer, it will just steam cooked and you'll lose the layer of flavor that comes from slightly browned meat. Consider cooking the bacon in batches if necessary.

I got the egg yolk nest idea from Mario Batali, and it really works the best. I always used to whip up some eggs and then pour it on top of everyone's dish at the end, but this often left egg yolk soup at the bottom of the dish and it's really easy to overcook the eggs this way. The egg yolk nest is really impressive and captures the spirit of the dish wonderfully.

This ratio of pasta-to-pork involves the absolute smallest acceptable quantity of pork. Any less pork (or any more pasta) will yield a dry-heaving mass of carbs and cheese - not ideal.

More words about the recipe (updated 4/8/09):
I had the great fortune of preparing this recipe in Italy, with ingredients from an Italian market. I bought great eggs, spaghetti, olive oil, fresh black peppercorns and beautiful, thick slices of pancetta. The results were a bit earth-shattering: the porkiness of this dish is much more pronounced when using real pancetta instead of bacon or the cured pancetta you get in American markets. I like it, and I believe this explains why grated cheese is in the original Carbonara recipes and seems a tad overkill when using bacon - because real pancetta/guanciale is not as naturally salty.

Accordion Breath

"Oh! You startled me!" said the woman with perfect skin to the man who couldn't feel his arms. He zig-zagged closer to the front of the queue at the bus stop. A relatively big guy with child-bearing hips felt like a little baby in his body, and he walked into a corner deli. The skinny-sideburned skinny guy behind the counter had the same name as the guy in the adult shell, and he was standing on a platform behind the counter. (This is a simple and effective tool to deter any kind of funny business in a corner store. Heh.) The shell moved quickly out of sight into an aisle with diapers and pet food. The guy behind the counter was exchanging pleasantries with an associate wearing a Chicago Bulls jumper.

The shell grew sad. The kind of deep sadness that doesn't have an equivalent because it's not really that bad. The kind of sadness that stems from indecision - not bad decisions. The sadness of sitting all alone and accepting that the inside of the shell is made of worthless, pathetic composite.

"I feel like a bug, a useless firefly, a pointless insect (which is a remarkable word)," oh come on you're being too hard on yourself! Remember when you used to fly high? Yeah, remember all that flying you did, remember all of it? "No, it was worthless, look at my shell." Stop it, everything going to be ok! Everything is delicious, everything is inexpensive. Everything is a breeze.

Sinister

The itch came early in the evening, and even earlier in the day now that the summer was behind us. You see, we enjoy these kinds of things now that the sun goes in so much earlier. The temperature and the seasons and whatnot. So I decided to traverse from my naked state to my clothed state: I picked up some gray socks. One of them was balled up in the other so I had to undo it with my dominant hand. Then I put the socks on, first my right foot then my left foot. I was naked except my light gray socks. Then I walked over to get my boxer-briefs. I thought about how annoying this election was.

Does anyone really know what's going on? I mean does anyone, ANYONE, claim to know what 56% of 300,000,000 people are thinking. It's kind of misleading. Heh. You can't research this stuff as with Consumer Reports. No one is "informed." No one has any idea what goes on behind closed doors or what politics is really all about or has a remotely "expert" understanding of the "demographics." I don't think ANYONE actually knows what's best or what will work out better or anything. Despite this, the outcome is actually really important. It's like when you pull out a board game and can't find the dice. You either have the right dice or you pull some dice from another game and it just doesn't work the same. At the end of the day though, you're picking dice.

I picked out my favorite boxers because I thought someone might see them today, why else do you wear your favorite underwear? You either do it deliberately, or you do it when you go out with no prospects. So they're light blue. Light blue boxers and gray socks. I started thinking about food again: $17 for a po'boy in NYC in August? Actually, if it's any good that's probably a decent price. Starting now.

I want to be crisp but I want to be real. I want to be slick but I want to be understated. I'm going for professional and blue-collar. I want to stand out among the conformers I hang out with enough that I'm lavished with attention but still subdued enough to come across earnest and humble.

There's this sign on Houston Street, it's a fun little sign, hehe, hoohoo ha ha. I rolled around and autumn leaves fell on top of me and it was amazing. It. was. surreal. I found America. After these two minutes of daydreaming, I lost myself. I lost myself. When I go outside, WAY outside, the risk is still so small. It's like turning your headlights off in the Pennsylvania backwoods for a second with every intention of turning them on a second after. I mean, what would I do if the lights didn't click back on? I'd slow down quickly and stop, right? And then a giant moose would be in front of my car like Jumanji.

I put on my white undershirt and that was fine. It was crispish. I was stretching my knees out and dancing a little while seated.

Red Vodka Room

"What would you like?"

After placing the plastic glass down, a young woman with bright blonde hair and a Redskins cap sat over the top of her glass and watched the Shiraz vibrate until it stopped. So that's when this incredible turn of events happened in the basement: Two guys had to replace one of the kegs, it was a two-man job after all. They had gone to remove the spent keg but the contents were under pressure or the pipe had some compressed air or something like that. Anyway one of them held the tense object and the other had to roll the spent keg out and roll the fresh keg in. I'm not really familiar with these processes so my description is lacking. So the smaller guy who held the tense object — with two hands — wasn't particularly strong, or tall, or confident, or experienced. As he unfastened the yolk...

"Gingersnap wheatgrass avocado Maldon pan-braised sepia." A man with a guitar stood looking at the rest of us and he picked the guy standing next to me out: "Oh god that guy needs to get laid." I was watching the sound equipment in that moment so I missed the look. Usually I can read that kind of thing. I am ashamed, he thought I thought, but I wasn't thinking that. In that moment I was only thinking about the audio stack. I mean I may have been thinking, "it would be cool to be the lighting guy or a stage hand or the guitar-tuner."

"A steady." So I looked at my 8-bit color reflection in the window and wasn't that pleased. In God We Trust. A little girl was exposed to brutal physical treatment at home and brutal emotional treatment at school. It was a tragedy.

"The kids were so bad this week, may I have a vodka tonic?" Slam and slam and slam and slam it must be Friday. Two kids knew the deal and they prepared for the event. They had this friend who promised one of them something and they had quietly competed for the lead. They were friends and they didn't need this complication. This is life. "Stoli."

And then it happened...he told her what he'd not wanted to say and what she didn't really want to hear.