cookin’

This past weekend, stopping in at Rite Aid to pick up shaving cream and shampoo, I noticed a small table of kitchen appliances on clearance sale, among which sat a $12 crock pot. Having recently read that perhaps slow cooking was healthier cooking, and with a $20 bill burning a hole in my pocket, I decided to go for the impulse buy.

Several days later, I can definitively say it was the right choice. I’ve churned out a couple of excellent slow-cooked meals that were tasty, healthful, easy to prepare, and conducive to leftovers (key for someone who eats as frequently as I do). Despite skimming the booklet supplied with the crock, I in the end jettisoned prescribed recipes in favor of a fast-and-loose instinctive cooking approach. The two resultant winners:

Ridiculously Easy Pot Roast

6 medium potatoes
1 large onion
10 carrots
3lb lean beef bottom round
1/2 cup water
salt, pepper

Slice the onion, peel the carrots, and toss everything in the crock pot on low heat for 10 hours. Voila.

Even Easier Chicken Casserole

3 large chicken breasts
Bear Creek Chicken Noodle Soup Mix (or similar)
3 cups water

Toss everything in the crock pot (nota bene: remove soup mix from package first) on low heat for five hours. Voila again.

Honestly, I think I just might be the next Fannie Farmer.

versification

Arriving uptown last night fifteen minutes early for a rehearsal with my jazz septet, I popped into the neighboring Barnes & Noble to waste time wandering the piles of books. Thumbing a few in the “New Releases: Poetry” section, I was suddenly and intensely reminded that I love poems, that I have since at least kindergarden, and yet have somehow fallen almost completely away from reading them.

With a bit of reflection, I was unhappy to realize the reason: over-education. Too much time deconstructing poems, picking apart the nuances of their language in an attempt to second guess the writer’s intentions and unintentions, had almost entirely robbed poetry of the joy of pure and simple reading. So, to remedy that, I’ll be falling back on the suggestion of Poet Laureate Billy Collins: reading a poem a day. Not analyzing and discussing. Not “unpacking”. Just reading. Reading and enjoying.

Don’t worry; I won’t be subjecting you all to those daily poetry choices. (Not most of the time, anyway.) But, on the off chance that some of you might similarly be inspired to rediscover a lost love of the form, here’s one to kick things off, by Laureate Collins himself, that sums up rather perfectly the bind poetry finds itself in today.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

hope?

I think I finally see a light at the end of this tunnel of work. Either that or the headlamp of an oncoming train.

clarification

Dear readers,

No, I haven’t given up writing actual blog entries entirely, in favor of amassing inane collections of quotes; instead, I’m simply and completely buried under a ridiculous and unprecedented pile of work. Things will return to their normal pithy self as soon as I can dig my way back out.

jbn

daily quote (re: inebriation)

“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.”
– Joseph Conrad

“I only drink to steady my nerves. Sometimes I’m so steady, I don’t move for months.”
– WC Fields

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
– Abe Lincoln

“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.”
– William Shakespeare

daily quote (re: booty)

“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”
– John Updike

“Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it’s one of the best.”
– Woody Allen

step aside, mr. astaire

A good friend of mine here in the city grew up in a very orthodox Jewish community, which disallowed mixed dancing (i.e. women dancing with men); as a result, she never picked up even the most rudimentary ballroom dance skills – a distressing inability, considering how frequently her job as an assistant curator at the Met requires her presence at gala openings, fundraiser balls, and other society events. Certainly, Manhattan is full of fine ballroom dance academies ready to remedy such a situation; yet most require students to sign up for group classes in partnered pairs, to cover for the fact that, while women appear to be lining up for admission, the number of straight guys in the city who might sign up for such classes on their own accord could be counted on one hand.

To make a long story short, then, when she stepped onto the floor of Dance New York yesterday evening, it was with me, sucker friend number one, in tow. At least, I consoled myself, I’d previously picked up a small amount of ballroom experience, through a short class while at Yale, an ex-girlfriend who was heavily into the late nineties’ swing revival, and a mother (serious enough about waltzing to head intermittently to Vienna with my father to dance at the Royal and Opera Balls) who would occasionally drag my seven-year old self down the hall to strains of Strauss. Still, by the start of last night’s class, I could barely remember the basic steps of the various dances, much less perform any well enough to use side by side with royalty (or even anyone with two opposing feet).

By the end of the evening, however, two partners I danced with asked if I was an instructor, and one of the instructors asked if I’d ever considered competing. On the one hand, I was thrilled and flattered – a natural talent discovered! On the other, I was completely appalled. Ballroom dance? So far as I was concerned, it might as well have been natural talent for interior design or hair styling. Why couldn’t I suddenly discover a knack for 100 mile per hour fastballs, I wondered, or a surprising ability (considering my limited height and exceeding whiteness) to dunk with Jordan-esque panache?

Sometimes, life is so tragically unfair.

we mean business

Every so often, you get to go into a negotiation and just lay it down. I mean, you own that puppy. You control the pacing and flow, dictate the language of discussion, deftly make moves that seem concessions yet actually push your position steadily ahead. You out-legalese their lawyer, jocularly defuse their emotion-laden contentions, and leave deeper in their good graces than you began the meeting, they with the vague sense that perhaps they came out ahead, and you with the knowledge that, most clearly and certainly, you were the one who did.