Gone Mild

Spring is fast approaching, and, with it, little kids will soon be swarming around orange cones in our local parks in their awkward shin guards. Another Brookside Soccer season is nearing.

For years, I coached a Brookside soccer team. While I hear horror stories of out-of-control parents and bratty kids, my experience was nothing like that. I had parents who were uniformly supportive, and a group of kids I still remember fondly. SW was a quick and physical player with a sense of humor that challenged my own ability to suppress grins and laughter as he would mimic referees giving pregame structures. AM was probably the best player I ever coached; his skill with the ball was a mystery until his father showed up at practice wants and participated in a casual scrimmage. JC was a big friendly kid with a natural ability to kick the ball a mile.

While many teams improved over the years, our team suffered a relative deterioration. Brookside soccer is a recreational/instructional league, and I promised myself and the parents that I would never yell negative things at a child placed in my care. While I probably did not achieve 100% compliance with my pledge, I think I came pretty close.

The unintended side effect was that utterly nonathletic kids who were shamed off of most other teams in most other sports came to love playing soccer for Coach Ryan. Other teams purified their talent pool while mine attracted the runoff.

The missed opportunity to craft a killer team was one I happily surrendered. Several parents with talented kids chose to place them on more challenging teams so they would develop their skills more rapidly. That was absolutely the right thing to do. At least a couple kids I coached showed signs of growing into a budding high school or even college star, and I don’t think my coaching style and talents were ideally suited to sharpening those skills.

Ultimately, the parents were in charge and, like I said before, I wound up with an incredible group of parents. The only time I was ever confronted by a parent about playing time was once when JC got to play a little longer than the rest. His parents just wanted to make sure I wasn’t favoring their son at the expense of another child. I explained the scheduling quirk that caused the extra time and they went away happy. I went away with a clearer understanding of why JC is such a good kid.

Now, when I drive through the city in the springtime, and I see the groups of kids clustered around a beleaguered coach, I start thinking I ought to lose my extra pounds and volunteer next year to coach a fresh batch of soccer players. Then, sanity kicks in, and I realize that my work and travel schedule would not allow weekday afternoon practice sessions, and I am forgetting the cold Saturday mornings with questionable whether. My days of coaching are over, but I’m awfully glad I had them. I hope there are a few coaches out there now having an experience as wonderful as mine.

Liquid smoke may be the most under-rated food product in the modern supermarket. In a do-it-yourself, hands-on preparation world, liquid smoke seems like a cheap, processed short-cut unworthy of the attention of serious food enthusiasts. Most people view liquid smoke with the same disdain as they would tub margarine.

In truth, liquid smoke is a natural product, produced by running smoke through condensers and producing a liquid. It’s the same smoke that might adhere to a slab of Bryant’s ribs, but it comes in a convenient bottle. Right now, I’m enjoying a nice bourbon enhanced by an ice cube infused with liquid smoke. It enhances the bourbon without over-powering it – one teaspoon of liquid smoke in two cups of water makes a nice, smokey ice cube.

Liquid smoke also figures in the best crock pot recipe of all time. Ultimate Cheater Pulled Pork as described on the best cooking podcast ever is the soul of simplicity and frugal high-living. Trust me on this, you will love it. And here’s a tip just for Gone Mild readers – put those leftovers into a very hot skillet and scorch them a bit – then toss in some diced green chilies and serve it with a bit of salsa verde on tortillas, and you will have a combination of crispy texture and decadent flavor that will change your world.

Now, here’s a funny twist. Until I started working on this post (about the same time that I poured the above-pictured cocktail), I had never realized that Wright’s Liquid Smoke – the main player in the world of liquid smoke flavoring – originated in Kansas City. On top of that, Ernest Wright was a member of the local Rotary Club, and he was a pioneer in sharing his wealth with his employees. I read all about it right here in the April, 1923 issue of the Rotarian.

Cheers to Ernie, liquid smoke, Rotary Clubs, bourbon and pork.

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
    Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
    From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
    If I lacked anything.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here”:
    Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
    I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
    ”Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
    Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
    ”My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
    So I did sit and eat.

    – by George Herbert

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This is kind of funny.

In the comment section after last week’s poem, a couple friends debated the role of ambiguity in poetry, and I defended it. Then a high school friend pointed out to me in another forum that I, myself, had missed a major allusion – Derek Walcott’s Love After Love is clearly written in reaction to the above poem, by George Herbert almost 400 years ago.

I confess that if I had ever read Herbert’s poem before, I had forgotten it. Thus, whatever depth is added by the comparison of the poems escaped me entirely. The subtlety of expression that frustrates XO and Les also resulted in me missing an important element in the poem’s richness. I have been hoisted on my own petard, I suppose.

There is room for all of us on the spectrum of poetical understanding, I suppose. XO insists that a poet should “say what he means”, and be done with all the word play and allusions. I imagine that XO enjoys a good limerick, though, and possibly a few other solid verses. On the other end of the spectrum is my high school friend, who is tremendously well-read and perceptive miles past my own understanding.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I enjoy poetry, and appreciate the sensation that the right words produce when describing real toads in imaginary gardens. I think, at some level, we all do, even if that is only in the form of a favorite pop song. To me, it’s kind of amazing that there’s so much beyond what I catch. I have to accept my own lack of fluency in the canon of English literature, but, at the same time, I can enjoy the allusions and depths that I do recognize.

This kid has a head start on me -

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

— by Derek Walcott
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When I first read this poem, I thought it was simple. In a way, I was correct. It serves up no complex words, and it doesn’t play “hide the ball” with at least one of its major themes. It’s good to love yourself sometimes, when you spend so much of your time focused on loving others. You read this poem, you “get it”, and you feel like you know what the poet was after. It’s like a short pass in the middle of the field – the quarterback delivers the ball to the tight end for a short gain. It is what it is, and it serves its function.

And here’s where you, as a reader, can make your choices. Let’s carry that football metaphor a little further. You’re the tight end, and you just caught the ball in traffic. (You, as a reader, in the traffic of the modern world, have focused your attention on to this poem and caught it, which is a pretty impressive feat when you have other things to be doing, whether it is to read the next poem in the anthology, make eye contact with that attractive person across the library table, go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, or whatever.) You’ve done your job, and the quarterback has done his. Take your three yard gain and line up for the next play.

But here’s where the great ones prove themselves. You’ve got the ball, you’re getting tackled by other drains on your attention, and now is the time when you can break this one for a big play or not, depending on your field of vision and the strength of your determination. If you can break that first tackle, you could run pretty far with this poem.

Give wine? Give bread? Wait a minute – that is some pretty heavy imagery there – what is God doing in this poem? Think about that one for a while, and you might find yourself running down the right sideline and wind up in the end zone of some fresh insights about God and love.

Love after love? What does that after mean? Does that mean that you can only fall in love with yourself after you’ve loved someone else? The loving is again, the giving is back to yourself, and the love letters are already on the shelf – you’ve been here before. What does that mean in the context of loving yourself? If you push your way through those thoughts, you’ll get a first down, at least.

What does it mean to peel your own image from the mirror? You peel things that are thin, just like the mirror itself. It’s just an image – when you peel yourself off the mirror, are you somehow achieving wholeness by destroying an imitation? How does that relate to the mirror image in the first stanza – the one that greeted you and got this whole thing started? And is the mirror a door back then? A door to what? This is open field running here.

This poem is a completed pass, and so much depends on the receiver.

I have a fascination with Russia. I took four years of Russian language in HIgh School. The Hermitage is on my bucket list. I am interested in their brewing traditions. I grew up during the Cold War, and the Russian Bear was a fascinating constant presence in the psyche of that time.

But I had only dabbled with Russian Literature. I think I read a Dostoyevsky short story or two, and I suffered through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I never dared approach the real masterworks of Russian Literature. Frankly, I was intimidated by their reputation for sweeping drama and complicated casts. I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to keep up.

With my 2+ hours of commuting a day, though, I have been listening to a wide range of books, and I finally decided to tackle Anna Karenina from Audible.com. Broken into 4 chunks of 8 hours each, it seemed a big bucket of spackel to fill a gaping void in my intellect.

It wasn’t until 20 hours or so into it that I admitted to myself that I had been duped by the literature-industrial complex. Anna Karenina is an under-edited amalgam of pampered aristocrats’ interior dialogues and arch manners. By the time Anna finally jumps under a train, my only regret was that I was not there to give her a shove.

I blame Tolstoy, or his absent editor. The description of Levin’s wedding managed to drag itself out for miles and miles of my commute, for no apparent purpose other than to make us suffer as much as we do when we ourselves are stuck in ceremonies of cruel length. Lengthy interior monologues, including attempts to remember prior thoughts, are catalogued as if it is possible to care what some silly, self-absorbed pompous nincompoop would be thinking. And, though perhaps it was just my translation, I grew tired of hearing that Anna “screwed up her eyes” with eye-rolling regularity.

While the characters were mostly unlikeable and completely unadmirable, the most surprising thing to me (though I’m not sure it’s possible to deliver a surprise over 32+ hours or 900 pages, pick your poison) was how little I cared for any of it – the plot, the setting (cities are bad, country is good), the costumes, the social mores, etc.. Each of the characters came with an emotional amplifier that blared out at inappropriate times. Inconvenience or awkwardness was never merely that – it was always “unbearable” or “impossible”, as though the laws of medicine and physics bent themselves to sympathize with a person’s desire not to see or speak with another.

For years I’ve been ignorant of Russian literature. Now that I’m no longer ignorant, I feel mildly stupider for having spent so much time among the Russian aristocracy, who have less dignity and moral self-awareness than the characters on your average reality show.

It looks like the temperature is going to be sunny and over freezing on Sunday, so it is time to fire up the brew pots and make my first beer of 2013. The last time I was at Bacchus and Barleycorn, Alberta had me taste some of their new coffee malt, imported from England. There’s no actual coffee involved – it is a dark-roasted barley malt that tastes a bit like a good, rich coffee. I want to try putting some in my award-winning porter recipe, for a nice dark beer to serve at our Mardi Gras party in February.

If anyone wants to come over and participate in a brew day (which means pretty much standing around and looking at a kettle boil while sipping on a little homebrew), just let me know.

There is something wonderful about fat in food. It gives a cozy warm fullness and a luxuriousness on the tongue that place dishes like Roasted Duck or Fettuccine Alfredo near the top of my yearned-for meals. I like fat, and lots of it.

But when the storm last night caused us to back out of our party plans and stay local, we didn’t want to end 2012 with a guilt-inducing fat fest. We weren’t looking to moderate ourselves into monkishness, though. We wanted something rich, tasty and celebratory.

We chose Shrimp Risotto – fairly easy to prepare, tasty as all get-out, relatively inexpensive, and reminiscent of our trip to Italy – a highlight of 2012 and of our lives. And, surprisingly, not all that horrible for you, given its decadent richness.

If you’ve never made risotto, here’s the secret. Buy Arborio rice at the grocery store – it’s not cheap compared to other rice, but a cup of it provides the backbone of a meal that will stuff two and leave enough leftovers to feed them again, so go ahead and blow $5 on a bag that will feed you 6 or 8 times.

Arborio rice is short-grained and starchy. Prepared correctly, that starch oozes into a rich, thick base to deliver flavor provided by broth and whatever else is included. Because it is slick and thick, it fools your mouth into thinking it is enjoying a fatty, cholesterol-heavy suicide meal instead of a much more reasonable starchy treat. Depending on what is included with the risotto, you’re looking at something between 250-500 calories for a big serving. It’s not rabbit food, but you could do far worse.

For the meal last night, I bought half a pound of gulf shrimp (on sale at $8.99 a pound) and when I peeled them, I put the shells into a couple cups of water and a bottle of clam juice to make a seafood broth for about half the fluid I would soon be needing. After that was ready, I strained out the shells, and added some wine and beef broth (I had intended to use chicken broth, but we didn’t have any, and one of the points I’m trying to make here is that you can be flexible in the kitchen) to bring it to about 5 cups of hot broth.

I sauteed a finely-chopped medium white onion and 3 cloves of garlic with a bit of olive oil in a medium saucepan, and when the onions and garlic were soft and translucent, I added a cup of dry arborio rice to the mixture and sauteed the rice for a couple minutes, too. Sauteing the rice gives it a bit of a nutty flavor, though some argue for a much more complex procedure.

Part of the reason that risotto seems like a somewhat romantic meal to me is because of what comes next. You stir for a long time. Making risotto calls for patience and devotion. Gratification postponed. No rushing, but steadfastly being there. It’s a married couple dish, not for speed daters.

You add a cup of the hot broth and you stir. Eventually, the broth gets absorbed into the grains of rice, and they ooze a bit of starchy goodness, so it’s a thick porridge that won’t level itself out perfectly when you pull the spoon out, and then you add another cup. (By the way, use a wooden spoon, just because a metal spoon on your saucepan sounds annoying.) After about 3 cups or so, start tasting bits of rice. I added about 4 cups before my rice hit the stage I wanted – no chalky hard part in the center, but still just barely firm.

At that point, I added the shrimp which I had cut up into small pieces, and a bit of lemon zest to liven things up. Then I grated a couple ounces of really, really good Pecorino Romano on top of it, stirred it a couple minutes till the shrimp was cooked through, and it was ready for serving. (A bit of chopped parsley is a good idea to add color and a bit of bite if you have it.)

Was it good? Hell, yes, it was good. We ate it with a wonderful sparkling wine made by a great movie director and named after a great movie director, and 2012 ended on a high note. A fitting ending to a year that was challenging and even awful for some, but was rich and delightful in our corner of the world, for which we are truly thankful.

In Time

— by W.S. Merwin
_____________________________________

Merwin is a new-found pleasure to me, and this poem is a gorgeous, multi-layered example of tricky, almost punny ambiguity that manages to hold onto beauty while it plays with language itself.

Start with the title.  ”In Time”.  As in “Just in time”?  Or as in musical notation?  Is there a reference there to one of my favorite novels, “In Our Time”, and are we supposed to notice that the time is not “ours” in this version?  Are we supposed to notice the phonic nearness of “In” to “End” in the context of “time”?  Heck, it’s about news – are we supposed to think it’s in Time instead of Newsweek?  Of course, I’m pushing the limits of possible meanings, but, so what?  Merwin gives us permission to run amok when he starts with such an evocative title.  I’m pretty sure he won’t mind.

Is the circumstance described in the first couple lines real, as in autobiographically something that Merwin remembers?  I don’t know, but, again, he’s giving us freedom to roll the thought around in our own minds, and personalize the poem to when the worth was going to come to and end.  Bomb tests?  Nearby rioting?  War (not all poetry is supposed to be set in 2012 Kansas City, after all)?  The Mayan Apocalypse?  Fit your own fear into this poem, one of those times when you feared cataclysm.  For me, it’s a combination of several instances.

Do you need to know the specific instance he’s talking about?  Just shut your mind up and accept it.  The willing suspension of disbelief.  Focus instead on the human reaction – sharing aphrodisiac oysters and dancing to hummed music.  They may be wearing high boots, but they’re keeping their own time.

Here’s a special treat – you can hear the poet read his poem if you click the audio bar.

Kansas City’s latest addition to a growing beer scene is Bier Station, a draft and bottle shop located at Rockhill and Gregory Boulevards, a short stroll from my front door. It will open for business tomorrow, 12/29, but I was lucky enough to be invited to a preview yesterday evening.

Bier Station is a new kind of beer store, where you have 3 main options when you walk in. 1) You can walk in, pick out some beers from the cooler, and take it home, just like any other beer store, but better because of the selection. 2) You can walk in, take a seat, and drink beer from the 21 taps, just like any other beer bar, but better because of the selection. 3) You can walk in, choose a beer from the cooler, bring it to the bar, have them open it (for a slightly higher price than the to-go price) and enjoy it at the bar or one of the tables, just like no place else in Kansas City.

Last night, I drank at the bar and then brought home a few treasures.

Short review – WOW – Kansas City has a new source for great beers and a great place to hang out.

Longer review – Bier Station is a warm, inviting place with thoughtful touches to make it truly special. In the upstairs loft space (ideal for gatherings of friends, or book clubs, or fantasy sport drafts, etc.), a wall is taken up by a great photograph of a turn-of-the-century beer garden in KCK. The furniture downstairs combines recycled-wood tables and comfortable chairs.

But you’re not at Bier Station to shop furniture – you’re there to experience the best beers in the world, and the place features the most thoughtful selection of beer I’ve ever seen. 21 taps with a broad range of styles, flavors and brewing traditions. I have been drinking craft beer for a couple decades with an eye out for new examples, but even I had never tasted more than a few of the tap offerings. This is not the same old tasting group, I assure you.

I cannot say enough good things about the beer selection in the coolers, either. My New Orleans-based daughter noticed that her local favorite, Abita, wasn’t represented, and then we took a look at the wall full of coolers to see what we could recommend removing to open up a spot, and came up blank. It warms my heart to see that much great beer in one location. The beer manager at Bier Station is Brad from Royal, and he knows his stuff.

I should also point out that they have a superb selection of single bottles for the best build-your-own-sixpack opportunity in Kansas City. Too often, the bottles shunted into the build-you-own section are last year’s seasonals and whatever hasn’t sold, but Bier Station wants to help you taste the best beer at its peak, so you’ll be back to expand your beer horizons.

Bier Station also has a small food menu, that may expand with time. Right now, they offer Farm-to-Market pretzels in several varieties (Bavarian, Potato and Rosemary, Jalapeno and Cheddar, and one I can’t recall), a good selection of cured meats and cheeses (including BobKat Dan’s locally smoked Gouda!) and some delectable looking cupcakes.

Let me acknowledge that Bier Station is a local business start-up run by people I know and care for, and it is a couple blocks from my home, so I have all kinds of biases that make me want to love the place. But the joyful truth of the matter is that the people I care for have delivered a top-notch product – I would honestly love this place if it were in Blue Springs or even (gasp!) Kansas, and I would rave about it even if I hadn’t shared great homebrews many times with John Couture. It really is a tremendous addition to Kansas City’s beer scene (bier scene?), and I plan to be a regular.