As usual, there is an audio version of tonight’s entree available here.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
Beautiful Sensibility
I’ve been thinking about beauty this past week, thanks, in part, to my friend Ben. This is a good time for this, because Tennessee is about to turn its most beautiful, so I am sitting behind an abandoned restaurant, listening to, feeling the spray from, and watching an old fountain, watching the sun play, and thinking about beauty.
There are a lot of theories out there, and then there are people who create beauty and people who enjoy beauty without any needed assistance from philosophers like me.
Among the theories, a powerful one is what I will call the Classical Ideal.
It finds a high expression in Plato, but also owes a great deal to Pythagoras, and, outside of them both, animated ancient art. For these lovers of beauty, beauty is an ideal, a perfection, something we try to capture in art, we aim for in art, and which we cannot find in nature. We have an innate sense of what this ideal beauty would be, and we consider things beautiful to the extent that they come close to reflecting this ideal. This ideal is closely tied to balance and proportion and harmony, and can, in many cases be expressed mathematically. The sculptures of Polykleitos are an example of this; in a pleasing, beautiful face, the distance between the eyes is a set proportion to the face as a whole, and a certain position in the face, and the length of the body, the size of the chest, the width of the hips, the length of the legs…
Oh, Mathematics: you naughty bugger!
By contrast to this calm balance of rules, the Romantic view of art aims precisely to tear loose, to suggest power and passion that is not even expressible in conscious thought, let alone within the surgical precision of math. The wild emotion of beauty in art or in nature takes us beyond the calm, placid, everyday, into the cosmos as a whole, the mind of God, or our own subconscious.
I’m not sure which of those is bigger, or which of those is darker; my subconscious, however, requires less storage space.
I find beauty in the cool, crisp, rational lines of Greek architecture, and I also find beauty in the stormy passionate upheaval of Wagner’s Liebestod. They are both beautiful, but beautiful differently.
What, then, is beauty? What makes both of these beautiful, as well as “an exhilarating sunset, an expressive smile, a tranquil view,” or good company, or rest at the end of the day, or even, Joe Frogger ginger cookies?
I don’t know what it is in the objects themselves that makes them beautiful, although somehow it seems to be in the object itself, so that we can expect it to have that effect upon others. Beauty affects us deeply in the mind, so that we can talk about balance or about movement, or about color or about tone. It also affects us deeply in the heart, and can move us to tears or euphoria, to laughter or to passion.
However, it affects us through the senses; beauty is not a thing of the mind or of the emotions, but something we experience through sight and sound and touch, perhaps even through smell and taste and other senses.
A rose is beautiful.
A rose looks beautiful–the gradual fading of colors into different shades, the gentle folding and unfolding petals turning in upon each other, turning out towards the world, circling into a tight center.
A rose smells beautiful–the soft clean smell of the lazy, sunlit life within the folds of the petals, a sweetness more complex than sugar, a smell perfumists try to capture, but which becomes cloying and sickening if imitated.
A rose feels beautiful–the pink, red or white surfaces so soft to the touch, resisting yet falling back, so soft to each caress, so milky smooth, and yet so fragile.
Certainly, a rose can represent or be a simile or be a symbol of something else, but its beauty is not suggestive of something absent, but of the present, of the here and now. The beauty of the rose acts upon our senses–it itself is beautiful, and this beauty strikes us to the core.
Beauty may seem like it has a purpose, but it can be an end in itself, because it really is one of the few worthwhile ends we can find.
Apple Nests
The theme of the week is beauty, so I tried to come up with something that was aesthetically pleasing on several levels. I don’t think it is complicated, but it is difficult, and may take several tries to get right.
Be careful with the hot sugar–it is sort of like a cross between super glue and lava if it gets on your skin. This is not a task for multi-taskers.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups sugar
- ½ cup of sliced, toasted pistachio nuts
- 1 Tbsp kosher salt
- Several (one per guest?) apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
- 1 Tbsp lemon juice
- 1 Tbsp butter
- Spice or flavorings to taste (cinnamon seems obvious, but cardamom is a possibility, as are cider, or rum or brandy, I suppose; I used a tablespoon of my apple butter)
- 1 cup heavy cream
- ½ tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp sugar or powdered sugar
Equipment:
- Clean stainless steel pan
- Several steel soup ladles
- Several forks
- baking sheets and baking parchment
Step 1, Prepare Ye the way: Get all the stuff you will need ready, especially the first three ingredients, and the equipment. Make sure you have a clean, clear work space, and the time to work un-interrupted. Take a deep breath.
Step 2, Heat that Sugar! Put the sugar in the steel pan, and put 
it over a medium to high heat. At first, it will do nothing, then it will smell hot, and then, the edges will start to melt and to turn slightly brown. The less you can stir this, the better, but it is also good to sort of swirl it around so that it doesn’t scorch or get to burnt around the edges. After 10, maybe 15 minutes, it will be a very thick brown syrup. Take it off the heat and let it cool slightly.
Step 3, Shape it: You will be using this sugar by dipping a fork in it and drizzling the syrup over things to form the nests. If you drizzle it over a wooden spoon dangled over a pan on the floor, it will form long, spider-web like strands. You could drizzle 
shapes in it on the parchment paper and let them cool and get hard.
What I am doing is making little nests by drizzling the sugar over ladles.
Coat the ladles with cooking spray, and maybe sprinkle a little bit of the nuts and the salt on them. Take a fork-full of the melted sugar and drizzle it in a pattern of your choosing on the back of the spoon. After each swipe, sprinkle a little more of the nuts on the nest.
Continue until you have a solid enough basket to put the desert into. Reheat the sugar mixture if it gets too thick.
Note: you will want these to cool before handling them, but it is best if they are still a little warm, because the pliability will make it easier to peel them off the ladles. If you are not using them immediately, store them in a dry, airtight container, maybe even with 
those little moisture absorbing vitamin packets–humidity makes these really sticky.
Step 4, Another path: After you have enough nests, sprinkle the remaining pistachio nuts and a little Kosher salt on a parchment sheet, then drizzle the remaining sugar mixture over them. this will give you little sheets of pistachio praline which you can use to decorate the dessert (or just to eat).
Step 5, Meanwhile, back at the apples: Fry the apples in the butter. 
Add whatever sweetener you like if the apples need it (or if you need it, which is really more likely), and whatever spices or flavorings you would like. I kept mine simple, but you could go whole chai or spiced rum punch.
Step 6, Whip it good: In a largish bowl (4 cups or more), combine the heavy (whipping) cream, the vanilla, and the sugar. Whip with a mixer until peaks form.
Step 7, Plate: On a small plate, set the nest, then fill it with the fried apples, and top it with the whipped cream. you can set a chunk of the praline on top of the cream, and, if you prefer this for presentation, either draw in caramel sauce on the plate, or dust the plate with pistachios.
Step 8, Serve it up: This Doctor isn’t telling you to feed anybody shortening bread; have some of these and share them with a dinner party.
What is Beauty?
When you say that something or someone is beautiful, what do you mean?
Can anything be beautiful, or only certain kinds of things and people?
What is it that makes them beautiful?
Codetta
Slow night at the Bistro.
No Customers; everybody must be getting ready for the Rhythm & Roots Festival in Bristol. We’re leaving Peirce to close up, and Wode Toad is taking me to a firing range.
Peirce has Sinatra playing as we leave.
No customers, and I’ve run out of things to say, or I have just tired of talking to myself.
Writing is like engraving love letters on feathers, casting them into the wind and wondering if someone will read them.
Send me questions; at some time I’ll come back around.
Audio Post
As usual, there is an audio version of tonight’s entree available here.
This big ol’ goofy world
My dearest reader, who doesn’t write,
I’ve been thinking lately about worlds underneath the world—Gaiman is wonderful for that, as of course, was Rowling. Clive Barker does that well with the parallel world of Ararat (of course, terrifyingly in his other books), and I suppose that is part of the framing of many zombie and other un-dead stories—the idea that there is another reality lurking right beneath the one in which we go about our lives. I really enjoy Latin American Magic Realism for the same reason—that there is magic right below the surface.
I wonder why this appeals to us?
Sometimes, this brings us back to the world we had when we were children exploring it for the first time, when it was all new and crystalline.
Sometimes, it just shatters the mundane, dull, inanity of this working day world which we find so numbing.
I don’t know about magic, and I don’t believe I have ever really gone looking for it.
I only know the reality of the world as I live in it, and it is as filled with wonder as a good cookie is filled with chips and nuts.
Let me give you an example:
I can sit at a table in Cootie Browns and watch the solidity of my glass,
the table, the college students playing at wait staff, the Arsenal match on the telly. It is all quite pleasantly normal, and the Middle American wasteland of North Roan Street beyond it is frighteningly normal.
But if, after Cootie Browns, I turn left and go two blocks, suddenly I am in a different world.
There is a creek slowly winding its way through the grass, cutting banks into the clay and stone, over-shadowed by tall trees. There are birds singing, and dragonflies buzzing in the sun and shadows. In one tree, I can see more bluebirds than I have ever seen at one time—at least a dozen.
There is a well-tended but worn red barn, and in 
little knots in the grass, there are muddy white cows going about their lives, calmly unaware of the radical incongruity of being surrounded by a town.
Stranger, however, is the little self-contained world that meets me if I turn right instead of left.
Behind the Honda dealer, and down the hill, in the shadow, there is a darker world, another city.
The first time I stumbled across it, it seemed like a little medieval village tucked away, out of view. There are car dealerships, shops and restaurants all around, but here are several blocks of trailers that form their own city within the city, with its own roads and rules. In the hollow, the street winds down into Spring City.
The street winds around, and turns off into gravel roads that become dead ends and driveways, little homes gathered together and looking inwards. By the dozens, these trailers are close by each other, and are shaded over by big trees, so that it always seems a little darker in the narrow twists and turns of Spring City. As you would expect, there are run down trailers and run down cars and run down people, but here and there you also see well-tended places, happily and tackily decorated with octopus’s gardens of planters and lawn jockeys. I have a friend who is a probation officer who has had clients here, but I suspect there are also folks here who have their own notion of order, and would handle minor disturbances on their own—not that the police are never called in.
Children play, running or riding old bikes, and people sitting on their stoops watch me as I walk by, inhaling from their cigarettes and letting out the smoke without ever taking their eyes off me. I pass a big truck full of furniture, because every day somebody is moving in or moving out of Spring City.
I have been a lot of places. I can spot elephants in the stones of European cities, but I have also spotted live giraffes as I have driven to Knoxville, and completely new worlds walking through Johnson City, Tennessee.
My dreams often seem dull, because my waking world leaves me marveling.
Pirate Muffins (aka Krakenmuffins)
Just a reminder:
Yom Kipper may be Friday, but National Talk Like a Pirate Day is a week from tonight. Now, I could have waited and posted this then–that will be when we will be leaving them unguarded on the counter at the Philosophy Bistro–but then ye filthy bilge-rats would not have the time to be bakin’ yer own.
Should I dress up again?
Ingredients:
- 1 cup TVP
- 1 cup rum (approximately)
- 2 cups flour (Whole wheat, white, both, as you wish)
- ½ cup of sugar
- 2 tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ cup brown sugar
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- ½ cup rolled oats
- ½ cup walnuts
- 1 cup diced apples
- ½ cup chopped golden raisins
- 2 cup cooked sweet potato (I like it baked, but I assume canned will do)
- 3 eggs
- ½ cup buttermilk or Greek yoghurt
- ½ cup oil (it might work without this; I liked making it with coconut oil.)
- 2 tsp. vanilla
Step 1: the TVP: This can be done earlier. Measure out a cup of TVP, and cover it with the rum. Let it soak, so the TVP absorbs the fluid. If you are a teetotaler, substitute something interesting.
Step 2, Prepare Ye the way: Preheat the oven to 350°, chop the apple, either grease the muffin tins or put in the cupcake liners (I usually spray a little canola oil in the bottom of these to make things come out easier). I get 2 dozen medium sized muffins out of this mix.
Step 3, sifting the dry ingredients: In one bowl crumble up the brown sugar and the oats, then sift (mix if you don’t have a sifter) in the flour, white sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Mix thoroughly.
Step 4, mixing the wet ingredients: In another bowl, mix the TVP, the apples, the raisins, sweet potato, vanilla, oil, eggs and buttermilk.
Step 5, combining the big mess: Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones and mix well. You want to make sure the individual bits of apple are each coated to keep them from getting too clumpy. The consistency should be much firmer than batter, but a little more liquid than cookie dough.
Step 5, baking: Fill two dozen or so muffin tins. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. See how they look. Stick a toothpick in one and see if it comes out battery.
Step 6, gratuitous pirate joke: What is a pirates favorite letter?
You would think “Rrrr,” but no; a pirate’s heart belongs to the “C.”
Step 8, sharing: Oh, make them work for it. Bury the muffins on a deserted beach, leaving the only map in possession of a drunken, cursed first mate. or just tie them to the parrot.
Audio Post
As most weeks, an audio version of tonight’s entree is available here.
Sensuality, continued.
We Americans are a rather hedonistic culture, placing a high value upon comfort and pleasure.
The sad thing is, we are not very good at it.
We are not very good at being hedonistic, because we really don’t understand how to use our senses.
Any trip to most American restaurant will prove my point—there are huge servings, and way too much salt, fat, and sugar, but there isn’t really that much sensual pleasure to be had. We have made gluttony a national past-time and, at the same time, a chore. In fact, the reason we need so much sauce (besides the low quality of the ingredients—Damn you food industrial complex! Damn you to hell!….
***SLAP!***
But I digress. Thank you, Wode Toad.
The reason we need so much sauce is that we don’t really taste our food. We don’t take the time to find out what the flavor of each item is. We allow our food, our music, our body washes (Thanx, Axe), our entertainment, our sensual experiences (Thanks, 50 Shades) to be over-blown and way too loud, going for quantity, but not enjoying the full array of sensations each moment can bring us.
Among the problems is that we put so much priority upon sight and sound—the least intimate of all sensations—have we barely are aware of the wide variety of input of our other senses.
I already talked a bit about taste in the recipe section, but what of the others?
Step outside. Feel the sun on your face. Close your eyes, and feel the sunlight soal into you as if you are absorbing it, the way a tomato does. Breathe in, and try to figure out how many smells there are in each breath. Dogs absorb most of their information through smell, whereas we tend to ignore this sense entirely. Is there fresh mowed grass? The early browning of tree leaves? New flowers? The roads and sidewalks baking through the afternoon sun?
Or just exhaust and different cigarettes? Can you smell the different smells of the city? At a distance, even unpleasant smells can be interesting—the faint smell of skunk on a summer night is one of the smells in very good coffee.
Speaking of that, how do you drink coffee? Do you feel the warmth of the cup in your hands, look at the rainbow-mottled surface of the liquid (of course there is oil, ya’ mook! Essential oils provide most of the flavors we enjoy), add sugar, and feel it as you drink it—each cup involves taste and smell and sight and feel.
Stretch.
Take a moment and feel different muscles tighten and untighten as you stretch. Tense and relax, and feel your body.
At work, take a hop and then break into a run; feel your legs stretching beneath you as you dash.
Jump up under a tree, grab a branch, and pull yourself up; you will be aware of each part of your body as your feet hunt for new footholds and your hands swing across branches amd you taste and smell each leaf and bark.
Dance! Throw yourself into wide, wild abandon as you feel the rhythm pounding through your body, and your boots against the floor.
