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Dear friends,

Lloyd and I are both fighting something off tonight, so the long-winded bloviating will have to wait until tomorrow.  Apologies, apologies.

Until that time, please allow me to share with you two really good things…

Although it’s already in my photo album, I am posting this picture of my street during our first real snowstorm of 2003-2004.  Everything looks pretty with a fresh coat of snow on it, of course, but there is something about my street that I just love in a snowstorm.  On overcast days the neighborhood is suffused with a bright greyness that makes everything look sharp and soft at the same time.  When you add snow to that, the whole neighborhood just looks bright, glowing, lit from within.

A few interesting trivia points about this picture:

Yes, I stood in the middle of the crosswalk to get this shot—and yes, that is an oncoming car.

The red brick house behind the trees, the one with the bay windows, is our apartment building.

The overpass carries both freight and Amtrak trains to Boston, Springfield and points north.

The church, which you can see through the overpass, is the Church of the Immaculate Conception on 29th Street and Ditmars Boulevard, and can be found on page 807 of the AIA Guide to New York City.  It is a lovely church, and the bell tower is grand and dramatic.

One of the good things about fighting something off is that we don’t have to waste our time tonight on idle pursuits such as dusting or doing dishes, and thus can spend our time enjoying our Firefly DVD box set.  If you were a fan of Firefly and you still haven’t forgiven Fox for not doing right by it, then snap this set up, if you haven’t already.  If you’re not familiar with it, and if your sole impression of Joss Whedon is “that guy who makes the silly vampire shows for the kids,” then shake the cobwebs and free your mind, baby.  It strikes me as unfair in the extreme that Firefly didn’t even air for a full season, but Gunsmoke was allowed to run forever.

Yet Another Reason to Thank Lloyd:  Two of the last people in the New York City metropolitan area who hadn’t yet seen ROTK saw it this morning.  Funny how 3 1/2 hours flies when you’re having fun.  And I was having fun, if you define fun as “crying like a baby at the displays of fellowship, fealty, melancholy and discovery depicted therein.” My face must have been shining like a diamond, because the people leaving the theatre during the credits gave me a wide, wide berth.  I blew my nose, dried my tears, took Lloyd’s hand and together we emerged into the grey rainy light of Steinway Street.  We stopped at Rizzo’s for thin-crust Sicilian pizza, our usual post-movie ritual.  We walked hand-in-hand down 30th Avenue.  I had the strongest urge to start singing “The Boy Next Door,” but thankfully I did not.

Round about Astoria Boulevard, I said, “Well, that was really beautiful.”

“Yes, it was,” said Lloyd.

“One thing, though,” I said, “anything else we should watch today should be really silly and/or dumb.”

“Of course,” said Lloyd.

“I mean, really silly.  No life lessons at all.”

“Sure.”

“Gratuitous boobies would probably work, too,” I said.

“Oh,” said Lloyd, “those are never gratuitous.” Bless his little heart.

In the end we gave gratuitous boobies a miss, in favor of our New Statesman videos, starring Rik Mayall as Alan B’Stard.  Just what the doctor ordered.  Thanks, Lloyd.

Yet Another Reason to Yell at Google: Someone hit my page based on the search for crispy creem lady magazine.  As my friend Marge said, Homer, I don’t know what you have planned for tonight, but count me out of it.

The bittersweet just keeps on coming at PTMYB:  As I mentioned yesterday, I finally got to break in my new copy of the beautiful Lands of Plenty:  Authentic Sichuan Recipes Personally Gathered in the Chinese Province of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop.  I have several Chinese cookbooks, some of which I even cook from semi-regularly (like The China Moon Cookbook by the late Barbara Tropp), but in this one, I think I’ve found something from which I could cook regularly, on weeknights, even.  This is a beautiful, special book.  Fuchsia Dunlop is a writer and East Asia specialist for the BBC World Service.  She came to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, in 1994 on a British Council Scholarship at Sichuan University.  While there, she and a friend were allowed to take private cooking lessons at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine.  After completing her course at Sichuan University, she dropped in at the culinary school to say hello to her chef-instructors, who invited her to enroll in the full-time professional course.  She became one of the few women, and the first Westerner, to complete this course.  She is a peerless cook, a thorough scholar, and an enthusiastic connoisseur of this noble and glorious cuisine.

When we came home today, I was loaded for bear, all ready to tell all of you to run right out and buy this book.  I wanted to wax rhapsodic over the braised chicken with chestnuts that I made for dinner last night, chicken and chestnuts made fragrant with ginger, scallions, double-black soy sauce, brown sugar, Shaoxing rice wine (sherry works as an admirable substitute, by the way), and half a pint of the rich turkey stock that I made and froze on Thanksgiving weekend.  This is not only one of the nicest things I’ve ever made, it was also one of the easiest, with none of the exhaustive prep and frenetic last-minute activity that tends to scare people away from stir-frying.  I started writing.  I went to Amazon to pick up the link.  I blanched.

Don’t get me wrong.  The reviews were stellar.  But one of the reviewers issued a caveat:  Most, though not all, of the recipes call for Sichuan peppercorns.  I remember my friend Sue telling me that the U.S. government has banned the import of Sichuan peppercorns due to the presence of a canker in this year’s crop that ravaged orange groves in China and has the potential to do so here.  The reviewer said that the ban could be in place for decades.  I went to both the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration websites, at the end of which I felt like I had been poked repeatedly in the head.  Nothing about a decades-long import ban.  World Merchants in Seattle said only that that they would be out of stock until the new crop came in, at the earliest.  Penzeys, which has carried them for years, did not even mention them.

The question may be asked:  But Bakerina, can’t you just substitute black or white peppercorns for the Sichuan pepper?  Well, yes, you can, in the same way that you can substitute parsley for mint:  you will still get something good, but there will be a noticeable difference in flavor.  Sichuan peppercorns are their own creature.  They are spicy, not overly hot, but with slightly mouth-numbing properties, and have a distinctive, vaguely camphor-like aroma.

I would still recommend that you pick up Ms. Dunlop’s book, if not for cooking, then for the exhaustive research and beautifully-written annotations to the recipes.  There is much in here to make you smile.  The following information, new to me, made me glow on the inside:

The 23 flavors of Sichuan are:  homestyle flavor; fish-fragrant flavor; strange-flavor; hot-and-numbing flavor; red-oil flavor; garlic paste flavor; scorched chili flavor; tangerine-peel flavor; Sichuan pepper flavor; Sichuan pepper and salt flavor; hot-and-sour flavor; fragrant fermented sauce flavor; five-spice flavor; sweet fragrant flavor; fragrant wine flavor; smoked flavor; salt-savory flavor; lychee flavor; sweet-and-sour flavor; ginger juice flavor; sesame paste flavor; mustard flavor; salt-sweet flavor.

The 56 cooking methods of Sichuan are...all right, I won’t list all 56 cooking methods, but they include some shimmering, evocative terms, including “clear-steaming”, “pot-sticking”, “red-braising”, “hanging oven-roasting”, “deep-fry and receive” and my favorite, “explode-frying,” a way of fast-stir-frying, in very hot oil, foods like kidneys and poultry gizzards cut into crosshatch, so that they explode into flower-like shapes.

Thankfully, I still have some Sichuan peppercorns of my own, a little less than half a one-quart mason jar’s worth.  They are still pungent and flavorful.  I hope that by the time they are gone, I will be able to buy more.  It is entirely possible that I won’t, that it may be 20 or 30 years before I will ever taste them again.

Dear friends,

The good news is that I am in cookbook love.  With the gift certificate that one of my boss fellas gave me for Xmas, I picked up some goodies, including the wonderful, wonderful Lands of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop, and tonight I got to test-drive it for the first time.

The bad news is that I waited until I was thoroughly exhausted before sitting down to write about it, and as a result I have lost the ability to edit, rewrite or speak English.

The good news is that I know that all I need is a good night’s sleep and an early morning show of ROTK tomorrow, and I will be back in form, and when I am, I will be more than ready to tell you why this book is worth its weight in pepper.

In the meantime, since I am still too compulsive to leave well enough alone, here are some more pieces of evidence that I am pleased as punch with my ability to download my pictures off my new camera…

Picture #1 is the view from my front stoop, facing southeast (albeit in a wide-angle view; objects, such as the intersection of 29th Street and 23rd Avenue, are closer than they appear).  As I pressed the shutter, I heard a loud noise behind me and, startled, I moved the camera.  When I looked at the thumbnail, I saw that the brick building across the street had this interesting stripy moire pattern.  I was dead pleased with myself.  Look at that, I said to myself.  I am an accidental genius.  If I had tried to do that on purpose, it never would have worked.  Just wait till I show this to all the cool kids!

Then I downloaded it and discovered that it was a thumbnail-specific effect, and that once you enlarge it, a brick wall is a brick wall is a brick wall.  Nice work, genius.

I still like this picture, because it feels friendly, much like my street.

Picture #2 is of something I found on yesterday’s field trip.  I was so enamored of it that I went back after my regular Saturday morning trip to the Greenmarket and bought two bottles of it, along with a bottle of Samuel Smith’s Winter Welcome 2002-03, one of the real pleasures of winter for us, and a bottle of Lindemanns sour cherry lambic, which, if you like lambics, is one of the nicest things you will ever drink.  (If you don’t like lambics, then, uh, never mind.)

The Grail Ale, incidentally, is brewed by Black Sheep Brewery in Yorkshire.  It is actually a decent ale, a bit bitter but with a nice lingering finish...which, oddly enough, sounds like “Nnnnnnnnnni!”

Lloyd and I had planned to see ROTK today, but decided instead to postpone until Sunday so that we could sleep in.  This left me with a nice unstructured day to do whatever I wanted.  I decided to catch the bus to Jackson Heights and poke around in Indian groceries for a few hours, but first I read this little heartbreaker of an article in the New York Times about the hard fortunes of my beloved Pittsburgh, where Lloyd and I had been planning to move until we learned just how broke the city was, and how uncertain its future is.  If you’ve ever wondered what happens to a city when its primary industry disappears and the tax base shrinks (40% of city property is tax-exempt, half of city-based corporations are tax-exempt, and 2/3 of the workforce commutes in from the suburbs and is subject only to an annual $10 occupation tax), well, this is it.

After that, a nice field trip was in order, so I walked around the block and got on the bus.  Imagine my surprise to discover that the bus did not go to the heart of Jackson Heights, but rather to LaGuardia Airport.  I took this as a sign that I needed a nice long walk, and after several bizarre detours that will be shared at another time, I found myself on Steinway Street, the largest and most famous shopping drag in Astoria.  I stopped in an Indian grocery on 30th Avenue, where I found a tub of bitter melon, and, inspired by aethele’s beautiful photographs of broccoli romanesco that she took in Germany, I asked the nice man behind the counter if I could get a picture.  He was more than happy to oblige.

When I got home, after first popping into Manhattan to have some arepas for lunch, I decided that I’d had enough bitter for one day and was ready for some sweet instead.  Since I have received a lot of e-mail about the ginger fingers, I thought that I might as well make a batch of them and take a picture to a) convince the fence-sitters that these are definitely worth the effort and b) remind myself that even without a bakery, I am still a bakerina.  (Go ahead, bake a batch.  You know you want to.)

About six months ago, the Sunday New York Times Styles section ran an article about a (supposed) trend in which adults were flocking to entertainments created for children. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had just been released, so of course there was a lot of verbiage dedicated to that, but there was also a run-through of Playstation games, young adult novels, cartoons, pop music and the amount of time spent enjoying this stuff, rather than pursuing adult pursuits like building retirement plans or meaningful relationships with other people.  There were interviews with fab young persons who embraced their Potterphilia with pride.  There were representatives from the other side of the coin, who found this sort of thing depressing at best and the death knell of enlightenment at worst.  Because this was the New York Times, which never fails to give a cheesy name to the supposed trends it supposedly spots (as witnessed 10 years ago, when it tried to rename the part of the Lower East Side that lay below Houston Street as BoHo; the next day, graffiti sprung up all over the neighborhood declaring THIS IS NOT BOHO), they found a pair of marketing consultants, who dubbed the people who followed these pursuits “rejuveniles.” I hated this tag on site, and asked myself once again if the pleasure of finding an old college friend’s wedding announcement was worth the pain of reading the rest of the Styles section every week.

Naturally, Plastic picked this story up, and the Potter fans, news nerds and inveterate trolls wasted no time in airing opinions.  I think my sole contribution to the dialogue was a confession that reading this article made me want to kick the marketing consultants in the head, but was afraid of being branded a rejuvenile delinquent, har de har har.  And I wonder why my karma is so low.  (For those not familiar with Plastic, posts can be rated by a floating band of randomly-chosen moderators, who can vote your posts up or down, thus awarding you “karma points.” I have been posting to Plastic since February 2001, two weeks after it went live, and all I can say is that I must be either dead obnoxious or dead boring, because every day some bright young thing creates a Plastic account, and within a week, his/her karma score gives mine a severe pantsing.  Not that I am obsessed with my karma in the least.  Heavens, no.)

I hate the whole idea of rejuvenilia, and the unspoken assumptions behind it, that we are all a bunch of overgrown children who refuse to move onto the more important things in life.  I hate the whole notion that we are a bundle of either/or impulses.  Either you like Queens of the Stone Age or you like Cole Porter.  Either you spend all your time in front of your Playstation, or you go outside and play with others.  Either you read Big Serious Adult Nonfiction or you read Stuff Aimed At 12-Year-Olds, and never the twain shall meet.  I blame this on Crossfire, with its not-so-subtle message that there are 2 sides to an issue, and they both involve a lot of shouting.  Of course, I could be taking this too personally, out of spiteful defensiveness, she-who-loves-Cartoon-Network-to-death.  Or it could be because even when I was younger, the question of kids’ stuff vs. grownups’ stuff was a false dichotomy.  I was lucky in that I was encouraged to read pretty much anything I was interested in.  There was the usual parental eye cast out for sex and violence, not by virtue of their being sex and violence, but because I might not understand the context in which the sex and violence took place, and thus might find it confusing or upsetting.  (I note, though, that at the tender age of 10, I was allowed to read The Cracker Factory by Joyce-Rebeta Burditt, which is full of sex and adult explorations of alcoholism and mental illness.  It was also very, very funny, which taught me that sometimes humor will let you get away with a lot.) Other than that, though, the only criterion was that if it looked interesting, it was fine to read.

This got me off to a good start in life, both as a precocious kid and a don’t-call-me-rejuvenile adult.  It meant that I was able to read some truly good books before I got to high school, when the desire to read them is usually beaten out of one.  And you don’t have to live in a snobby, rarefied or isolated environment to feed this enthusiasm early.  All you have to do is sit down next to your mother, who is watching Crime and Punishment on PBS, starring John Hurt as Raskolnikov, and you are so fascinated by the way he literally sweats fear and guilt and dread that you announce to no one in particular “I want to read that,” and hey presto, there it is under the Christmas tree, waiting for you.  Ditto The Count of Monte Cristo and Gone With the Wind, which was not nearly as good as the other two but was still a Really Big Book, which was impressive to the other kids when I lugged it around at school.  It was also fun to see my teachers freak out at the cover, which included an illustration of Vivian Leigh spilling out of the bodice of her gown, breasts almost completely exposed.  “Oh, gosh,” I’d say, “I didn’t realize that classic literature was inappropriate for the classroom,” and they would retreat, thinking they were not getting paid enough to deal with smartasses like me.  (My stepdad was a social studies teacher at the same school, so my teachers were his colleagues, which meant that my smart mouth eventually caught up with me.)

This latitude paid off in further dividends in my early 20’s, when I got a job as the children’s book buyer for Tower Books in Philadelphia.  This job meant that I had to read a lot of children’s books—picture books, chapter books, YA novels, nonfiction, the lot—and I had a blast.  I learned what a complicated dance a good children’s picture book was, that trying to tell a good story in 100 words was much harder than it looked, and how the best editor will raise the pairing of author and illustrator to an art form.  (Because there is a perception that “anyone can write stories for kids,” the market is flooded with ill-considered picture books like the truly awful The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach, co-written by Paulina Porizkova and illustrated by her stepson Adam Otcasek.  Pointless story.  Ugly, ugly illustrations.  This is what happens when children’s books are written by and for cynical adults with hollow senses of humor.) I learned that Mem Fox was the queen of picture books, and that Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith are the best friends of wacky children everywhere.  (Raise your hands if you have ever read a copy of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales to a giggling 7-year-old.) I learned that Daniel Pinkwater can do it all, picture books, midgrade fiction and YA, and be hysterically funny in all genres.  For my money, the best YA novel ever written was Pinkwater’s Young Adult Novel, which is about a group of high-school Dadaists.  I don’t miss much about that job, not the general indignities of retail, nor the often-sociopathic mood among the store staff, certainly not the lousy pay, but I miss the books, and the sense of sheer unadulterated fun that came from reading them, picking out the best stuff for the store and helping baffled adults pick out something that their kids would just love to read.

It is in this spirit of happy enthusiasm, not don’t-call-it-rejuvenilia, that I am pleased to boast about some of the goodies I got for Christmas, and to recommend that you check them out if you love children’s books, or if you have pre-teens and young teenagers in your life.  I have been laughing myself stupid over Louise Rennison’s series of books about 14-year-old Georgia Nicolson:  Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging; On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God (published in the UK as It’s Okay, I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers) and Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas.  I’ve heard people compare Georgia to Bridget Jones, but that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  Georgia has more in common with Adrian Mole, the hero of a series penned by Sue Townsend in the 1980’s.  I would have married Adrian years ago if he only he weren’t a fictional construct.  Like Adrian, Georgia is self-absorbed, brighter than she is given credit for, and a dab hand at funny observations.

I was also glad to pick up The Slippery Slope, Volume 10 in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.  (Trivia buffs may want to know that Lemony Snicket also trades under the name of Daniel Handler, author of The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth, and accordionist for the Magnetic Fields.) This series, which is about a trio of orphans tracking the truth about their parents’ deaths while trying to elude the evil, murderous, fortune-hunting Count Olaf, is my chapterbook wet dream:  hardbound (yet affordably priced), acid-free paper, notched signature, beautifully-drawn endpapers with a built-in Ex Libris plate; in short, books built for keeping.  The stories are dark, very dark, but although the Baudelaire siblings are in constant peril, they always manage to save themselves from almost-certain death at Count Olaf’s hands.  The editorial voice is a scream, filled with wry definitions of words and phrases, and includes useful information like how to make puttanesca sauce.  I have actually made puttanesca sauce following Snicket’s instructions in The Bad Beginning.  It works.  And I am nuts about the introductory paragraph to The Slippery Slope:

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called “The Road Less Traveled,” describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used.  The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help.  Sure enough, that poet is now dead.

If I were a 9-to-12-year-old reading this book, I would be thrilled and flattered that Lemony Snicket found me smart enough to share this information with me.  It is the best author-reader relationship I have ever read, anywhere.  Rejuvenile, my ass.