My mom bought me socks. These socks are ostensibly the same size, yet the sock on my left foot persistently rides higher on my ankle, by roughly an inch, than the one on my right foot . The asymmetry here is perturbing in a "my voice sounds like that!?" kind of way. It makes me wonder if it's my feet that are bizarro reflections of each other, or if maybe my ankles are constructed at different heights. I also can't rule out that I may have one leg freakishly that outsizes the other and by some trick of my brain or complete epic fail of self-awareness never noticed it.

When I look at my feet without socks there is no discernible difference in size or shape. The flaws in their mirroring only seem to appear when outside apparatus draw attention to it.

Of course, we're all asymmetrical in some manner or another. If I stare myself down real hard in the mirror I can see one ear floating above the other. It's a real jab in the mismatched eye. I think it's less about vanity (though there's definitely some of that) than it is about missing the details. If I can look at the reflection of myself for 29 years and only maybe twice a year see the halloween-ish nature of the true me (which I figure, considering how often I look in the mirror in a year and how many opportunities I have to notice these things, probably means I'm fairly symmetrical), it makes me wonder what else I'm missing.

"I hate broccoli, and yet in a sense, I am broccoli."

I'm reading DFW again, which seems to correspond with a compulsion to
write. Sarah's been writing too, and maybe there's some inspiration
coming from reading her daily assignments.

It seems to happen periodically that certain aspects of our
self-identity come to a head and we have to decide whether we are the
person we think we are, or whether we are something else entirely. To
wit: I am not a coffee person. I defined myself for my entire life as
someone who does not—ever—drink coffee. No. I am a dessert person. I
like delicious sucrosey treats. Coffee is bitter. It leaves an
unpleasant aftertaste. Sure, coffee is gross, some people
respond—until you add sugar and cream. This, like a cocktail, always
seemed like a copout. If you don't like something, don't have it. It's
just cheating to cover up the flavor you don't like with other flavors
just to get the chemical upside. Don't like whiskey, there are other
alcoholic options, and the same can be said for caffeinated beverages.

Coffee is a false prophet. It's for the weak-minded—those who lack the
intrinsic motivation and focus to get shit done. They need a
performance enhancer, a minor steroid for the mind—HGH, creatine,
Bawls. Coffee makes me hyperactive, gives me chest pains, and an upset
stomach. Or maybe that was my last job.

I am not a coffee drinker. Let me rephrase that: I am a coffee
drinker. Turns out.

I blame the pizza place; and also Sarah, who introduced me to the
gateway drink, the latte, last November. Fridays and Saturdays I'm
generally up and out the door by 9:15 and pretty much immediately
working once I step outside—shopping, running errands, writing mental
prep lists—and actually at Depokos by 10. If it's a slow day I have a
couple hours in the afternoon to relax between lunch and dinner (the
gap in which I'm writing now).

If I wasn't diligent in getting to bed on time on Friday night,
Saturdays especially can be long. In order to be on the ball as best I
can—to greet customers with verve and frothy banter—sometimes a little
doping is useful. There is a café conveniently located two doors down
from the pizzeria. I have graduated from the latte to the house brew.
It's cheaper and seemingly just as potent. By keeping my coffee
consumption limited to one to two days a week, I'm able to milk that
caffeine for maximum effect.

It doesn't necessarily help the feeling at the end of a long day—it
can actually make it worse, like some kind of behemoth sugar-crash
that leaves my brain a vacuum, devoid of any chemical activity—when if
it hasn't been busy can just feel draining, with the lower half of my
body—my hips and hamstrings and knees, the balls of my feet, my
calves—worn and sore from standing for 10-to-12 hours. When it is busy
that same fatigue can be eminently satisfying, knowing that I have put
all my energy into creating something that I take pride in and that
customers have (hopefully) enjoyed.

And so I drink coffee to help me make it there. It's acrid and
astringent, but also earthy and invigorating.

Pizza

Dear Everyone I Have Ever Met (more-or-less),

I've bought a pizza place.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,
Will



--
"The two strange men who just now wanted to shoot us to death were eaten by a cow and that almost makes sense to me."—the Tick

At Emiko's Wedding

Today I am in the hills of Santa Barbara. Not to be confused with Hanna Barbera. The house we're staying at for Emiko's wedding is the most ridiculously large house I've ever been in. The kitchen/living room is this size of my regular residence's entire first floor. There's a second living room, a guest house, a dining room, a pool, two hot tubs (apparently, though I've yet to see either), an avocado orchard, a game room with a pool table and separate poker and black jack tables, lovely views of the surrounding Pacific coast landscape, and blah blah blah, etc. I pity the cleaning ladies.

Emiko's wedding is this evening. Then it's back to LA tomorrow where I plan to do some pizza-ing and catch up with some folks.

More changes are afoot at Portobello. I'll keep you posted.

a friendly warning

If anyone's planning on going to see X-Men: First Class, I strongly encourage you to change those plans. Remember X-Men 3? It's that caliber of cringe-inducing, cheddar-covered cornball, logic-defying embarrassment of a film. They actually managed to make a less ridiculous movie out of Thor than X-Men.

If only they'd based the film solely on the content and tone of this image:

 

... they would've had something worth watching.

Planking

Tripod Plank

Backstage Plank

Camel Hump Plank

Vagina Rock Plank

Supermarket CCTV Plank

Dinner Plank

Airplank

So maybe ya'll have heard of this and I'm just behind on my internet fads. Normally I'm not one for completely inane webby fads (and I mean truly, in every facet, stupid, e.g., the majority of LoLcats), but there's something to the deadpan delivery of planking—stone-faced people in exhibiting themselves in a ridiculous, stiff-as-a-board horizontal posture—that I can't help but enjoy.

Rules of Planking:

When performing a Plank:

1. You must always lay face down, ensuring your face remains expressionless for the duration of the Plank.
2. Your legs must remain straight, and together with toes pointed.
3. Your arms must be placed by your side, held straight and fingers pointed.
4. You must make it known that you are Planking. Saying 'I am Planking' usually get this across. Sternly announcing it will ensure a good result.
5. Your safety should always be considered. Properly thought through Planking procedures should always go to plan. Never put your self at undue risk.
6. Every Plank that is captured must be named.

Not saying I would really ever do this though...

I realize probably a lot of people who used to check this thing regularly don't anymore and that's okay. It's nice to keep it around for times when I feel like rapping at the ol' qwerty. In considering the reasons this here doesn't get the regular attention it used to, I've come up with a few explanations:

1. I live a relatively drama-free life. Most of my concerns are domestic. And while I'm sure some of you are interested in how often the cat wakes me up at 8 am by batting me in the face, I'm not too interested in writing about it. And for the drama that isn't domestic—it generally isn't suitable for broadcasting over the intertubes.

2. I'm pretty stationary. I'm not traipsing about the Earth's underside or ricocheting around New York, doing all the fun and exciting things one does in New York—visits to the Met, MoMA, or dozens of other museums; seeing shows at the Lincoln Center; attending debates between the Economist and the Nation; sampling the goods of any of the dozens and dozens of quality pizzerias; even wandering around Central Park somehow seems significant. Really everything in New York seems significant while you're there... probably because it's a point of reference for everyone. There just isn't a lot of novelty to life in Portland.

3. Social networking. Need to know something? Facebook pro'ly has it covered at this point in pithier statements, or I've posted a link as my gchat away message.

So what news? Well, in the past few weeks I've started taking some hip-hop dance classes. It's a drop-in class, so I show up when I'm able and make an ass out of myself trying to learn a routine that other people seem to have pretty much already mastered.

I broke page 1000 in the Instructions. Only 100-ish pages to go and I can finally read something else (Maps & Legends by Chabon is on my list).

My dad sent me Papa Max's—my great grandfather's—fedora. It's a really nice hat. Facebookers can now see a photo of me in it. It needs a some repairs on the inner band, but otherwise, it seems to be in very good shape. It should go well with the suit I'm getting tailored from Duchess Clothier.

In addition to the hat, I also received a audio recordings of interviews he did with Papa Max and Grandma Ida in the late 70's. I'm learning some pretty interesting stuff about where at least part of my family came from. If I understand the tapes right, Papa Max came to the US from what's now Belarus via England and came through Ellis Island. It wasn't long before he owned a delicatessen and a purveyor of things like pickles, then became a farmer even though he knew nothing about farming. I haven't quite absorbed all the details, but it seems to have all the elements of a classic Jewish immigrant tale.

walk the line

Here's how it works:

One of the wait-staff brings in an order written on a ticket. They stick their copy of the ticket on the back side of the hot line window. The chef sticks his copy of the ticket on our side of the line and reads off the order, e.g., "Pick up: beet tartare, crostini, an arugula salad! Order in: two ravs, a marinara and a cashew cream!" At which point I would will scramble to get my stuff together, probably shuffling in place while picking up the wrong plate for bread, looking about for the ring mold to put tartare in and then overdressing the arugula salad (think Jerry Lewis in oversized shoes).

After bungling about there for a few minutes, I'll place the appetizers up in the window (a shelf above the cold line), call out something like, "Apps in the window!" They'll then get taken out to their table by the food runner, who will cry out something like, "Table four going out!"

From there we pick up other tickets that have come in or we dally about reorganizing and cleaning our work stations, prepping food for later in the evening or the next day, or just gaze into each others eyes longingly until we're told to fire the next course on that ticket. At which point I'll busy myself with some dough stretching, distribute some toppings, and try not to burn myself while shuttling pizzas in and out of the oven.

There are some nuances to this whole process. Different dishes take different amounts of time to make. My pizzas require between three and five minutes once they're in the oven, while most of the pasta dishes probably require between two and four minutes and portobello steaks need more time. So in order to make sure all the food is ready simultaneously, pizzas get started first and then once they're about half-way finished, pastas get thrown in the boiler. At this point our timing for stuff is pretty good, so food tends to get out relatively fast and grouped together properly. Of course, if we end up with a large table ordering, it can delay the orders for everyone else in the restaurant.

Happy BSD 2011

Happy Batman Sticker Day everyone! Yup. Still preachin' the gospel.

Advantage: Home.

Sports Illustrated published an excerpt of Sportscasting by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. The article was all about the myths and realities of home-field advantage. Apparently one of the causes is bias in officiating. When they looked at statistics related to team travel, fans' support affect on players, and player comfort related to familiar environs, they found all those things to be statistically irrelevant based on in-game performance of players (they actually found visiting quarterbacks to have a slight statistical advantage over home quarterbacks). What they did find was that umpires and referees are swayed by crowd reactions. In soccer they found, for instance, that when the home team is winning at the end of the game, the amount of extra time added is less, averaging 2 minutes, while when the home team is losing the extra time averages 4 minutes. The number of penalties and fouls also favors the home team. This is also true on the gridiron. And in baseball called strikes and balls also fall in favor of the home team.

While this probably isn't the only cause for home-field advantage, it does seem like a pretty important aspect of it.

An that's the interesting thing I read recently.

* * *

In restaurant news, we're working on developing a cashew-based mozzarella substitute. We're working from a recipe by Miyoko Schinner. So far we've found the recipe works in terms of flavor, but the consistency is much too soft. Agar agar seems fairly temperamental and it seems like we're going to try and replace it with Irish moss (a seaweed). Hopefully we'll figure it out in the next couple weeks and can replace the butter-y tasting Daiya cheese with something a little more satisfying.

cooooooooooooooooookieeeeesssssssssss

Rebel that I am, I'm makin' truffles for the cookie party. We've got your standard dark chocolate, cardamom–ginger, chili, and paprika–cinnamon (which is really mostly cinnamon). Well, at least I've made the ganache for the filling. I still have to coat most of them in a shell. I mean, I guess I don't have to—we could just spoon the ganache into our chompers. I imagine it'll be less satisfying that way though.

Portland's on it way to becoming a pizza town:

Food lovers who know anything about Portland, Oregon, may first think of the city's renowned food-cart scene. Or its way with the microbrewed beers. Or its rising coffee-roasting culture. All thriving. Add to that a killer artisanal pizza moment.

(Serious Eats)

smarter than the average donkey?

The Achenblog has a couple of interesting thoughts on the current tax bill. One of them carries the transcript of Obama's response to a reporter questioning Obama's values. A clip of this appeared on the Daily Show last week. Here's a bit that wasn't included there: 

That can't be the measure of how we think about our public service. That can't be the measure of what it means to be a Democrat. This is a big, diverse country. Not everybody agrees with us. I know that shocks people. The New York Times editorial page does not permeate across all of America. Neither does The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Most Americans, they're just trying to figure out how to go about their lives and how can we make sure that our elected officials are looking out for us. And that means because it's a big, diverse country and people have a lot of complicated positions, it means that in order to get stuff done, we're going to compromise. This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people. When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal. This country was founded on compromise. I couldn't go through the front door at this country's founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn't have a union.

heave-ho

I admit that I've neglected this thing for a while, at least with pretty much anything substantial, personal, or what the average person reading this might consider interesting. That is to say, I'm uninterested in reading a lot of the stuff here and when the author isn't even interested, that doesn't exactly indicate Andean condor-like majesty of prose or content. (Though, I suppose that's not really the point of this thing anyway.)

You might have noticed I played with bloggers template designer. We are amused. And look: color! Fun!

What most people seem to be interested in here is the restaurant. What is going on with that exactly? The stuff that seemed to me new and exciting for the first couple months are now kind of old hat and pedestrian. But it's been six months now and I definitely feel much more at ease than I did the first few months. I haven't had chest pains in a couple months for instance (something that seemed to correlate to ingesting caffeine before service—I stopped doing that).

Milestones for Portobello since my last related post (August 22nd):

1. listed in the Willamette Week's guide to top Portland restarants
2. appeared on the Cooking Channel
   
3. started serving lunch
4. began serving fancy prix fixe meals on weekends
5. had one very positive and one middling review regarding the pizzas
   

Our line is also all crazy. Nate (formally master of apps and desserts) is now the chef de tournant or rotating chef. He's been trained up on pretty much everything and can fill in at any station on the line. I'm now picking up appetizers, desserts and pizzas and am slowly getting lessons on the sauté line, which is to say I'm occasionally getting splattered with hot oil and narrowly avoiding melting my flesh with boiling water.

Jesse, sous-chef and living art exhibit, is now running the show most nights, as Aaron the co-owner/head chef is preoccupied working lunch, designing prix fixe menus, and encouraging everyone to do push-ups.

On the pizza front specifically, we've gone through a few menu changes, and I've made some dough adjustments after learning a little more about salt and its effects on gluten development and enzyme activity.

Since August we ran through our Autumn menu which included a pizza with butternut squash sauce, cherry peppers, brussels sprouts, garlic, and cashew cream in addition to what've been our four standard pizzas: a marinara, a daiya cheese-based margherita, a spicy field roast and cherry pepper pie, and the "piscia"—caramelized onions, olives, capers, garlic, and oregano.

The Winter menu has boasted the standards plus a sweet potato, caramelized red onion, kale, garlic, and rosemary pizza; a pie with butternut sauce, hazelnuts, chili oil, shaved apple, and sage; and last week we had one with cashew cream, chanterelle mushroom, brussels sprout, garlic, pear, and chao cheese. (Is it pizza as I imagine it? Eh. Not exactly, but they tasted good. Trust me. The hazelnut pizza, sans apple, has been my favorite thing to make for myself for a few weeks now. I made a version at home for some friends and they were all pleasantly surprised.)

Yes, I'm positive. The best of 2010.

There was a lot to choose from this year. My list clocks in at an hour and forty minutes, which is a lot to sit through. I swear it's worth it though. Everything on this one was either released in 2010 or late enough in 2009 that I didn't hear it until this year.

black and white and brown all over

I just started reading DFW's The Broom of the System and there's a paragraph at the beginning of chapter three that sets the scene. It's filled with seemingly trivial details about the color of paint on handrails (yellow) and the texture of the lawn grass. Embedded in there is this: "Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun." Evocative, yes. But the generic "old black woman" kind of bothers me. If he was describing an old white woman he presumably would have just written, "old woman." Or at least he would have been more specific in his description of skin tone. This is presumably because of some innate bias we have when imagining fictional characters to thinking of them as similar to ourselves by default. So for DFW, who was a white male, in order to paint the picture he imagined, he had to note that this old woman was black.

What I'm getting at is that by noting specifically that the woman is black it underscores the fact that this detail is a real point of distinction and that since none of the other characters so far have been described as black, we assume that they aren't and we can probably continue to make this same assumption for the rest of the novel. It makes me wonder what a black reader might think when arriving at this line.

While I imagine that Wallace did not exactly have a black audience in mind when he wrote the book, I also can't assume that he only imagined white people reading his work.

the latest and greatest

Sarah is finally here! It only took a few years, but she's now living with Amie in NE. We had dinner this evening at Blossoming Lotus, which is the other well respected all-vegan restaurant in town. Coconut sweet potato soup was consumed among other delicious plates.

I've also been reunited with another friend:

Remember her?

The Great Catsby presides over a new kingdom.

She's also better behaved. I don't have to distract her with a toy at all times.

Furthermore, as probably all the readers of this blog are aware, Portobello was listed in the Willamette Week's 2010 list of the top restaurants in Portland. Pat on the back to us. I don't have any new shiny blocks of color to share from the restaurant, but I did make some cheesy pizzas at home the other week:

...still got it.

ITEM! One Fuji bicycle, which has become my main form of transportation (with thanks to Oma for the capital, and Morgan for having a bike to sell):

 

Also, the other week I went on a short hike with Laurel and Jonah to Horsetail falls out in the gorge. It was lovely:

Buke and Gass

It's so rare to find music that really hits that pleasure spot in my brain—the same spot that makes my eyes roll up in the back of my head when I fiercely scratch that mosquito bite that's been itching all afternoon. I mean really rare. There are songs that can get me going, hype me up, follow me around and stick in my head with T-1000-like tenacity (Hannah Georgas' Bang Bang You're Dead is the most recent example I have of that). But sometimes it's years between finding a band that just brings a smile to my face.

Buke and Gass are it right now. Their music gives me that blissed-out sensation. It's unlike anything I've ever heard before—just two people with homemade instruments, a modified bass ukulele and a hybrid guitar-bass; they also simultaneously play a kick drum and bells with their feet.  While they're singular in their sound, Buke and Gass's aesthetic is right up my alley—it's melodic, cacophonous, dynamic, fiery, percussive, and cerebral yet emotive. Mostly they just rock my socks off.

Judge for yourself.

PS Thanks Radiolab.

Foxconn

Mike Daisey's a monologist. Really he's a storyteller who draws on autobiographical material. I attended his performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, an examination of the history of Apple, the cult of Apple fandom, the "visionary-asshole" who is Steve Jobs, and most stirringly the seedy underbelly of electronics manufacturing.

Apparently half—HALF!—of all electronics in the world are produced by one company: Foxconn. Foxconn has its largest manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen, which is southern China, a town that grew from a fishing village of 500 (according to Daisey) to a city of 14 million in only the past 30 years. Their facilities employ 430,000 workers. They have 25 cafeterias that each feed 10,000 people at a time. Daisey, who went there, interviewed Foxconn factory workers about their working conditions and posed as an American businessman to get access to the insides of the factories to see what the conditions were actually like. His report, not surprisingly, is hella depressing. While he was there a worker died from exhaustion after a 32-hour shift. He met factory workers who were as young as 11 years old. He met an employee who was labeled a troublemaker and blacklisted by the labor board after asking why she was not receiving overtime pay for working 105-hour weeks. He saw the netting that was installed around the office and factory buildings at Foxconn after a series of workers committed suicide by jumping from the roofs.

Despite all this, Daisey still loves his technology. He remains optimistic that things will change because, he says, "they do change." He notes how Apple was once near the Greenpeace's dirtiest companies (due to their uses of heavy metals, packaging waste, etc.). Now Apple is atop Greenpeace's list of cleanest companies. Why is that? Primarily pressure from consumers. I plan on emailing my buddy Steve Jobs about it soon.

Sungold.

Oven management is really something you don't think about too much when you're only making a three or four of pizzas in a night. It's also pretty straightforward when you can only fit one pizza in your oven. The oven at home can generally bake two or three pizzas in a row before it needs some time to reheat, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes.

The Bakers Pride at work though is a trickier beast. Because it has two decks, but only one burner, and seemingly poor thermal mass. Any time I open a deck to put a pizza in, take it out, or move it, I heat is lost. And it doesn't matter which deck I'm messing with, if I open one, I lose heat in both.

And the temperature difference between the top and bottom deck is probably roughly 50 to 100 degrees. There are up and downsides to this, which I'll get into soon. But for now I have to grab my shin guards. My legs are in demand.