We wait for the light to change, even when there are no cars. That’s not just my city, by the way, that’s my neighborhood. That intersection is a short walk from our house.
“Law-abiding street parties are the best ones.” — Deadspin
A couple years ago a coach or player from some out-of-town sports team was issued a jaywalking ticket right outside a Seattle stadium, which made the media everywhere else run stories about how backward and quaint Seattle was for actually considering jaywalking an infraction…Continue reading Still pinching myself→
Grandma cutting up some tomatoes.I mentioned the other day that I was planning to make chili for the Superbowl, and specifically to make my Grandma’s Chili. After posting my explanation about Grandma’s recipe, I wound up in several conversations with friends about my grandma’s way of cooking, and the nature of old family recipes. One friend had a great way to describe what I was trying to explain: for a lot of people, a recipe isn’t a list of ingredients in precise amounts, it’s a process.
Such a process recipe is my recollection of Grandpa’s cornbread. Approximately equal amounts of corn meal and flour, with some sugar, baking powder, salt, an egg or two (depending on how big a batch you’re making), some butter and some milk. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly first, soften the butter, add the eggs, milk, and butter, blend. If the texture and thickness isn’t right, add some more cornmeal, or some more milk. Pour into a greased pan and bake about 20-25 minutes at 400-ish degrees.
I set some goals for the year, and since this sort of thing often does not go as well as we hoped, I tried to set some very concrete steps for the goals. I tried to model the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.
Since being accountable to someone seems to keep me motivated, I also planned to post updates throughout the year. The beginning of a new month seems like a good time to do that:
Goal: Reduce the outrage.
Step: Listen to the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me podcast once a week, limit the amount of time I read news during work breaks.
Progress: I have been limiting the amount of time I spend reading the during breaks and listening to the Wait! Wait podcast each week. I’m still getting riled up about certain kinds of news, but I also feel as if I’m laughing at the antics of the wingnuts slightly more often than I was.
Goal: Write more regularly.
Step: Spend the reclaimed break time writing. Find other ways to motivate myself to write rather than twiddle the keys.
Progress: I have been writing during part of my lunch break at work, though I’ve been writing blog posts more often than fiction. I’ll keep working on this.
Goal: See friends for fun more, as opposed to all of my social interactions being driven by various projects.
Step: I didn’t have a good concrete step for that. Which may be just as well, given that for most of the month of January, my husband and I have been sick or trying to get over being sick, et cetera.
Progress: We haven’t been able to resume our weekly get together and chat night. I didn’t have to cancel Writers’ Night nor miss out on the AFK Tavern meet-up with out-of-town friends, so I wasn’t a total hermit.
My friend, Anthony, has been trying to get folks together for a regular “drink and draw” on a Sunday afternoon at AFK Tavern, and I’ve put the next one on our calendar. Which may help with the next goal.
Goal: Paint, draw, and make music.
Step: I didn’t have a good way to make myself do that instead of other things.
Progress: If I can manage to attend the Drink ‘n’ Draw meet ups, I should get some sketching done there, as well as seeing friends just for fun. I still need to come up with some more steps to push this one along.
Me and my maternal grandmother. I think I was four?My maternal grandmother was an improvisational cook. If you asked her for a recipe, it was always a bit of a ramble. If you worked with her to make whatever it was, there was always a narrative that went with it, with frequent asides about alternate ingredients you could use if you didn’t have something, or if you wanted it to be a bit different.
Most of her recipes began with the sentence: “First, chop an onion.” Most of her childhood was in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, but she also lived in Texas at several points, and her accent sounded more coastal Texan than Missourian. Her oldest brother, who was born in Kansas, often teasingly called her the family’s Texan transplant. I have sometimes labeled homemade chili’s I’ve made from Grandma’s recipe as “Grandma’s Texas Chili,” because of this.
As I mentioned above, her recipes are never strict. I must have eaten her chili hundreds of times, and helped her cook it dozens of times, and I suspect that no two of them were ever exactly alike. Her chili recipe differed from her others because, it begins with, “While the bacon is cooking down, chop an onion and your peppers.”
Among all the variants of Grandma’s chili I ever had, the only three constants were: onions, beans, and bacon. Usually there were several kinds of peppers, but if she didn’t have peppers, she’d just sprinkle in some (or, depending on her mood, and whole lot of) cayenne or even paprika. She favored ground beef, but would substitute pork sausage, ground chicken, or sometimes chopped meatballs or even chopped bologna, if that’s what she had. There might be tomatoes, or not. Frequently the tomato component would be generous dollops of her homemade green tomato relish (which was always spicy), because she almost always had many jars of it in the pantry. Even if she didn’t cook the relish in the chili, she’d usually set out a jar so you could add some to your bowl to spice it up.
She wasn’t particular about the beans. When I was younger, she almost always started with dry beans that soaked overnight. Later she was more willing to use canned beans, since they were more convenient. Any beans would do. I remember more than once she used Van Camp’s Pork & Beans.
The basics of the recipe were:
Cook some bacon until it is very crisp, set the bacon aside.
Chop your onions and peppers up while the bacon is cooking. Saute the onions and peppers in the bacon grease.
Add your meat. Yes, even if it is extremely non-lean hamburger, cook it in the bacon grease. The bacon is very important!
Season liberally with salt. Optional spices to throw in while satueing include pepper, chili pepper, cayenne, paprika, garlic, or pickled hot vegetables.
Add tomatoes or tomato relish or tomato sauce if you are doing tomatoes.
Depending on how you’re doing the beans and what kind of pan you’re cooking the onion, peppers, either add the beans and some liquid to the pan, or start the beans cooking in a pot and add the meat, onions, et al, to them.
Crumble up the bacon and stir it in.
Get the chili to a boil for a while, tasting and adding seasoning, until everything tastes right.
Serve with grated cheese if you have it, and/or green tomato relish, or some salsa, or…
I mention the hot pickled vegetables because she almost always had some of those around the house, too. I was one of the few members of the family who loved eating those as much as Grandma (later, when I started regularly making haberno salsa to bring to family dinners, Grandma always asked to take the leftover home, so I started bringing a separate container of it just for her to take). One time, when she didn’t have any fresh peppers and didn’t have any cayenne, she fished all the pickled peppers out of a jar of the hot veggies, and poured some of the hot pickle brine into the pan with the sauteing bits.
Even with the wildest substitutions, by the time Grandma was finished, it was always Grandma’s Chili. And it was always great.
I’ve only gone all out on Grandma’s Chili a few times in the seven years since she died. I make chili all the time, but it’s not Grandma’s. When making “ordinary” chili, I am as prone to substitutions as Grandma was, and almost never use bacon. When I make chili that I call Grandma’s Chili, I always soak beans overnight, spend too much time choosing bacon, always get some fresh peppers, and onion (usually a sweet one). I try to steer the taste to the milder end, since my husband (and most of our friends) can’t take the kind of chili that Grandma or I would call hot. Sometimes I make some haberno salsa for myself and the brave souls.
I didn’t pick up any really hot peppers. I stuck to mostly sweet ones, since as far as I know it will only be Michael and I eating my chili tomorrow while I watch the Superbowl.
It’s easy to forget that professional athletes are people. And, despite the fact that for a while I majored in journalism, I sometimes find it very hard to believe that most journalists are even slightly human. Let me explain why.
Marshawn Lynch can smile once Robinson starts talking for him.One of my favorite players on the current Seahawks roster is Marshawn Lynch, a big running back who is just amazing to watch on the field. Despite him being my favorite, I was unaware that earlier this year, the League had threatened to fine him because he kept ducking out of press conferences. Player contracts require them to be available to the press, because most of the money the League makes comes from the networks and so forth.
Anyway, you only have to watch a couple minutes of this video of him to see that he isn’t being some sort of prima donna about the press. He is clearly extremely uncomfortable with all the mics and cameras. As he says early on, “I’m just here so I won’t get fined, boss.”
The other player in the clip, Michael Robinson, attempts to take the heat off by answering for Marshawn. He does a fairly humorous imitation, and gets Marshawn laughing. Eventually Marshawn makes what I think is an excellent answer to several of the reporters asking why he doesn’t want to talk to them, since the press is supposed to be a bridge to the fans: “If y’all say y’all is a bridge from the players to the fans, and the fans really ain’t really tripping, then what’s the point? What’s the purpose? They got my back. I appreciate that. But I don’t get what’s the bridge being built for.”
The thing is, I don’t understand how anyone with a gram of empathy in their souls can watch Marshawn squirming in that chair and not understand how deeply uncomfortable he is. Not just understand, but squirm a bit yourself!
I understand about the need to get the story in order to keep your job. But when three or four other guys have already asked almost exactly the same question—including that phrase about a bridge to the fans!—what’s the point of repeating it?
If he was a public official, and the reporters were trying to get answers about an incident where it seems action by the official or his underlings had caused harm to the public, then it’s perfectly understandable for journalists to keep asking the same question. In that case the subtext is, “None of us are going to quit bugging you about this until we get an answer.” In that kind of situation, they’re serving a public interest. But this is football, for heaven’s sakes!
The really interesting thing is that Lynch gave an interview later in the week, in a one-on-one situation, where he was quite talkative, and he didn’t just spout of a string of sports clichés:
“And I’m not as comfortable, especially at the position I play, making it about me. As a running back, it takes five offensive linemen, a tight end, a fullback and possibly two wide receivers, in order to make my job successful. But when I do interviews, most of the time it’ll come back to me. There are only so many times I can say, ‘I owe it to my offensive linemen,’ or, ‘The credit should go to my teammates,’ before it becomes run down.
“This goes back even to Pop Warner. You’d have a good game and they’d want you to give a couple of quotes for the newspaper, and I would let my other teammates be the ones to talk. That’s how it was in high school, too. At Cal, I’d have my cousin, Robert Jordan, and Justin Forsett do it.
“Football’s just always been hella fun to me, not expressing myself in the media. I don’t do it to get attention; I just do it ’cause I love that (expletive).”
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