But the results are well worth it. One of the most aromatic and flavorful dishes you can ever prepare. Everyone will LOVE IT.
The first time I prepared this dish was in Meridian, Mississippi. This small sleepy town is not known for stocking the more exotic spices, such as Black Cardomon, Black Cumin and Mace.
Fortunately, 90 minutes away was the small college town of Starkville (home of Mississippi State University). We found what was probably the only Indian/Asian grocery store around in those parts. To the owner's credit, he had the balance of spices I needed.
I just recently made the dish again. And it was like I had never made it ever before. Running around the kitchen, trying to do things in parallel and failing at it. The only thing I did that saved my bacon was having all of the spices out and ready to go.
I started at 6pm, naively thinking I could do it all by half past seven.
We finally sat down to eat at 9pm.
Only one other time did a recipe kick my rear-end. It was a Paula Wolfort recipe for couscous and chicken. Ths first time I made it, it took me 8 hours. I was finally able to refine the timing down to 4 hours.
The owners of the website have a helpful youtube video (which I regrettably did not watch!!)
If I made this a couple more time within th next 6 months, I'm sure I can bring the time down to 90 minutes. I'm sure more organized cooks could do this the first time making it!
My wife called me to tell me the stereo was delivered. "The guys complained endlessly. They said there was no way it weighed 200 pounds."
I sort of smiled - maybe slightly embarrassed. I guessed on the weight. Okay, maybe I was on the light side. But I did recommend they use a hand truck since it was definitely not light.
The other problem: Our living room is on the second floor of a four floor townhouse. I hate the stairs. But, carrying heavy things up stairs is nothing new. For delivery guys to complain seemed silly to me. It's all in a day's work as far as I was concerned. I've had pianos carried up and down stairs over the decades.
And since I used to work in the pick up and delivery sector, having had to haul refrigerators, washers, dryers and huge window A/C units, I wasn't very sympathetic.
But...this stereo was special. Very special, indeed.
It was the Zenith Model Y966D. Mediterranean style cabinetry and solid state sound system. 320 watts of unadulterated power.
I had it sent to a company in Houston who did a lot of old stereo restorations. This one was a piece of cake for them. Within a week of approving the work, they were done.
I almost didn't buy it. And I had such a hard time getting it delivered from Chicago to Beaumont due to horrible ice and snow in Illinois. After I paid for the stereo on Ebay, the owner informed me it had some problems. I rolled my eyes. OK. Buyer Beware. Stupid me.
But as it all turned out, the issues were minor.
This was the exact same model my Korean mom bought for our home back in the late 60s. She plopped me down in front of the Zenith and said "Listen."
Stereo was quite new at the time. High Fidelity or HiFi as it was called had reached its peak. It did offer much better frequency reproduction. But it lacked DEPTH.
That was what stereo offered.
My overbearing mother continued. "Do you hear the instruments? You can tell which direction they are playing from."
Yes, she was right. The horns were on the left in the back. The strings were in the front with the various sections spanning left to right. It was absolutely fantastic.
Of course, I wasn't going to tell my mom that. I was 13 years old. I wouldn't agree to anything she said.
PHAT SOUND
It is hard to describe the sound on the Y966. The only term I could come up with is the term Phat Sound.
Now, the term "Phat" is an urban slang word for "good" or "excellent". But for music, the term takes on more qualities than just good or excellent. It's necessary to describe what makes a sound Phat.
From what I can tell, a Phat sound, or rather the Phat sound of a song, is one that encompasses a large range of voices, tones and frequencies, thus making it very satisfying to here. Usually a mix of low bass beats and percussion with voices (human and instrument) that are in a broad spectrum range of frequencies.
Here was my meager attempt at composing, trying to use my limited sound recording system to capture that Phat Sound. In this song, I tried to use some grunge beats and constant repetition of background sequences plus a wide range of frequencies.. The song does lack a little cohesion, but if you have a good sound system, you can catch the grand range of frequencies. There are a million things I'd like to tweak on this song, but at some point, you've got to stop and call the project complete.
Unfortunately, it's an MP3 and so, the compression takes away some of the spectrum. I have the Wav file on another hard drive. I'll try to upload that later.
I found a really great youtube video that encapsulates the Phat Sound. They use a mix of female voices for the high pitch with a heavy beat background and high strings. Great breaking dancing scenes, too. There is a lot of finesse in this song. I am still astonished at the world wide adoption of American Music style.
Everything is PHAT SOUND
But the purpose of this was to describe what a Phat Sound is and how it relates to the Zenith Y966.
Every album you listen to on this device, takes on the Phat Sound. It is amazing how 1960s technology can do such a remarkable job of producing this Phat Sound.
This is what I have found since it has (re)joined our household. You put a record on the Y966 not to listen to the song. You put a record on the Y966 to listen to the song ON the Y966.
Peak Coffee: Has something else in our world peaked?
OK…so I started noticing a pattern. But it took several
decades for me to see it form.
First there was the tape cassette:
Then there was the
floppy disk:
Then there was the
memory stick:
Are you detecting a pattern?
It seems than when a technology becomes so common, so pervasive in our
society and when companies have squeezed as much juice out of a product as they
can, they always seem to be able to squeeze profits out of it one last time by…
offering it in a variety of colors. This tells us the tech has peaked. And it is probably ready to be replaced by something else.
And so that gets us to Peak Coffee. I was at the store the other day and this is
what I saw:
So, what does this mean?
I don’t think it means that drinking coffee is dead. What I think this means is that there is
another new sophisticated coffee tech that is coming in the near future.
What will it be like?
Not a clue.
Or, I could be wrong and there is NO NEW coffee tech coming.
Who knows? Maybe the
old steel percolator is going to make a comeback.
While working in Italy in 2008, I had a chance to take a business trip to Moscow. I was pretty excited since I had a good friend who lived in Moscow while he worked on a project there.
We landed in the evening, I think. I was with a bunch of Italian engineers. I was the only American.
We checked into the Metropol Hotel. Apparently, this hotel used to be used exclusively for Politburo members. But we were Post-Communist now and we got the chance to see the richness of the place that used to be only for the powerfully connected.
Moscow Metropol Hotel Lobby
We first made our way to Red Square. Unfortunately, the gates were shut and locked. All we could do was look into the area. Quite impressive. There may have been another way in, but it was pretty dark and we were tired.
Gate to Red Square
The Kremlin and Cathedral
We made our way to what I am guessing was the Moskva River. The area was really quite nice. Restaurants lined the river. There were fountains and other nice touches.
We were getting hungry and decided to eat. I spotted a Sbarro's restaurant and (half kidding) told my Italian counterparts we could eat here.
Oh NO! They said. I decided to keep digging. I told them they had Italian food.
Oh! They did NOT! I was told.
So I pointed to the Sbarro umbrella printed on it "Authentic Italian food." Look at this I said.
They all laughed and kept walking.
We ended up eating here...and they were ok with that!!
We got back to the hotel and the elevator impressed me.
Metropol Hotel Elevator
The next day we had breakfast. I recall breakfast being $100. It was buffet style. A woman played the harp as we ate.
I loved the ceiling in the breakfast area.
After the meeting I headed out to meet my friend Raj Sharma. In order to get there, I had to take the Moscow subway system. Amazing and FAST!
Escalator down to the Moscow Subway
Stunning architecture.
The main problem I had was that all the signs were in Russian/Cyrillic. In order to find my way out, I had to follow people in the hopes they were exiting the subway and not just connecting to yet another subway train.
It's a miracle I made it to the bar my friend was waiting to meet me at.
OK. Let me know when they have it loaded. He typed back.
The street we live on is narrow and hard to maneuver. For a normal car. For a truck with a trailer that can carry three cars, just about impossible.
I stood looking at my car and the automobile delivery guy as he approached from a block away.
"We're going to push it over to our truck and load it there."
Ah. Clever. If Mohammad won't come to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammad.
....I think I have that backwards...
The car they came to fetch was my 2001 VW Beetle TDI.
The TDI standing for Turbocharged Direct Injection. Yep, this diesel powered puppy could hit the road and stay humming along for almost 600 miles on one tank of gas. We're talking close to 45 miles per gallon. And I was not driving this like "grandpa" drives, leaned over peering ahead going forty miles per hour.
We're talking screaming down the road at 90-100 miles per hour, blowing the doors off of other cars on the road. Yeah, it's not a supercharged Dodge Charger that probably could without even a sigh hit well over 140 mph. But for a small 1900cc turbodiesel, it was impressive.
This car was.... a sleeper in its own way. And I did everything I could to keep it running. And it was not easy.
I think I spent more on the car than what I originally paid for it. If ever there was a Beetle model that seemed to embody all of the problems a car can have, I owned it. Deteriorating plastic, airbag problems, oil pan issues, bad repair parts, even (gulp!) a bad fuel pump, you name it. Where other Beetles maybe had one of the problems, my Beetle seemed to have ALL of them.
So here I stood, watching as it was slowly hoisted up the ramp of the trailer. No longer drivable. The shift cable had messed up again. The A/C had quit working.
After replacing the spoiler three times, it was damaged yet again, this time by a raccoon who had just crossed the road and inexplicably CHANGED ITS MIND at the last second. I gave up. I wasn't going to do it a fourth.
Since then, the windshield cracked from the intense Houston heat. Someone had whacked the driver's side mirror, cracking it...and then self consciously folded it over so no one would notice.
But the engine. The engine was SOUND. It purred like a kitten. As with most diesels it had that small rattling sound while idling. But unlike the old diesels from the 80s that vibrated and rattled so bad you felt like you were caught in the middle of a California earthquake , today's diesels are as smooth on startup as any gasoline engine.
They loaded it up and are pulling away. I typed.
OK. Thanks! Thanks for everything! He typed.
Oh, Orlanda, I owe it all to you. Thanks for all you've done. I typed.
And so the New Beginnings. The person I was texting to was the one man who could make sure this old 18 year old car, on the brink of being a Collectible Antique, would be well taken care of. Handled with the care this old car deserved.
He was a mechanic in Jackson, Mississippi who was an expert on all things Volkswagen. And just about any other car from what I could tell. He had pulled this car out of so many fires, I lost count. I was living in Meridian at the time. He would even drive the 90 MILES to check out my car.
It started raining so I didn't get to see them drive away. But the image is imprinted on my brain almost as if I had seen it.
Goodbye, old friend. I'll stop in and check on you.
OK, so it's been a while now. But I think I can still describe what a typical Italian Cafe is like. They are certainly different from, say, a typical Korean coffee house.
Korean: Similar to American Cafes. Large, a number of tables, variety of coffees, variety of fare.
Italian: Small. Narrow. Few tables. Various coffees? No. Various types of coffee. Well, yes, I supposes. Espresso. Cafe Americano. Double espresso. Maybe....something else. But that's it. They usually have only the traditional pastries that I've discussed before.
There was one cafe I would occasionally visit. Very small and narrow. And tables? I recall maybe....three. And that day, they were all taken.
Many of the cafes in Italy actually have a bar. You know. Like in a....bar? But, all they have is coffee. I would sit sipping my "giant" Cafe Americano while many Italians would order an espresso, down it in one or two gulps and boom! they were out of there.
Well, this day I decided to use the bar. There are no chairs at the bar. I ordered my coffee - my giant coffee and started drinking.
I recall how many Italians came and went in that entire time I was casually sipping my giant coffee. Six? Eight? And here I was...still standing.
And then I just got tired of standing. I started to fidget. Put my weight on one foot. Then switch to the other one. I stood there for what seemed like 10 minutes.
And then I was finished.
I never drank at the bar ever again.
I should mention that many of the cafes have handmade Italian sodas. I never had one.
That would have required me to speak more Italian.
