DIY Tomatoes and 99¢ Boxer Support

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Goddamn hallelujah it is tomato season!  The seedlings I planted in May have exploded into thickets of green and red.  When water from the sprinkler hits the leaves, the sweet, sharp smell of their insides blooms up.  When I try to arrange one branch this way or another vine that way, the delicate green-white outer skin rubs off, leaving a seeping window into a deeper, interior green.

I don’t want those tears.  You don’t either.  But tomatoes are scraggly, lurching vines.  Without some kind of support, they really would weave through and around themselves along the ground into thickets.

A case in point. Notice that I'm double-teaming with both a dippy cage and a craptastic bamboo stake. Notice that I've already tried to bundle the beast into some sort of manageable order. Notice how Nature laughs at me.

And tomato cages only do so much good.  That is, if you’re giving your tomatoes the sun and the water they need, they will outgrow any cages I’ve ever seen at the hardware store.  And stakes are a joke, which doesn’t mean I don’t have some from back in the day that I will continue to use until they’re splinters.

But you need to tie the limbs of your tomato plant up to support of some sort or another.  If you don’t, you’ll end up breaking branches when you pick the fruit.  The bounty is just too heavy for the source. Continue reading →

Tighten Your Dirndl and Snap Those Lederhosen, It’s Oktoberfest Time!

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Oktoberfest: it's German for Festival of Beer and Boobs!

Bierleichen: it’s the German word for people who pass out from drinking too much. Literally, beer corpses. You’ve got to love a culture that has a word for just that, right? That’s why today we’re celebrating Oktoberfest beers.

Much in the same way department stores drag out the wreathes, red ribbons, and oversized jingle bells while you’re still dealing with a Halloween candy hangover, the liquor stores are stocking their refrigerated shelves with Oktoberfest right now, even before post-season baseball begins. So we’re going to take a moment out of this glorious August day to talk about these fall beers.

This year the official Oktoberfest in Munich begins September 22nd and runs through October 7th. So, it’s not all in October, either. Way back when, the dude in charge of Germany’s social schedule pushed his glasses up his nose and signed a document to begin the celebrations in September for the better weather. But when the party started, back in 1810, it began in mid-October to celebrate the October 12th wedding of Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese. The events wrapped up with a horse race, which was apparently such a good time that they decided to do it again the next year. And that, folks, is how traditions begin. With lots of beer. Continue reading →

Picking Apart Picky Eating

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incredible, edible

The most reviled ad campaign of my childhood

“I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor,” Julia Child said. It was no grotesque vermin that prompted this declaration, no poisonous bit of flora. It was cilantro, an ingredient that many foodies would eat by the fistful.

She’s hardly alone. It’s rare to find someone who really and truly enjoys eating everything. My father winces at the sight of asparagus, my boss gags on any tomato sauce that is too sweet, my friend Dave turns pale at the thought of white substances located anywhere along the mayonnaise/sour cream/Alfredo sauce continuum. What’s more, I’d be hard-pressed to name the favorite dish of any of these people. The items that repulse them are just weirder and more interesting.

But where do these strange food hatreds come from? Is it cultural? Physiological? Psychological? There’s a whole field of psychological research behind the notion of conditioned food aversions (also called Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome). One nasty encounter with a food, and our minds can turn us against it for years to come. The theory is based on the idea that our foraging ancestors had to learn to stay away from noxious berries and such, but anyone who ever did too many shots of Jägermeister will be intimately familiar with the basic concept. The thing is, many foods become guilty merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was hardly the fault of that can of red cream soda that I drank it right before I got a bad case of the stomach flu when I was eight years old, but it was many years before I could drink any of its brethren.

But the conditioned response explanation seems to me, at best, incomplete. Continue reading →

Name that Kitchen Gadget!

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In scouring the Internet for this Friday’s pop quiz, I found an OK Cupid page devoted to “singles interested in obscure kitchen gadgets.” Believe me, they covered quite a spectrum, these singles, from a chipper looking New Zealander making a peace sign at the camera to a scowling woman from Tempe whose eye shadow was almost as impressive as her cleavage.

At any rate, gadgets clearly have wide appeal and since we had fun a few weeks ago with our historic utensil puzzle, we thought we’d let our readers test their wits with some more modern marvels. If you can identify all nine of the items below, you should start your own culinary school…or at least troll for some new admirers on OK Cupid.

gadget 1gadget 2gadget 3gadget 4gadget 5

gadget 6

gadget 7gadget 8gadget 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t follow this link until you’re ready to see the answers! Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion Part II (1786)

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So, picking up on Monday’s tale of the potato’s rise to the status of staple food and, more specifically, the height of fashion:  When France sent its army out against Frederick the Great’s in the Seven Year War, a 19-year-old pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier signed up.  He ended up locked in a Prussian prison, escaped, was recaptured, etc. until he served, by some accounts, a total of five stints in the cooler.  Frederick, you’ll recall, had forced his starving Germanic masses to eat potatoes through the delicate wielding of the lash, and so Parmentier found himself eating nothing but during his stay.

In spite of the fact that the potato was banned as human fodder in his home country because it was believed to cause leprosy, Parmentier did not, in fact, lose any digits.  So when he made it home in 1763 and took the job of pharmacist at the Invalides Hospital, he tried to push the food.  Alas, the Catholic Church ran the hospital, and we know how open they are to new and healthful ideas.  Not even Parmentier’s win in a 1770 essay contest on “Foodstuffs Capable of Reducing the Calamities of Famine” changed their minds, nor the Paris Faculty of Medicine’s reclassification of the spud as legit food two years later.  So Parementier searched his brain, scratched his long, cartoonish chin, and discovered his inner Charles Barnum. Continue reading →

How to Feed (and Shvitz) a Cold

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Banya

This is from the Brooklyn Banya website. Full disclosure: most of the women in bikinis I saw were not wearing hats.

I tightened my towel and slithered along the wall, trying not to interfere in the conversation between the proprietor of the Brooklyn Banya and another man (which was perhaps a friendly disagreement or perhaps just shy of coming to blows—it was hard to say), but before I could inch out of sight, the owner grinned at me happily, pumped his fist in the air and said, “Yaaaah! Americaaaan!” I took this as some sort of ebullient welcome to his house of Russian-ness, so I sniffled and weakly raised my fist in return.

A summer cold is an insidious affliction, sneaking up on you with its chills and fevers while everyone else is still frolicking happily in the sunshine. And so when one hit me this past weekend, I decided to fight fire with fire—I was going to sweat the thing out of me.

It’s true that, at least for most people, the main attraction at the banya on Coney Island Avenue is not the food, but I had sound reasons for considering this a PitchKnives excursion. For one, even the non-edible portions of a bath house have a hint of the culinary. Where else can you simulate the experience of baking yourself (dry sauna), parboiling yourself (steam room) or poaching yourself inside a eucalyptus leaf (wet sauna)? But more importantly, I figured that any people who included Siberia within their borders would boast some powerful cold-battling vittles. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion (8,000 B.C. & 1740)

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The historical trajectory of potatoes joined ours sometime between 8,000 and 5,000 B.C.  The Incas developed enough different varieties that, according to National Geographic, they could glean every nutrient needed for survival from a potato-only diet.  They included spuds in their prayers.

The rest of the world was not so enamored.  When the Conquistadors introduced potatoes to Europe in the 1500s, folks suspected them not merely deficient for human consumption, but injurious.  They are not mentioned, after all, in the Bible.  Their lumps and eyes suggested disease in an age in which the appearance of a vegetable was often thought to reflect the maladies it could cause or cure.  In 1633, French Burgundy felt the need to pass a law forbidding people “to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy.”  Continue reading →

Yo, Did You Know That Monticello Has a Sweet Garden as Part of Its Deeply Ambivalent Legacy?

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Monticello is the Virginia plantation that Thomas Jefferson spent 41 years building and the home to which he brought all of the inventions of clever common sense he found in Europe or Antiquity’s texts: a machine that duplicates with one pen on a piece of paper the motion of the pen worked by a human hand on another; a Lazy Susan for books; a clock to hang in a continent of folks who’d never seen one.  He invented a plow and designed into the house components so simple as to be plucked from the seed of artfulness just before passing the threshold of “invention”: a weather vane on the roof attached to swing a compass on the ceiling of  the vestibule; the weights that turned the clock unspooling up the wall along a seven-day calender, telling the time.

Jefferson imagined an America of gentlemen farmers.  He himself was a farmer, would have been a gardener were it not for the free labor of 200-odd slaves whom the museum now refers to as “enslaved workers.”  I like how it shifts the emphasis.

Jefferson considered the introduction of horticultural wonders a responsibility.  His slaves cut his vegetable garden out of the side of the mountain with hand tools.  They created a small bluff over sloping fields he would try unsuccessfully forever to turn into a vineyard.  The garden was dinner, botanist’s experiment, and showpiece.  It included a pavilion with a pyramidal roof and a reading bench.

The garden is kind of awesome. Continue reading →

A Schooling on Summer Beers

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Every day I wake up and think to myself, "you never have to go to school ever again," and then I can get up.

The other day I saw a school bus drive by and my stomach dropped. I felt the same wave of dread that came over me at the end of every summer, ages six to seventeen. I’ve found there’s nothing better to rid oneself of this anxiety than indulging in something that reminds me of adulthood – like a good beer. The only question we have to answer then today is: “what exactly is a summer beer?” The answer: I don’t know and ohmigod we’re running out of summer!

There are dozens of brews out there that call themselves “summer beer,” such as the Sierra Nevada Summerfest sweating on my desk at this very moment. The language on all their labels promises crisp, light, thirst-quenching drinks. For the most part, they all have a fairly low alcohol content, too, lending themselves to long, hot afternoons. With those characteristics in mind, let’s take a look at some of my favorite styles that will cool you down on these remaining Indian summer days.

Wheat beers cut the heat pretty efficiently, and I find hefeweizens to be some of the most effective. Yeasty and fruity, they come in pretty tall, thin glasses with a curl of lemon or orange on the lip. (A highly contested piece of fruit, as some so-called aficionados claim it ruins the taste and head. Come on, let’s have a little fun here.) The best hefe I ever had was a Weihenstephaner (they’re also fun to say!) on a blistering day in Boston. Continue reading →

Reminder: Send Us Your Best Summer Cocktail!

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cocktailsTemperatures are once again rising like a flock of seagulls on the wing. It’s important to hydrate…and why not throw in a little gin while you’re at it? We’re calling on all you gifted mixologists out there to cool our sweaty brows.

Send your signature summer cocktail recipes to submission@pitchknives.com. We’ll try the ones we like best and rate them according to taste, creativity and capacity to refresh.

It’s only right that the winners receive a token of our gratitude. What will it be? An artful swizzle stick? A crocheted beer coozie? A hand-mixed glass of Shannon’s signature cocktail, the Bee’s Knees? You’ll just have to win to find out.

Entries are due this Saturday, August 11. So get to it! Shake, stir, and please, please chill. The address for entries is, one more time, submissions@pitchknives.com.