Friday, March 31, 2017

Bad Joke Friday

For those of a musical mind:

An Eb note, a C note, and a G note walk into a bar. The barman says, “Sorry, we don’t serve minors here.”

C sends Eb a dirty look. “I told you to act natural!”

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Something for Thursday

You all need an earworm. I'm here to provide.


Or, if former teen idols are more your speed:


Hey, if your musical life doesn't include the occasional bubblegum song once in a while, you're doing it wrong.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Something for Wednesday

I know, it's not Thursday. But hey, whoever said I had to stick to the schedule?

I've had an odd relationship with country music my entire life. On balance, it generally isn't my cup of tea, but when a country song gets under my skin, it really gets under my skin, and this -- "Y'all Come Back Saloon", by the Oak Ridge Boys -- is a perfect example. I love this song to death. I don't know why I've been listening to it a bit of late, but I have (and I've almost certainly featured it on Something for Thursday at one point or another). It goes back in my memory a long, long way -- all the way back to my childhood. I looked it up, and the song's 40th anniversary is coming up later this year. Wow.

I think I really respond to the country songs that have a hint of sadness to them. The best country songs always seem to deal with sad memories, of loves lost and people looking back over hard lives. That's what this song sounds like to me...and then there are the wonderful lyrics. I mean, the first verse (heard after the chorus, for an interesting formal change) is pure poetry:

In a voice soft and trembling, she'd sing her song to Cowboy,
As a smoky halo circled 'round her raven hair.
And all the fallen angels and pinball playin' rounders
Stopped the games that they'd been playin' for the loser's evening prayer.

I don't care how much you claim to hate country music, that is some wonderful writing there. The smoky halo circling her raven hair? That is a perfect image for a song like this, as is the notion of an entire saloon's clientele falling silent as the raven-haired beauty with her tambourine starts her song. Of course, the song's melody will lodge in your ear in the best way. What a great song.

This live performance is terrific. Please don't laugh at the Saturday Night Fever outfits they're wearing! This is a terrific performance. There are more recent renditions on YouTube as well, if you want to hear how the group has changed over the years.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Tone Poem Tuesday

Easter is coming, so in that vein, a concert overture by the great orchestral master Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His Russian Easter Festival Overture is a work that pays tribute to Easter and the Russian Orthodox liturgies. The composer actually uses a number of liturgical melodies and chants throughout the work, giving the piece a feel of being both older and newer than it actually is. Apparently in Russia Easter is called "the Bright Holiday", and Rimsky-Korsakov's overture teems with both a celebration of the Resurrection and a more pagan exultation in the coming of Spring.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Bad Joke Friday


Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Oops. Time got away from me yesterday. So what to do? Resort to the old favorites, of course. Lerner and Loewe, performed by Maurice Chevalier. Here is "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore" from Gigi.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Tone Poem Tuesday

Like many a lover of classical music, I suspect, my knowledge of composer Paul Dukas can be summed up in one sentence: "He wrote The Sorceror's Apprentice."

Which he did.

The Sorceror's Apprentice is pretty much the only work by Dukas to enter the standard repertoire, and I couldn't begin to tell you without Googling what else he might have written. This is partly because apparently Dukas was extremely self-critical, and he actually destroyed a good number of his own works rather than let them be heard. A number of his works have survived, but as of this writing, Dukas remains to me entirely unknown outside of this one tremendously famous piece (which received an assist from Walt Disney when it was included in Fantasia).

Here is The Sorceror's Apprentice.


Friday, March 17, 2017

GOOD Joke Friday!

A friend posted this on Facebook, and in honor of St. Patrick's Day, here it is!

---

It was raining hard and a big puddle had formed in front of an Irish pub.

An old man stood beside the puddle holding a stick with a string on the end and jiggled it up and down in the water. A curious gentleman asked what he was doing.

'Fishing,' replied the old man.

'Poor old fool' thought the gentleman, so he invited the old man to have a drink in the pub.

Feeling he should start some conversation while they were sipping their whisky, the gentleman asked, ‘And how many have you caught?'

'You're the eighth.'

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Something for Thursday

What's neat about really great songs is that they can be remade from one genre to another. "The Long Black Veil" started as a country ballad, but here it is recorded by Celtic supergroup The Chieftains and sung by Mick Jagger.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

How I made Gluten-Free Fried Chicken, lived to tell the tale, and was worshiped as a hero

The Wife and I both share a love of fried chicken, because fried chicken is awesome and people who don’t like it are wrong and unhappy. We don’t indulge fried chicken all that often, because it is admittedly not the healthiest stuff in the world, and over the last few years, we’ve indulged even more infrequently, as The Wife has had to adopt a gluten-free diet. Before that, though, this is how we almost exclusively enjoyed fried chicken:



Yeah: the KFC bucket. This is now off the table as an option for us, although once a year or so, when The Wife isn’t gonna be home for dinner, I’ll treat The Daughter and I to a bucket. (Same thing with one of our favorite local pizza joints, because I try not to flaunt Teh Gluten in front of She Who Cannot Eat It But Can Still Smell The Amazing Food).

Anyhow, very few restaurants offer GF fried chicken, so now it’s become an almost-luxury. One such restaurant is the wonderful Waffle Frolic in Ithaca. We make a point of eating there each and every year when we visit for the Apple Harvest Festival. I never heard of waffles with fried chicken until about ten years ago, but since then? One of my favorite things! We found another fried chicken restaurant with GF offerings in Webster, NY, but that’s nowhere near our usual beaten path. That leaves making it myself as the only real option.

Despite our love of fried chicken, I never made it all that often, because it tends to be a bit labor-intensive. (As per this excerpt from one of my favorite cookbooks.) However, I’ve recently decided that I should make it more often, and it needs to be gluten-free. So! Off to the races, Batman!

Obviously, the key is to make sure your seasoning is gluten-free (they almost always are, but it’s best to check the label or make your own seasoning mix) and use gluten-free flour instead of regular wheat flour. That’s it. Other than those cautions, making GF fried chicken is no different from any other fried chicken. I made a batch last weekend, and I was promptly informed that I didn’t make enough. (I made twelve pieces. For a family of three. Not enough. And...they were right.)

In terms of methodology, I did a little research on GF fried chicken, and then I basically mashed up a recipe of Emeril Lagasse’s (from this cookbook) with one of Alton Brown’s (from this episode of Good Eats – excuse the poor video quality. I only fried legs and thighs, because frankly I don’t get America’s obsession with breast meat, and while I could have done wings, the legs and thighs were enough. (And no, I didn’t butcher my own chickens. I know, Alton Brown says you’re supposed to. But when The Store sells these nice big packs of a dozen legs and another pack of a dozen thighs for the same combined price as two whole chickens, which wouldn’t yield enough of what I want anyway, I go with the big packs. My sense of frugality has not yet developed to “butchering my own chickens”.)

As I researched technique and looked at recipes, I realized that the only real difference is the flour, when making fried chicken gluten-free. That’s it. Every other aspect of preparation is the same. You just have to use different flour, and the key tip I found in this regard is that you have to be a little bit careful in which GF flour you use.

Gluten-free flour, for those who have never used it, is made of grains that don’t have gluten. I know, that’s obvious, but there are a lot of variations out there: rice flour, garbanzo bean flour, flours from various nuts, and so on. Some GF flours consist of just one of these, while others are a blend. The thing with GF flours is that because there’s no gluten, they don’t behave in quite the same way that wheat flour does, especially in yeast-leavening situations. Gluten is what gives bread and pizza dough that “stretchy” quality, which is why breads made with GF flour tend to have noticeably different texture. And that’s fine, but to get the textures closer to what’s expected, GF flours often have to be supplemented with xanthan gum.

What does this have to do with fried chicken? Well, some GF flours on the market now come with xanthan gum already added, while others don’t. For fried chicken, you want the stuff that does NOT have xanthan gum in it. Now, I did not verify this myself, but I found that tip on a GF cooking website that really seems to know what it’s talking about, so I took them at their word. So read the label and make sure your GF flour has no xanthan gum. OK? OK!

The rest of the steps were pretty standard, actually. I soaked the chicken in a quart of buttermilk overnight in a one-gallon ziploc bag. Emeril Lagasse says to season the buttermilk with hot sauce and Essence, but I didn’t bother. (Yes, I use Emeril’s trademark Essence spice mix. Sue me. It’s a perfectly good spice mix with flavors I like.) For the cooking oil, I used regular vegetable oil. I know, peanut oil is better for frying, but it’s also really expensive in the quantities needed, and since I do very little deep frying, I never end up keeping the oil I use for further dishes. Besides, smoke point wasn’t a factor, because of the temperature I used.

After about twenty-four hours of buttermilk soaking in the fridge, I drained the chicken, seasoned it liberally with Essence, and dredged it in my GF flour. Then I let the pieces rest on a rack over a cookie sheet while I heated the oil and then fried the pieces in batches, four at a time.

I'm making fried chicken. #yum #friedchicken

Alton Brown’s method in the Good Eats episode is actually for pan frying the chicken, not deep frying it. But the preparation steps are the same, as are the food-handling tips he provides, so I used all those: long buttermilk soak, liberal seasoning of both sides of the chicken, flour dredging, and resting the pieces. I did rest the pieces much longer than Brown calls for – in fact, the last pieces to go in ended up with a 40-minute rest period! But all was well, so I wasn’t worried. I also did not season the dredging flour itself, heeding Brown’s advice that some spices do burn so they’re better off being shielded beneath the flour than being mixed in with it.

And then, into the oil with the chicken!

Fry some more! #yum #friedchicken #altonbrown

Come to papa! #yum #cooking #friedchicken

As noted, Brown is pan frying his chicken in the show, so he uses vegetable shortening that he heats to 350 degrees. I used vegetable oil to deep fry my chicken, and here I heeded a piece of advice from Lagasse: I used a lower temperature, only 300 degrees (which dipped into the 280-range when the pieces first went in). I had about three inches deep worth of oil in my Dutch oven, and I did four pieces at a time, ten minutes to a side each. Doing the math, it took me about an hour to fry up a dozen pieces of chicken – another reason I don’t do this all that often. Lagasse recommends the lower heat because he believes that higher heat can result in a scorched crust on the chicken by the time the meat is done. Again, I did not experiment to see if he was right. I did, however, follow his advice, and the result was highly satisfactory.

Finally, out came the chicken:

Overalls are the ideal garment for cooking, yo. #cooking #overalls #vintage #Key #bluedenim #dungarees #denim

Thigh and leg. Finished article. Oh yeah babe. #yum #cooking #friedchicken #darkmeat #ftw

Those two pieces above are from the last batch, which was quite noticeably darker than the first batch, because of more bits of stuff floating around in the oil by the time I got to them. They were still awesome, though.

Oh, and that book excerpt I link above? I think she’s wrong when she says that the chicken must be fried at the last minute. If anything, the chicken should be fried first, and then allowed to rest for a while before eating. I had more than enough time to throw together a batch of cornbread and bake it in between the batches. It’s generally my belief that you do not want to eat fried chicken within at least fifteen minutes of removing it from the fryer. The stuff stays warm for a really long time, and cooked meat of any type should always be rested.

How did the chicken come out in the end? Well, the family ate it all up and promptly scolded me for not making enough. I made twelve pieces. That should tell you something. That was some good chicken, folks! And The Wife didn’t get sick from eating it! Yay! Yeah, we really set the culinary bar high here at Casa Jaquandor: food has to both taste good and not make The Wife sick.

A couple other random thoughts:

:: This gadget is awesome:

Another indispensable kitchen gizmo: a combination timer and thermometer. The probe is on a long cord and you can set a target temp for stuff in the oven: when the food hits the temp, the gizmo beeps. Very handy. #cooking

It’s a combo timer and probe thermometer. The probe is on a really long high-temp cord, so you can actually set the probe in a piece of food in the oven and set the gizmo to alert you when a target temperature is reached. Or you can use it as a straight-up timer. Very useful. I recommend it.

:: I also recommend that every kitchen on Earth have at least one of these:

BTW, if your kitchen arsenal doesn't include one of these, GET ONE. Trust me. #cooking #spiderskimmer

The spider skimmer is a Chinese invention that is ideal for removing food items from hot liquids. Seriously, you need one of these if you don’t have one. You might even need two.

:: This was the first time I ever used my Dutch oven for deep frying. Prior to this, I always used my wok, which works just fine. The wok is a perfectly acceptable pan for deep frying. I prefer the Dutch oven, though. Its straight sides give more room at the pan’s bottom for the chicken pieces to do their thing without touching each other and getting clingy. Also, the Dutch oven is narrower at the top, which means that I could use my splatter-shield gizmo to contain the splattering oil. With the taller pot and the lower oil temp, there wasn’t really much splatter at all, but being able to use the shield was a bonus. (I know, I can get a shield wide enough for the wok.)

:: Always take time while cooking to pet the cat.

Lester visited while I was making dinner #Lester #catsofinstagram

And I always wonder, why don’t more cooks and chefs wear overalls in the kitchen? Their whole purpose is to be protective! Comfort is supreme, they’re not super hot to wear, owing to their looser fit than regular pants, having pockets to stick utensils is nice, and I like to hang a towel off the hammer loop to wipe my hands on. Anyway....

So there you have it: making gluten-free fried chicken. Next time I’ll probably make two dozen pieces. And I’ll be frying for two hours....

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

More snow....

Snowy #wny #winter

This really hasn't been a very hard winter, in terms of snow. In fact, there's only been one or two really "big" snow events, and one of those was really only notorious by virtue of when and how the snow hit: intense snowbands that stalled in place right during late afternoon and evening rush hour, back in November. That made a huge mess, and there were even kids stranded on school buses or who didn't even make it out of school.

So now the "big storm" is hitting the Northeast, and it's not sparing Buffalo. We're not really on the docket to bear any of the brunt of this one, but we will get a good amount of snow. Luckily it will fall over three days instead of three hours, which makes it much more manageable. There's some kvetching going on because Governor Cuomo declared a state of emergency not just for Eastern NY and the NYC metro area, which are the regions that are in the crosshairs for a big hit, but for all of New York State, which has a lot of people in Buffalo going, "Huh? We've functioned normally in worse than this." I dunno...I can see that point, but we have seen storms turn worse than expected in recent memory (see above), and just last week there was a nasty wind storm that still has several thousand homes in WNY without electricity. I don't think erring on the side of caution is always a bad thing.

Anyway, stay warm, people!

Tone Poem Tuesday

An American in Paris.

Is it a tone poem? You bet! Or rather, a "symphonic poem", which is really much the same thing. Gershwin intended the work to reflect the energy and rhythms he experienced while traveling in 1920s Paris himself, and the work really does buzz with a certain cosmopolitan energy, at least until the pace slackens and we turn to the plaintive blues sung by the solo trumpet. It's amazing to me that such an optimistic work could be inspired by a European city so soon after the cataclysm of World War I, but in the roaring twenties, I imagine Paris was a place of amazing energy. I tend to see this work as a companion to the Rhapsody in Blue, but an older, more mature one.

Happy Pi Day!!!

UPDATE 3/14/2019

I see this post is getting a lot of traffic all of a sudden, so if you like this sort of goofiness, check out my similar post from last year, which features a newer video in which I may or may not get pied. (Spoiler: I get pied.) Happy Pi Day, everyone!

UPDATED below!

Yes, it's Pi Day, 3-14, the funnest of all the various goofy geeky holidays! (Well, May 4 -- Star Wars Day -- is right up there.)












UPDATE!!!

I posted the earlier material to hold this space until I had my own material ready to go. I didn't properly observe Pi Day last year, so I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice!

Pi Day preview: The pie, ready for dispatch! #piday #whippedcream

Final Pi Day preview! The last second, Prismafied. Video and other stuff tomorrow! #piday #pieintheface #pieinface #pieface #splat #pietotheface #overalls #vintage #Lee #bluedenim #dungarees #denim #rawdenim #doubledenim

Pi Day impact, close-up

And the final bit of #piday content for this year! Aftermath, Prismafied. Huzzah! #pieintheface

(These photos have been modified with an app called Prisma that makes nifty "artistic" images out of source photos.)

Happy Pi Day 2017!!!

Happy Pi Day, everyone!!!!!


Monday, March 13, 2017

Instaweeks

I haven't done this in a long time -- just a feature of a number of my recent photographic adventures via Instagram or Flickr. Here's some stuff that's been going on of late!

Reviewing notes. FORGOTTEN STARS III isn't gonna publish itself! #amwriting

No filter. Lighting fail. #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound #ChestnutRidge #wny #OrchardPark #winter

(This was a total FAIL of a photo, because of the lighting, but the look on the dee-oh-gee's face makes it look like he's just realized that the Horror Movie Murderer is behind him. Look out, Cane! Beware the Double-Denimed Doer of Dastardly Deeds!

Repping the double denim today #ootd #overalls #vintage #Lee #bluedenim #dungarees #denim #rawdenim #doubledenim

(You know, I doubt I'll ever decide to agree with people who say you shouldn't wear double-denim. Denim is awesome...especially the raw denim of those overalls. Need to blog about those....)

(These next photos I took while walking about with The Wife and The Dee-oh-gee in Geneva, NY. We went on an overnight getaway there a couple weeks ago.)

Rain or shine...PLAY! #sidewalkart #genevany

Hop Twist Twirl!! #sidewalkart #genevany

Another neat building. I like the cut of Geneva, NY's jib. #genevany #architecture

Sun and rain on Seneca Lake #fingerlakes #senecalake #genevany

Muddy driveway at a Seneca Lake winery #fingerlakes #senecalake #winery

Fingerlakes wine tasting! Look at the pretty bottles we bought! #wine #yum #fingerlakes

We visited a couple of wineries for tastings; hence the six bottles of wine. Wine is a big thing in the Fingerlakes Region.

Day three of mini-vacation! (And I didn't wear overalls at all for the first two days. Weird, I know!) #ootd #overalls #vintage #Lee #bluedenim #dungarees #denim #sweater #redandblue

Wow. The cookies were in sync today. #FortuneCookieTellsAll #chinesefood

Is anyone here a marine biologist!!! #seinfeldquotes #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound #beacheddoggie

Life keeps on goin', man!

Friday, March 10, 2017

Bad Joke Friday

Eep! I almost forgot about this! Take it away, Mr. Astrophysicist Man:


Thursday, March 09, 2017

Something for Thursday

I've featured this piece before, but it's turned up a number of times recently in my life -- a couple of times on the radio, and the other night two movements from it featured in The Daughter's school concert. So here is one of the grandest of orchestral showpieces, the Capriccio Espagnol by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Squaring Eight

Roger Owen Green has turned sixty-four, which means that the one age to have a Beatles song devoted to it is now his! Huzzah! Here's a barbershop-quartet type of cover of that very song.


Go wish Roger a happy birthday. Do it. Do it now!

Tone Poem Tuesday

Here's a strange work by Ludwig van Beethoven, written to commemorate a victory in battle by the Duke of Wellington. The piece is viewed as one of Beethoven's lesser works, and probably rightly so. Even Beethoven himself admitted as much, saying "What I shit is better than anything you come up with!" Still, it's worth a fun listen once in a while. It's basically a potboiler of a piece. Here's Wellington's Victory.


Of course, this type of thing would be done a lot more convincingly decades later by Tchaikovsky in the 1812 Overture....