Futility Now

It’s three weeks into my summer vacation & I can say with confidence that I’ve been making a pretty decent showing.  This last week has involved a ton of cooking with my mother, the highlight of which was the 15lb pork butt we picked up at the Original Steer Meat Market way out in the upper Ganges of Portland (where I grew up and my mother still lives).  Half of the butt (left cheek?) went to pork chili, and the other half to tamales.

I made up the sauce for the pork — I used a hybrid of recipes for mole sauce and chipotle sauce.  That chipotle flavor is divine if you ask me, but a bit spicy for the little one (okay, for me as well).  Ingredients included chipotles in adobo, tomato puree, powders of garlic & onion, oregano, sea salt & black pepper, cinnamon, brown sugar, bittersweet chocolate, and coffee.

After simmering for an hour, it was still mighty spicy, but when I added the pork and slow cooked it, some magical thing happened.  I think the plentiful fats in the pork meat balanced out the spice somehow.  The result was very nice.

In the past when I’ve made tamales I’ve had some help with the assembly.  It’s not that it’s difficult, but it is very messy and best done as quickly as possible, so that all the tamales have an equal steaming time, and the husks don’t dry out while you are working at it.  While some may consider this cheating, in the past I have also used kitchen twine to tie them closed, since I never manage to get the husks pliable enough to stay folded without it.  Finding myself twineless, however, I developed a new technique for getting the damn things in the steamer.

I used my mesh colander and stood them vertically, tips tucked like little sleeping bird heads.  The colander sits atop a wire stand for canning jars; the water level was about three inches high.  The only downside to this technique is that it only allowed me to fit about fifteen tamales in the pot, and if you’ll note the top photo, there’s a lot of masa and pork there.

On an exasperated whim, I put 1/4 cup measures of the masa dough into a cupcake tin and baked them for about forty five minutes — the little one named them lard muffins, and they are pretty good when piled with chipotle-mole pork & sour cream.

So the tamales were a real success, but I’ll admit that I don’t generally eat a lot of lard, and I found we (jmags, the little one, myself, and our dinner guests) were bloaty and stupefied after eating them — despite the grapefruit margaritas that flowed freely for all minus the minor.  Sometimes authenticity hurts. The next time around I may have to make some sort of compromise.

We had dinner at Rocket fairly recently and subsequently ducked back in for a beverage and some snacks. H felt some trepidation initially, as she had  heard mixed things from various food-eating personages. We suspect that maybe the place got off to a slow start, because both of our visits there were exceptional. On the first visit we were with 4 other people and had every entrée except the hamburger. Everyone shared everything, and we were all very pleased. I think the consensus is that the port shoulder was the number one offering, but I personally balanced my approbation a little more fairly. I will quell the urge to offer snobbish asides as to why this may have been.

The more recent visit involved only apps and drinks. H got some kind of meat-filled hush puppy, and I had a salad that was a bunch of slightly sweet and very tender pork under an immense pile of kimchi. The overall effect was extremely good, although I have to say that I think they wussed out a bit on the kimchi (i.e.: it wasn’t anywhere near as stanky as I was hoping that it would be.)

We have also become devotees of Apizza Scholls, although NOT of it’s patently offensive window decorations. Extremely poor taste aside, this place is a titan of tastiness. Our main problem is that we have not yet broken out of the one-caesar-and-one-white-pizza-to-share mould, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. Apizza may have an amazing array of other delicious options available to us, but for us we’re remarkably incurious. In our defense, the white pizza is basically cheese, truffle oil and sea salt. What the fuck else would you want?

Couple of concluding observations:

1) I promise that the next time I write about restaurants there will be surreptitiously snapped photos.

2) I don’t know if the same company does web sites for 90% of Portland’s restaurants, or if there’s some kind of hive mind mentality surrounding restaurant web design, but it sucks. This template (Rocket’s site is an example, Scholl’s isn’t) is absolutely horrible, and people perpetrating it need to die in a fire. Thanks.

I spent yesterday assembling a new theme for the site. I think it looks pretty nice and, more importantly, so does my fussier counterpart. It’s not without its gaps, which I hope to be making another pass at soon, but for a first try I think it stands up.

When we first set this thing up I played around with writing the whole thing from scratch, as it’s my instinct to avoid frameworks. We got to the point where we had a roughly 75% functional framework I decided I didn’t really like working in PHP, and that we’d be better off with an install of ye olde Presse of the Wordes. After that I was inclined to leave well enough alone for a while.

But you know how things are. Inevitably we got fed up with how the thing looked, so I opened up the themes that came pre-installed in an editor and started extrapolating. Obviously I don’t know enough to say whether it’s good or bad in the grand scheme of things, but I was pretty happy with the level of obfuscation involved in dealing with WordPress code. Its classes are fairly sensible and having all the args be key = value pairs with defaults keeps the spaghetti  level pretty controllable.

Nothing, however, was available as a buffer against the worst part of any internet-oriented project: CSS. Im not sure how this became the right way to do things, but it’s really awful. Considering how miniscule its task (styling markup) is, CSS is unforgivably complex, and its inheritence model is totally broken.  It really promotes creating great masses of intractable code. I imagine I’ll go ameliorate that at some point, but the fact that I have to at all is pretty annoying.

Sour grapes aside, it was pretty fun overall, and the slightly more iconoclastic look is nice (although I can’t really take credit for any of the design decisions; I just put it together.)