Huh?

I just found the following, scribbled in the back of a three-year-old notebook I use on very rare occasions:

8:45 — tap
9:02 — cough
4:23 — soda
4:24 — dust-off

I'm almost completely sure it's my handwriting. I'm also completely completely sure I have no idea what it means.

Is it an itinerary? An interruption schedule? A dance routine?

What was I thinking??

This Carolyn Grantham deserves props

I've set up a Google Alert so I know when my blog posts are crawled. And as I'm not the only Carolyn Grantham out there, some of the reports obviously refer not to me, but to my sisters-in-name.

This is one I wanted to share: a news story about Carolyn Grantham the hot-air balloonist taking developmentally challenged students for rides in one of the country's few wheelchair-accessible balloons.

See if you can read it without getting misty ...

It is the distant future ... the year 2000 ...

As I wrote previously, with a party to go to, we decided to take the futureworld approach for Hallowe'en this year. I've always had a hankering for silver go-go boots and fuschia wigs, so these (plus a lovely shirt I found in NYC in August, plus a space gun that makes eight different realiztik sounds), became the basis of my costume.

I was going for the retro-future look; something that said "it's the Sixties and we think the future will be pretty kicky, babe."

What I got was more "Look at me, I'm mutton dressed as lamb! Hooray!"



The Boy said, "That's nice. I want to be a crap robot."

So we found some boxes, bought shiny paper and LED lights, rummaged around the Garment District for a shiny top and, four hours before we were due at our friends' party, started to pull the look together.

Oh. Turned out the shiny paper was actually clear cellophane; it just looked metallic on the roll.

So, with the clock ticking, we ran out to PaperSource and grabbed four rolls of totally sparkly wrap.

"You certainly like our glitter paper," smiled the saleslady as she charged me $32. Grrr.

Back home, we wrestled with foil tape and packing tape and Scotch tape. After a couple of hours, the apartment was frosted with loose glitter.

But we had created a totally fabulously crappy awesome robot.

A bloody talisman

The morning after the Red Sox became AL champions, I walked down Brookline Ave to my office near Fenway Park.

Most signs from the previous night's celebration had been cleared away. Except for this:



A single sock, daubed with red.

For those unfamiliar with the symbolism of this object, here's an explanation. I particularly enjoy the line "the injured tendon in his ankle began snapping over the bone, which caused a popping sound."

It's now almost a week since the sock appeared.

There have been two World Serious games at Fenway, attracting more than 30,000 people a night. Even without the baseball-related hooplah, Brookline Ave is a pretty busy thoroughfare, thanks to the concentration of hospitals and colleges in the neighborhood, not to mention the bars and clubs facing the park along Lansdowne Street.

Each morning, the streets are cleaned, reasonably effectively, of programs, posters, plastic cups and hot-dog detritus.

And yet the sock remains.

I'd wager it will stay there, hooked on the chainlink fence next to the parking lot, until the Series is over.

Because no-one, not even the most grounded skeptic, is crazy enough to mess with the streak.

Sea beans!

One of the most fun things about shopping at WholeFoods is the range of unusual produce. Case in point: sea beans. And after many weeks of passing by, occasionally stopping to fondle them and wonder what-the-, we decided to give 'em a whirl.



Pretty, huh?

Apparently the plant is also known as samphire or glasswort (also passe-pierre, salicornia, sea asparagus, sea green bean, sea fennel and sea pickle), and was used in the production of glass in 16th-century England.

A taste test revealed that the beans are perfectly named. Imagine fresh raw green beans that have soaked in saltwater but retained their crispness: Sea. Bean. They're more texture than flavor (apart from, um, salt), but quite refreshing.

Their saltiness seems to make them a natural accompaniment to fish and seafood, and the few recipes I managed to track down treat them simply: blanch and serve with butter or lemon or olive oil or parmesan. Apparently, a traditional English method is to pickle them. First I'd heard.

We decided not to cook them, and instead used them to finish a stir-fry of eggplant, zucchini, ginger, lemongrass and shiitake mushrooms over rice noodles, where they added a nice crunchy note.

The Boy also experimented with a vodka-sake martini garnished with a sea-bean sprig, which made an interesting alternative to the usual briny olive.

Would we get sea beans again? Let's ask The Boy.

"Oh yeah," he says, without hesitation. "Definitely. I could just sit in front of the TV and eat a whole bunch of them."

Mind you, he also likes anchovies and capers, so his salt tolerance is way higher than mine.

Oh, way higher--he'll also happily order Vietnamese lemonade on a hot day.

Waaaaay higher.

What not to wear (until the distant future)

We've been totally geeking out lately, Doctor Who and Torchwood being the main culprits. So when it came time to consider Hallowe'en-wear, I was thinking ahead--to the future (and beyond!).

Which led to this morning's trip to the Garment District (it's a store). Hallowe'en is the District's Christmas--they're open until midnight through the end of October, and the place becomes increasingly crowded and frantic and heaving with students the closer one gets to the 31st.

So we were smart and went early, in the knowledge that the store's core clientele would still be sleeping off last night's kegstands. Good move: it was calm and peaceful. And they were playing the Kings of the Wild Frontier album, which made me feel 12 again.

The first floor of the store is now Boston Costume (formerly of Chinatown), so the range of outfits and accessories is huge: everything from vintage '50s dresses to authentic '80s suits to pirate/doctor/Elvis/vampire/gorilla-wear. (Though not all at once, unless you went as a pirate vampire gorilla-doctor who did Elvis impressions on the side.)

We realized certain costumes would make for great shorthand if you were trying to figure out whom to talk to at a party; if a guy is dressed as a Revolutionary officer, or Sherlock Holmes, or this rather fetching chef, he's probably cool. (The last one may only apply to me.)

If he's wearing a Whoopie cushion, or a condom machine, or ... well, this sophisticated outfit, it's time to check out the bar.

Anyway, back to the future. I came away with this:



The future's gonna be cool ... as long as the Flight of the Conchords's prediction does not come to pass.

The clouds were awesome today

Famous Puppet Death Scenes

So Edward Gorey, Tim Burton, Jan Švankmajer and the Monty Python guys all got together to write a puppet show about death.

Okay, they didn't. But if they had, the result would have been a lot like The Old Trout Puppet Workshop's Famous Puppet Death Scenes, which we saw tonight at the ICA.

To be honest, I was a little reticent about going; visions of lugubrious Dickensian vignettes lurked in the back of my head. But then I read the program notes, which said, in part:

Some scenes, I admit, were impossible to reproduce--surely the climactic finale of Düsseldorf's "Colossal Jesus" should take its place here among the hallowed, but the theater is only so large and the practice of human sacrifice has largely gone out of fashion.

Oh, I realized, it's meant to be funny.

And indeed it was, in large part--from the recurring scenes of a middle-aged, floppy-armed little man trying to avoid being walloped by a disembodied fist to Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel, in which two amorphous European characters are forced to choose between life and death, with, um, intestinal results. (Nein, Bipsy! Nein!)

But it was also poetic (a whale's giant eye opening and closing for the last time in a shimmering sea) and painful (the unbearable silence following a violent domestic argument, the whole scene illustrated only through the pages of an oversized pop-up book) and moving (a grieving man's tender, final farewell).

My favorite was Ice Age, in which a terminally ill man awakes after being frozen for centuries to find humans have evolved: they all speak an advanced language, spend their time on choreography and look like Johnny Depp. They have also conquered death, which pleases the man immensely--until he learns they envy him the gift of mortality.

The Boy liked The Ballad of Edward Grue, a rural-gothic cautionary tale about dressing up as a deer during hunting season (especially effective were the scarlet ribbons that unfurled and spread down the front of Edward's prone body).

Oh, I'm sorry--did I give away the ending? See, that's the thing: even though each vignette was so creative and imaginative that there was no way to guess where the story would lead, the finale was always the same.

As it is for all of us, right?

Breakfast: Porridge

Growing up, my oatmeal (or, as it were, porridge) experience came from two different angles. At home, winter breakfast meant Ready Brek, an instant hot cereal best known for ads that suggested a bowlful would give kids a visible aura of warmth (and yes, I was always disappointed when I couldn't see mine). It was quick, easy to make, creamy and comforting.

My grandmother's porridge was at the other end of the scale in terms of prep: the oats required constant observation and non-stop stirring, lest they stick and burn. The result was a thick, rich concoction, finished with a drizzle of honey. It was great--real stick-to-the-ribs stuff--but I had to wonder whether the effort was really worth it. You could make, eat and clean up after your Ready Brek in the same amount of time.

These days, we fall somewhere in the middle: we buy oats that take only a few minutes to cook--not completely instant, but not far off--and add dried cranberries, apricots and dates, crystallized ginger, fresh-ground nutmeg.

I thought that was pretty inventive. And then I read about the Golden Spurtle, which sounds like some adults-only Harry Potter adventure, but is actually the world porridge-making championship, held in Carrbridge, Scotland. Now in its fourteenth year, it consists of two sections: traditional (using just oats, salt and water) and specialty (oats plus a "blending and harmony" of other ingredients).

What impressed me most was not that the porridge should be referred to in the third-person plural, nor that the spurtle should be "stirred clockwise using the right hand so as not to invoke the devil," nor even what a spurtle is.

No, the coolest fact was that the winner of the specialty division (whose scene-stealing dish was apparently oatmeal topped with applesauce--hardly outside-the-bowl thinking) owns The Porridge Bowl, a mobile oatmeal truck.

And--even better--he's not the only one. There's also a chain, Stoat's Porridge Bar. Check out that line!

I wish I lived on a porridge truck route.

(sigh)

A taste of Liberty

Every day for the last year or so, my Red Line commute has included a brief glimpse of the transformation of the Charles Street Jail from 140-year-old prison to swank-ay boutique hotel. The Liberty Hotel finally opened last month, and last night we headed over for a snacky and a drinkie and a bit of a gawk.

It can be tricky to do theme hotels well; either you get the over-the-top cartooniness of Vegas (with its chlorinated Venetian canals and Parisian boulevards lined with trees fitted with electrical outlets) or you get a half-hearted nod to history (as at Jurys, housed in the old Boston Police HQ, which got as far as calling its bar Cuffs and then stopped).

The Liberty has pretty much got the balance right--the bar is called Alibi and the restaurant is Clink--but really, given the surroundings, it would be hard to downplay the building's backstory. A working jail for 140 years, it closed in 1990 (though declared unfit for human habitation since '73). Famous inmates included Sacco and Vanzetti, Albert DeSalvo, Malcolm X.

The $150 million spent on renovation included the removal of two tons of pigeon guano from the walls and roof. This audio slideshow from WBUR has some great before- and during-renovation images; compare and contrast with the "after" shots in this Flickr slideshow.

Three-storey arched windows, a 90-foot ceiling with wooden rafters and century-old brickwork. Circumferential catwalks, and cell numbers etched in stone above doorways fitted with iron bars. And then the modern touches: immense photographic silhouettes of trees, oversized white leather wingback chairs, octopus cassoulet.

Come on--you know I was getting to the food.

We tried for a table in the restaurant, but they were booked solid. Unexpectedly, the hostess asked if we wanted to eat in the lobby. "There are a couple of seats over in the corner," she said; "I'll send someone over."

We took up residence, people-watching the bright young things at the lobby bar, and waited. And waited.

Hm--not good.

But just as we were starting to consider relocating, the hostess came over. "Has anyone seen to you yet? No? I'm so sorry--I'll get someone for you right away."

I'm pretty sure that was a first for us: it wasn't necessarily her responsibility to look after the cocktail-centric crowd in the lobby. And although she was already busy, she took time to cross the room to check up on us. Big points there.

Soon thereafter arrived a waitron, and soon thereafterafter arrived wine. The Liberty sells their by-the-glass stuff in 100-mil and 250-mil quantities (the former being a reasonable $10-$15, the latter a slightly scary $25 and up); I ordered the smaller "taste" but ended up with more because the bartender wanted to finish up the bottle.

We just wanted small plates because we'd lunched on huge grilled tuna steaks (assuming each weekend might be the last grilling opportunity of the year) so started with a snackette of chicharrón with pink salt, lime and Thai basil. The pork cracklins were out of a bag, but the extra ingredients gave them a bright, hot, wake-up-tastebuds kick. Interesting enough to go on our next party menu, for sure.

Then octopus cassoulet for me (not really cassoulet as such, but rather some meaty blackened octopod served with a creamy stew of Parma ham, white beans, cranberry and orange) and duck confit flatbread for The Boy, the duck moist and dark and delicious.

And we don't usually do dessert, but they had peach kebabs with lavender marscapone, which seemed like the kind of thing we would order if we did. So we did. Not a huge plate--two small sugarcane skewers with a couple of grilled peach slices and a mini-ramekin of cheese--but enough to give us ideas (I still have bunches of lavender from this year's harvest).

And then it was time for a jailbreak. Oh, we paid the bill first. It seemed wise, given the surroundings. And then we busted out of the joint. Down the escalator.

Just (remembering) dessert

I was going to write about Rialto, wasn't I? Oh, but that was three whole weeks ago, and my tastebud memory has faded.

Mostly.

Neither of us can quite remember how I started, though I think some tender prosciutto was involved (The Boy had a grilled squid salad with fresh mint, which blended nicely). I do recall that the pork two ways included a chunk of Kurobuta pork shoulder that can only be described as pig confit. I know The Boy had a whole grilled sea bass with mussels and lemon that (if memory serves) was delicate, if a little unadventurous in execution.

But I do remember, very clearly indeed, the lemon panna cotta.



Bright and zesty, creamy but not too rich--a good clean flavor. Finished with a layer of Limoncello and diced fresh watermelon, and served with tiny buttery cookies.

Selective memory isn't such a bad thing.