loglog

Today Amazon brought me a package. In it were two books: one on programming and the other one is a cookbook. And what a cookbook it is. It is thick, and of coffee table format. The first 50(!) pages are filled with essays about food, cooking and the Alinea restaurant, and then follow another 350 pages with recipes, ordered by season.

It is self-made and self-published by the folks of the Alinea restaurant in Chicago. They couldn’t find a publisher so they did the publishing themselves. The chef wrote the text himself, the designer who designed the restaurant, their website and their house-style, designed the book, even though he never had designed a book before. His sister/wife/partner (I couldn’t find what their relationship is, but they share the same last name) made the photographs, even though she was also an amateur at that. But they took almost two year to make this book and during that time they sure got the hang of it. The dishes are real food, made during the daily prep in the restaurant, and not in a pantry kitchen in a food photographer’s studio with fake ingredients that just look good and don’t wilt. After just browsing in it for an hour or so I almost want to book a ticket to Chicago. I’m salivating.

The recipes all look quite simple, often requiring just between 4 and 10 ingredients. O wait, that’s is just one part of the dish. A dish often contains 4 parts but the recipes for those parts can be prepared ahead, all recipes end with phrases like “Store in airtight container”. The final part of the recipe contains instructions how to assemble and serve them as beautifully as in the restaurant. O boy do they look gorgeous.

I’m not a real foodie, I’m too poor to dine in expensive restaurants and too lazy to make elaborate recipes just for the two of us. I do cook (and like doing it) when we have friends over but that usually eats away (no pun intended) a whole weekend, including tidying up the house. We should do it more often, however.
Festive meals like Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving are mostly spent with Alison’s family and the food is traditional turkey dinner (with nut-loaf for us pescatarians). But maybe I’m going to break that tradition soon.

And now for the best part: the book only cost me 35 dollars. I pre-ordered it a month ago on Amazon and received it today. But strangely enough the book is still marked as ‘not yet published’ so you might still be able to pre-order it for this amazing low price. (I feel like I’m on the shopping channel now: “But there is more…”)
The normal price in bookstores is $56. Even at that price it is a steal for an impressive book weighing just shy of three kilos.

Order Alinea at Amazon.com

O, and please also take a look at the Alinea book website for more pictures.

We had a guest over for supper and I decided to make something I read about the day before on some weblog.

Smoked fish made on a gas grill.

Put a board of cedar that has been soaked in water on your really hot grill. Let it burn a while until it has developed a lot of smoke and then put some salmon (or other fish) on the board. Let cook for 10 minutes with the lid closed and you have a delicious smoked salmon.

At least, that is the plan. It’s always a gamble to use recipes you find on the Internet. And certainly to try them out on a guest.

But it turned out pretty good; certainly something I’ll do again. The guest liked it too.

[I won't mention the big glass bowl of grilled vegetables that I dropped. I had to throw it all out because there might have been shards of glass in it. I still had some veggies left, but they were still raw so we ate them quite some time after we had finished the fish.]

Watch him get special food. It’s not fair.

Pepe often covers his bowl of food so he can eat it later when he doesn’t feel nauseated. He does this by using his nose to move sand over his food. Since we are in short supply of sand in our kitchen, the dishtowel that we put his bowl on has to do. And it does.

Now he only needs to find a solution to that pesky creature called Poupoune, who keeps eating his food the moment Pepe leaves the kitchen. Even when he covered it.

What a difference a day or two makes. Yesterday I brought Pepe to the vet, who was very concerned and wanted me to take him to the animal hospital (the same place where I spent 1500 dollar for Poupoune a couple of years ago) to stay on an IV for the weekend to get some fluids and nutrients into him. She feared he had an ulcer and wanted to do lots of tests to come to a diagnose. I decided to only treat his symptoms, so she gave him an antacid and some subcutaneous saline. After paying 100 bucks I went home, with him wrapped in a blanket under my coat in the softly falling snow.

He slept all day, but then ate a little bit, and didn’t vomit. By the time Alison came home from the airport after midnight he was already feeling much better. He greeted her with his signature dance and she was very happy to see him alive. Today he’s even feeling better and eats and drinks, although not in very big quantities. But he is still frail. He lost almost a pound in body weight mostly of a lack of fluids. That is not healthy and we really have to fatten him up over the next weeks. He is very low on reserves.

I suspect him from pulling these stunts just to make us bond stronger to him. That and to be on the front-page of loglog every day.

I still need to record his dance for posterity; fortunately it seems he gave me a chance to do it. Now I only have to make him dance on camera. So far when I point the camera at him he immediately stops dancing and just stares at me and barks. His bark is just loud and annoying and not nearly as cute as him dancing in circles.

Pepe is ill. His kidneys don’t work very well, he’s drinking and peeing a lot, and he slowly loses weight. Getting the diagnose of kidney failure took a while because the vet wanted to check his blood and urine a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t a temporary illness that could be cured with some anti-biotic. She prescribed him antibiotics for a month ówhich made him feel nauseated causing even more weight lossó but it didn’t help.

So he is going to die. Not in a couple of months, but probably in a year of two. There is no cure but we can stretch his life a little, and improve his quality of life by giving him magical kidney powder. In order to make sure the medication is not having bad side-effects he also needs blood-tests every 3 months.

All this is not going to break the bank (it’ll cost slightly more than dollar a day) but during the last few months we thought long and hard what our limits are. Not only financial, but also moral. Should one really spend thousands of dollars to prolong the life of a dog (who had a good 12 years on earth) while for the same amount of money you could keep some people alive? It starts with a few dollars but since you have started, when and where do you stop? We’ve decided to treat him until the treatment stops working or until he has pain and isn’t happy anymore. But no big interventions.

Just thinking about our boundaries makes us feel guilty. Who are we to decide about life and death? But in reality we do. Our pets won’t survive without us. They need us for food and shelter and in return they keep us company and give us affection. But all these questions and doubts come up with Pepe, a dog we don’t have such a tight bond with compared to Poupoune. If Poupoune was ill we probably would go much further in extending her life.

Sure, Pepe is always good humoured, dances adorably (although not on camera) when he is excited and is very snugly and likes to be under your sweater and peep out his head like a joey. He sleeps 20 hours a day, preferably under a blanket, can’t go out for walks in the winter, sometimes poops and pees in places he’s not supposed to and, above all, he is not very bright.

Even though he’s ill he still does all of that. He’s not suffering as far as we can tell, and we give him special canned dog food specially formulated for dogs with kidney failure. Unfortunately Poupoune is very jealous he’s getting special treatment and she’s even grumpier than before.

When I immigrated to Canada I put only a few food items in my shipping container. Lots of dropjes (Dutch Liquorice) of course but also a box with twelve tin bottles of this sirup. It is grapefruit flavour (100% concentrated juice and sugar) and it’s the best sirup I’ve ever tasted. And I can’t get it here. Sure I can buy various sirups in the import stores but they’re all the regular flavours like lemon, berries and mint. But no grapefruit. And this sirup, with some water or soda water makes a perfect drink. Not too sweet and with just a hint of bitterness.

Over time the stash was used up but some visitors brought new bottles and I also brought back a few bottles myself every-time I went back to the Netherlands to visit my mother. My suitcase was usually quite heavy.

Today, when I opened a new bottle I was in for a bad surprise. It stank. And the reddish liquid had turned all brown and gooey. I checked the “best before” date and it said July 2004. Oops. I checked all five bottles I still had in stock and they all had the same date. Quintuple oops.

Apparently I had put all the newer bottles in front of the original batch of 2003 so those bottles had plenty of time to go bad. Darn. Now I have to go back to the Netherlands soon, I only have one bottle left. And my suitcase will be very heavy.

Every evening, around 6, we give Pepe and Poupoune some pig’s ears. Because even though we don’t eat meat ourselves we don’t impose our diet upon our dogs.

We usually cut the pig’s ears in smaller pieces and hide them in our apartment and then Poupoune and Pepe can try to find them. This to train their hunting skills. Usually Pepe finds one piece and Poupoune, who has more teeth and can chew them faster, finds the rest of them. But this morning Pepe found a piece of pig’s ear that Poupoune apparently hadn’t found yesterday. This caused a lot of stress on Poupoune’s side because she felt left out and anxiously she kept sniffing around to find more missing pieces. Which, of course, there weren’t.

[I'm too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

Poupoune, een tiramisu verpakking achtervolgend, kruipt onder de televisie.

[I'm too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

Het is Labour Day Weekend. Of eigenlijk Labor Day Weekend, want we zijn in de verenigde staten en daar schrijven ze een beetje raar. Maar ze hebben er ook maandag vrij en dat komt goed uit.

We zijn in Cherry Valley, een klein dorpje in upstate New York (dat 'upstate' betekent dat het in het noorden is niet in New York City) alwaar een nicht van Alison ieder jaar een groot feest geeft, de Harvest Party. Groot, zo'n 300 gasten, die voor 10 dollar zich tegoed kunnen doen aan 15 vaten bier en een heleboel eten. Dat eten - iedereen neemt een gerecht mee - staat in een grote tent in het geval van regen, die gelukkig uitbleef, en er is ook een podium in de grote oude houten schuur alwaar een paar bands speelden, waarvan een met Alison's oom John op saxofoon. Dat hielden ze vol tot twee uur. Ik niet, ik viel letterlijk om, mede doordat ik een keelontsteking heb. Maar pijnstillers werken gelukkig wel een beetje, dus ik slaap wel in, uiteindelijk.

Dus ik mistte de uittocht van de meer dan 100 auto's met hun bestuurders in kennelijke staat van dronkenschap. Persoonlijke ongelukken deden zich gelukkig niet voor.