We wish you two merry Christmas albums

After years of my whinging about the depressing dearth of quality Christmas albums, 2018 has produced two from the middle portion of the alphabetical list of my favorite bands.

Things started looking up in my world when the latter-day countrypolitan Mavericks started recording again a few years ago. Lead singer Raul Malo's Marshmallow World has long been a favorite of myself and the curmudgelings, so I had high expectations for the Mavericks' Hey! Merry Christmas! Unlike Malo's solo offering, it's mostly new compositions. As such, it didn't really connect with me on a first listening. However, I decided to give it another chance whilst baking Christmas cookies and was quickly converted. The Mavericks swing, children; they really do.

Strangely, the Monkees never recorded a Christmas album during their heyday, so they're offering one now before they're all dead. Don't be cynical, but get thankful: Christmas Party is a marvelous pop confection of Yuletide goodness. The only melancholy comes from two tracks by the late Davy Jones. He wasn't resurrected, but the tracks were unearthed from a vault somewhere. His voice is as sweet as ever, but we're reminded that the fates are allowing fewer and fewer of us to all be together with each passing year.

And you doubt the end is nigh?

Pringles™, being as they are the particleboard of the snack chip world, are well-suited for the dubious enterprise of flavoring the otherwise-noble potato chip with unnatural and unreasonable flavors (ex. barbecue, ranch dressing, and other abominations). Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that Pringles™ can now be had in "Thanksgiving dinner flavors." Having destroyed both Christmas and Halloween, popular culture is now busily at work bringing down Thanksgiving.

If this is not enough to disprove postmillenial optimism, nothing is.

I am going to live forever

The more coffee you drink, the longer you live, because science. So there, my tea-sipping enemies.

And please note: black is better.

I am so, so happy.

I admire boysenberry more than any ordinary syrup

As the legions of faithful readers of this blog will readily imagine, the list of reasons for me to go on is not only passingly brief, but growing briefer by the day. Over the years, pancakes have almost entirely dropped out of our Sunday-morning-breakfast rotation because the sugar-and-carb overload not only leaves one in a mild state of self-loathing, but even worse fails to fend off hunger pangs through the morning worship service.

Nonetheless, I cheerfully concede that the International House of Pancakes makes a quite excellent buttermilk pancake, and I get the occasional craving for a short stack covered in boysenberry syrup. I was accordingly driven to the depths of existential despair when told this morning that the blessed blackberry is no longer available at IHOP. O tempora, o mores!

Thankfully for you young people, the cause for boysenberry syrup's return has been taken up on the Facebook. It may be too late for my generation, but think of the children.

News I can use

My father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 78, and my paternal grandfather of heart disease in his mid-60s. In order to beat my dismal odds, and in line with my policy of following medical advice I like, I will be sure to maintain my daily dose of chocolate, per the counsel of the latest most absolutely reliable medical study.

Also, since I always make sure to eat the red and blue peanut M&Ms for their antioxidants, I will never get cancer.

Today's breakfast

Medium burger on rye, topped with bacon, cheddar cheese, over-easy egg, and country gravy.

This is a cry for help.

duh

According to the latest entry in the category "studies made necessary by the profound conviction that anything which makes people happy must be bad," coffee probably doesn't cause cancer. I've long know this. In fact, because colorful fruits are antioxidants, and because coffee is made from colorful beans, it's full of antioxidants. I can science too, people.

While we're on the subject, I love, love, love my pod coffeemaker, the most useful office supply in my study. Don't give anyone else this tip, but if you go to Starbucks the day after Christmas, you can get the Christmas blend coffee pods for half-price. Whilst doing this back in December, a store manager gave me, for free, a couple boxes of Thanksgiving blend pods. According to my daily afternoon coffee consumption rate, I calculate I'm set until August.

Coffee. Life is good.

This is why we bake

Monday mornings Grandma rose an hour early to make rye,

onion & challah, but it was pumpernickel she broke her hands for,
pumpernickel that demanded cornmeal, ripe caraway, mashed potatoes
& several Old Testament stories about patience & fortitude & for
which she cursed in five languages if it didn’t pop out fat
as an apple-cheeked peasant bride. But bread, after all,
is only bread & who has time to fuss all day & end up
with a dead heart if it flops? Why bother? I’ll tell you why.
For the moment when the steam curls off the black crust like a strip
of pure sunlight & the hard oily flesh breaks open like a poem
pulling out of its own stubborn complexity a single glistening truth
& who can help but wonder at the mystery of the human heart when you
hold a slice up to the light in all its absurd splendor & I tell you
we must risk everything for the raw recipe of our passion.


 -"Pumpernickel," by Philip Schultz

A little, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bit of leaven

Today we call it "sourdough," but for most of mankind's history it was just called "bread." Instead of commercial yeast, sourdough bread uses leaven, which is wild yeast captured from the air and cultivated in a flour and water matrix, called a "starter" (because you use some to start your bread loaf rising). That capturing process can be challenging for those of us surrounded by the thin air one finds at altitude. I began my own starter about ten years ago, following the recipe I found in (I think it was the 7th edition of) The Joy of Cooking. It took another five or so years to grow to the strength that I didn't need to add a yeast booster to get my bread to rise.

Over the years, I've given it to several people who've been able to use it with much success. (Because it's a living, growing thing, starter is the gift that keeps on giving.) One's starter can be a point of pride for the home baker, and it certainly is for me: it represents years of effort and cultivation, and proves a certain level of attainment. So you can imagine my distress (I actually cried out in anguish) when I discovered that Thing 2 had found my starter sitting on the kitchen counter and decided it had to be cleaned along with the supper dishes. The tupperware container in which I kept my starter was in the top rack of the dishwasher, thoroughly rinsed, and my starter had all been flushed down the kitchen drain.

Once I could start thinking again, I looked more closely at the lid. There was a wee little bit of old, gelatinous starter stuck in its rim. Given that I was looking at years before I would be able to cultivate and age a new batch of starter, I decided to take a chance. I was able to scrape out about 1/16th of a teaspoon, which I then mixed with just a teensy bit of flour and water. Frankly, it didn't mix in too well (I could still clearly make out the little lump in the rest of the matrix), so my hopes were low. But the next morning there were a few bubbles in the dough, so I fed it slightly more flour and water. By that evening, I not only had a resurrected starter, it returned from the grave with a richer, even more offensive sour smell so dear to the gluten junkie. 

Ah, the sweet swell of paternal pride.

Maybe I can go back down South now

I am a Union man. The Kingsburys (at least our branch of the Kingsburys) were for the Union, and I am no different. Nonetheless, depending on how you reckon your geography, I have spent about half my life in the deep South (Houston occupying that liminal space which is both entirely the South and entirely the West), and have the very firm opinions about grits to prove it.

I love the South, and I love the Presbyterian Church in America, in which I was ordained a deacon and had the privilege to be licensed to preach the Gospel. But I am a Union man, and I am not naive about the South or the PCA. Racism, albeit of the soft sort, still exists in the deep South and in the PCA (especially amongst her revered old men), and I have a black daughter. It's hard enough to be black in the American West. It occurred to me a while back that I couldn't in good conscience make it any harder by placing her in a white Church, in the deep South, that merely winked at the racism held to and practiced by her revered fathers. I decided that, come what may, I wouldn't be taking my family back to Virginia, much less any place any further south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Then I read this post on a protest at the 43rd General Assembly of the PCA. God bless Ligon Duncan and Sean Lucas. Finally, Southern Presbyterianism is waking up to the original sin at the heart of the American experiment in representative democracy.

Let's be clear: no one has asked me to go back down south, and I don't expect any ever to do so (other than a brief visit to Virginia in the autumn of this year). But maybe now there is a place for a Union man and his black daughter.

And maybe I can find someone with whom to have a reasonable conversation about grits.

Which got eaten first?

Chiasm at Chick-Fil-A

 It really is true: once you start studying Biblical Hebrew, you see chiasms everywhere.

My doctor is trying to kill me

I have been diagnosed with "cochlear hydrops," which means there's a wee bit of fluid in my inner ear  which leads to a persistent sense of "ear fullness" (i.e., how your ears feel when you ascend in altitude just before they pop) and of very mild dizziness. Since I enjoy neither of these symptoms, I am on the only known treatment (which is 40% effective, yay!), which aims to reduce said fluid by the use of diuretics, a low-sodium diet, and avoiding caffeine; this last because caffeine can reduce  the vascular flow which might enable the fluid to pass out of my inner ear.

The eyebrows of my otologist (ear doctor; I didn't know that word, either) raised noticeably when I told him I typically drink four or more cups of coffee per day; he told me to cut way down, preferrably to none. However, "the nation's top nutrition panel" "said that consuming as many as five cups of coffee each day (400 mg) is tied to several health benefits," according to the Washington Post.  Turns out that "moderate" coffee consumption is 3-5 cups, which means I am, at my most excessive, moderate. (Full disclosure: to get through presbytery meetings, I often double my consumption; however, it's church coffee, which we all know hardly even counts.)

For once, your tax dollars are spent on a good cause: vindicating my dubious lifestyle choices. Thanks, federal government!

Continuing education

As is the case for many others, one of the most important lessons I took away from graduate school is that I am not cut out for any higher educational endeavors. Nonetheless, on a recent trip to Berlin, Pa Curmudgeon found an educational institution which makes me wish I had taken a semester abroad.

Thanksgiving Day: The long-expected turkey

I checked the turkey's internal temperature for the first time at 1 p.m., at just under 5 hours from the beginning of the grilling process. My meat thermometer recorded 176 degrees (fahrenheit, of course;  it's not October and this isn't Canada), which confirms my belief that the weather is the controlling factor in grilling time. Since a turkey is considered cooked at 160 degrees, I guesstimate this 21-pound bird was done in about four and a half hours. Remarkable: that competes with a standard oven.

As Thanksgiving dinner was scheduled for 3 p.m., I lowered the heat in my Weber grill by reducing air flow to almost nothing. After a shower, I wrapped the roasting pan and bird in heavy-duty aluminum foil and towels for transportation to the off-site meal location. This kept the turkey sufficiently warm for serving when the dinner itself commenced.

As per usual, I was pleased by the striking visual effect of the turkey skin's mahogany hue, the result of sitting in smoke. (As I don't eat the skin, I can't say how the brine and smoke affects the taste.) The turkey retained moisture very well: juices ran off the serving/carving platter and stained the tablecloth. I did not notice any particular sweetness in the meat, despite the extra sugar and wine in the brine. I increasingly suspect the best way to add flavors to a turkey is through post-brine, pre-grilling preparations such as onions or fruits in the cavity or herbs inserted below the skin. The smoke notes this year were very subtle; this may be due to using branches which were still relatively green.

All done with the mildly obsessive chronicle. I promise.

Thanksgiving Day: the waiting is the hardest part

A few years ago, I was briefly enamored with a grilling device which promised perfectly smoked meats. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was basically a convection oven which used charcoal as its heat source, and its "grilling" process involved little more than inserting the food and then leaving said food alone until done. I immediately lost interest, as the entire purpose of grilling is to fiddle with the foods, constantly adjusting heat, position of foodstuffs on the grate, finding the magic point when perfect char has been obtained but just before burning occurs, so on and so forth.

Accordingly, the most trying time for me on Thanksgiving Day comes after wrapping the turkey in foil and adding hardwood. Lifting the lid will only cause heat and smoke to escape, and perhaps lead to an underdone bird. I must wait patiently for three hours, keeping my hands and barbecue tools to myself.

I've learned to occupy myself with hanging Christmas lights from the roof and a bottle or two of Sam Adams Octoberfest (I carefully reserve a six-pack or so for Thanksgiving; this tradition dates back to when I was buying beer past its sell-by dates at a local distributor's dock sale, said business now sadly closed). Not much of a sop to my obsessive tendencies, but it's the best I can do.

Thanksgiving Day, 9 a.m.

In the first hour of grilling, the outer flesh of the bird is seared, turning the skin a pleasing light gold. Given their relative fragility and close proximity to the hot coals, the risk now is burning the wings and drumsticks. Accordingly, I wrap the sides in heavy-duty aluminum foil. The resulting tent also convects the steam rising from the roasting pan up over the skin, and hence bastes the turkey for me.

I love smoked meats, but Mrs. Curmudgeon is not so enthusiastic. After my first turkey came out closer to bacon than not, I began adding hardwood to the coals only after the first hour of cooking. The smoke doesn't penetrate already-cooked meat as deeply, and the result is a very lightly smoked flavor, almost barely noticeable.

In recent years I've been using branches from an old cedar tree we took down from our front yard a while back, but, as previously mentioned, I have some crabapple branches with which to work this Thanksgiving. I place one on either side of the roasting pan, add some fresh coals, replace the lid, adjust the vents to a medium heat, and begin hanging Christmas lights on the house.

(Technically speaking, you don't need to hang Christmas lights in order to properly grill a turkey, but it works for me.)

Thanksgiving Day, 8 a.m.

In The Barbecue Bible, Steve Raichlen suggests from 15 to 20 minutes for a grilled turkey. In my experience, the actual range is anywhere from 12 to 25 minutes. The key factor appears to be cloud cover, with prevailing winds and temperature also strong contributors. This year's turkey weighs in at 21 pounds, and as it will have to be transported to an off-site dining location, I've decided to work with a conservative cooking time of five hours.

I grill the turkey on a rack in a roasting pan which rests on the Weber's charcoal grate; a turkey is too big to sit on the regular grilling grate and still fit under the lid. I pile the hot coals along the side of the roasting pan, in which I maintain about an inch of water to keep the heat from bending the thin metal. Turkey drippings in that water, happily enough, create an excellent stock for gravy. (This year, I strengthened the stock by putting the neck and giblets in the pan as well.) After a half-dozen or so turkeys, though, my roasting pan has begun to rust. This year, the turkey rested in a disposable pan liner. With water in both pans, I suppose I achieved a double boiler effect, although I can't imagine what that might have accomplished.

The turkey goes on, and then I wait an hour for the next step.

Thanksgiving Day, 7 a.m.

I light my coals in a chimney an hour before the turkey is to begin grilling, as the set-up is rather time-consuming. I do this on the gas grill in order to minimize soot on my Weber 22", which I use for all my artisanal grilling.

(Yes, that is an authentic set of vintage Korean barbecue tongs [circa 1968]: a legacy from Pa Curmudgeon's legendary bachelor days which I use to handle hot coals.)

Then I haul the brining bucket from the garage refrigerator (yes, I have to pull out several shelves and let my beer sit overnight at the garage's ambient temperature; no sacrifice is too great for a masterpiece) and drain the turkey in the kitchen sink. Most recipes recommend rinsing the brine from the turkey. However, I rinse the turkey before brining, and my theory is that any residual brine will merely add flavor to the pan drippings, and hence to the inevitable gravy.

Men start the turkey on Wednesday

If memory serves (and let's be honest: it rarely does), it was seven years ago that Mrs. Curmudgeon told me I would be making the Thanksgiving turkey on the Weber grill. After I stopped hyperventilating, I began obsessing, and now I have raised the grilled turkey to a fine art. Strangely, it only occurred to me this year that I have been depriving the world of my vast, hard-earned expertise. This year, I have decided to blog my highly-developed process for the world's benefit.

You're welcome, world.

Turkeys, whether in the oven or on the grill, easily dry out because of the extended cooking time. The solution: brine. The webernet is full of brine recipes, but all you really need is a cup of salt and a tablespoon of pickling spice per gallon of water. (Many recipes also recommend kosher or sea salt. Pretentious much?) This year I was given some crabapple branches to use for smoking, so I thought I'd try to accent the sweetness by adding a little extra brown sugar, along with a bottle of white wine which Mrs. Curmudgeon and I found overly sugared.

I have a 5-gallon bucket in the garage reserved exclusively for turkey brining. I recommend brining for 12-24 hours before cooking; today, that meant about noon.

This year, we're doing our largest bird yet (21 pounds), and it has to be ready (more or less) by 1 p.m. Since that means I have to prep the grill around 7 a.m. on Thursday, I also loaded my charcoal chimney and set out my grilling tools.

Only amateurs think turkeys are prepared on Thanksgiving Day.