And we’re back in the saddle, wielding the mighty lance of truth and scientific endeavor against the black knight of stupid dietary fads and quickly greenwashed wool pulled firmly over the eyes of its followers.

Not everything is better with Bacon

I’ve never been a fan of dietary restrictions. With them comes, generally as a prerequisite, often an annoying need to proselytize, ignore facts while playing talking points into the stratosphere. From PETA buffoons comparing themselves and animals to the victims of the Holocaust, to salivating dweebs storming a butcher and demanding to have their anti-meat diets served. Not to mention the death threats and images of family members with superimposed cross-hairs sent to chefs and butchers, and more.

Head into your favorite store and you’ll find quite a few “gluten free” products. Many which had been that way for decades (there’s no gluten in SunnyD, only extremely unhealthy sugary goop), but now sport the logo. In a brilliant marketing move, a small industry catering to the less than one tenth of one percent of all Americans suffering from coeliac disease, managed to convince a much broader audience of the evils of an inherently non-evil foodstuff, boosting their sales of often overpriced “dietary solutions”.

And, not unlike any old bad religion, the psychology of dogma stands – the more it is dispelled, the tighter its followers will hang onto it.

Try arguing with a vegan. Ever tried arguing immaculate conception with a nun? Don’t.

Ever eaten a tomato in November? Your friendly neighborhood nagging vegan did. That tomato, together with tens of thousands of its watery friends, came from Mexico. Raised “organically” on a swath of land wrest from the arms of mother nature through aggressive deforesting. Huge container trucks load the hydroponic abominations into their bellies, hurrying north to serve those who love their tomato and lettuce main course. Huge veins of asphalt and gravel connect the fields to the main interstates, built on top of natural habitats, killing more than one species for good. Extinction, apparently, as well as anti-environmental building and maintenance of farms isn’t part of the things that make stuff non-organic. But, hey, we didn’t use any fertilizer.

On its way north, truckers tell, it’s not uncommon to be stopped by waylaying thugs, crooked cops, and cartel employees. There’s good money making with those tomatoes.

Bite into it, go ahead. No animal was slaughtered for your dinner. Sure, you’re supporting the cartels that deal in human trafficking, the extinction of a few species, and the workers at that farm aren’t what you’d call in a good employment situation, but – hey – Stanley the Steer wasn’t harmed.

Ethics, it’s what’s for dinner. Just a question of what gets your ire up. Me, I prefer not to extinct species, support human traffickers, or support the work standards of those farms, but … hey, if it’s Stanley you’re more concerned about I’ll respect that.

The Baconkini... No, really, how can ANYONE resist that?

Apply enough pressure, and carbon turns into diamonds. Some people don’t want to wait those six million years, so pressure is applied now. Mainly, and chiefly, on us – the consumer. Watch your carbon footprint, people. And food, it turns out, has a huge carbon footprint. At least, so the vegan who spat in my face during a lamb cooking demo, meat does. Apparently vegetables are transported on unicorn laughter and carried across rainbows by leprechauns.

So says the vegan: “but as the end-user, rather than feeding it to an intermediary, I save a round-trip”. And right they are. No denying that. Which is, let’s face it, the main reason we need to re-think our diets.

Meat has become the staple of our plates. Cutting down on its consumption, introducing fresh, local, seasonal, vegetables as the stars into our dishes, makes sense. Talk to your butcher. Find someone who raises, slaughters, and sells locally. Offset the higher cost by eating less, but better. Six ounces of grass fed, local, beef beat the 20oz Mega Mart abomination every day. Talk to your farmers at the market. Most often they not only know what’s in season, they also have great ideas on how to cook it. Don’t expect to find every food source within driving distance, but take the time on a Sunday to find one new source that’s local. Use it. Reward the farmers and ranchers.

I’m no Alice Waters. I know how to cook, I am better looking, and I don’t have millions at my disposition. I also won’t tell you to blow your financial wad on hipster-approved “locavore organic” food. There’s more to this than chain burger or $8 organic egg. There’s a balance. One that supports our environment, promotes health, supports local businesses, and does more for the people, livestock, and landscape needed to produce food than any vegan diet…

Cut out T.G.I McShitBurger and move away from chain food sellers. The fundamental flaw in a vegan’s mind is simple: we can not change our food production by ignoring it. Greenwashing the atrocious means even vegan food is produced might help one’s own sense of guilt, but our planet doesn’t suffer less. Instead of looking away, work with those who are the mortal enemies of factory farming and CAFO – the local grower. Support their defense against the bullies at Monsanto and ConAgra, help keep a small farm or ranch alive by buying there instead. For every rancher still working out there, CAFO gets a big punch into it’s endlessly money lactating teat. And that’s good.

In one aspect, I guess we agree, the vegans and I: think before you chew. If that steer you’re gobbling down hailed, errm.. mooed, from the lush manure pastures of California CAFO Co., you better skip it. If that tomato, red and all watery, comes from Mexico, drop it like it’s hot. Buy local, support your farmers and ranchers, spend that extra minute talking to your butcher and the guy who sells radishes at the Farmers Market. You won’t regret it, it’s leagues tastier, and the environment will be much better for it.

And that’s where it all comes down to earth. Sloganeering, willful ignorance, and reliance on tainted “scientific” studies doesn’t serve omnivores or vegans well. Someone once asked, “is veganism a mental disease?” I disagree. But it’s as sad a mindset as that of the guy buying BurgerMc every day or getting their meat from Walmart. Willfully ignorant. And nothing pisses me off more than smug bastards ignoring the facts while declaring themselves superior to me based on flawed reasoning. That and, oh, those letters with cross-hairs over their children’s faces “asking” chefs to stop serving meat.

Next time someone wants to greenwash their guilt ridden diet, do me a favor. Ask them to think. Get informed. Learn about nutrition and the source of our foods. For one of those things we need to survive, food has become, sadly, quite a never-thought-much-of commodity.

I am SO out of my league here, but figured I’d try it anyways. This morning, getting up at five and all, I made Weisswurst. Despite its looks, this is not what’s known to Canadians, Cajun, and other Frenchmen as “boudin blanc“, instead it’s a veal and bacon based mixture (boudin is pork, not surprising considering it’s French cuisine).

The mixture was roughly 70 per cent lean veal, ground finely, then mixed with twenty per cent pork belly and ten per cent shaved ice, which had been processed into a foamy mass. Salt, parsley, mace, onions, ginger, and cadamom were added. The mixture was then filled into natural pork casings and cooked at 158 degrees F (70 degrees Celsius).

Traditional law (unwritten but almost, if sometimes not more, as powerful as written state law) in Bavaria says, that Weisswurst may never “hear” the noon church bells. Since it is not smoked or otherwise made less perishable, this made sense in older times, sadly today’s butchers and restaurants (mostly north of Bavaria) sell Weisswurst all day.

I finished at eleven, one hour to spare, and served immediately alongside mild Bavarian mustard, a pretzel, and some potato salad.

… but we’re switching to the Genesis Theme Framework after much contemplation. Run-down of the whole thing can be found at this post.

In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of a knackwurst:

Knackwurst

Much hubbub has been had about the (almost epic) fight between Matt Mullenweg, speaking for WordPress and – as far as most people are concerned – the sanctity of the GPL, and Chris Pearson waving the banner of Thesis and paid, non-GPL, premium themes.

I use Thesis on this site. Other than that, I have no stakes in it. I don’t like Chris, I am more than dissatisfied with this aloofness and elusiveness on the Thesis forums, and I am firmly of the belief that in this day and age of Twitter, Facebook, and social craze SEO is a dead horse which he beats too much. I don’t make money selling Thesis as an affiliate, and I don’t intent to use it for the rest of my days. One day something better will come along, and that’s when I’ll switch.

I like Matt. I really do. I remember getting him drunk on his 21st, rocking a gondola with him during a Napa Valley trip we organized, and terrorizing his first apartment in San Francisco. He convinced me to move from Drupal to WordPress sometime in 2006, and I think I still owe him five hundred bucks. Matt?

So, for all it’s worth, I should have a horse in this race tagging alongside Matt’s.

Here’s my issue, and it’s two-fold. First, I don’t like the GPL. Now, let me explain… I am all for liberal licensing. Heck, while working at Socialtext I pushed (and ultimately failed) for a license which would, in essence, declare web applications to be “shared” when served on a web server and require the code to be made public. Such efforts were included in the ill-fated Affero GPL and Mozilla’s MPL, but never took hold.

To Matt, the GPL is a magic bullet. One that saves the industry in and by itself. Pearson, on the other hand, is a pompous prick. No two ways about it. To Chris, he himself is the magic bullet. The one that saves and saved the industry on a daily basis, leaping tall SEO hurdles in a single bound. Both are wrong. Though, to be fair, being a pompous prick doesn’t harm one’s code and doesn’t diminish one’s actual achievements. While I might disagree with Chris being one of the top three names in WordPress, without Thesis I might have reverted to Drupal in 2009.

The GPL is outdated. It used to be fine when NetHack made its round around the globe. Today, no one compiles games anymore. The desktop is the web, the web is the desktop. Welcome to HTML 5, the Cloud, and the elusive “social” animal. Code is written for the web, downloaded from the web, deployed onto the web, and used on the web. The GPL might as well not exist anymore, since I am able to share the fruits of my labor right here, online, letting you play with it, use it, without ever sharing a line of the code I plunged into the GPL base provided by Matt.

Sure, if I wanted to package it and distribute it, I’d have to. But who does that, these days? Instead of shipping CDs with code, port 80 does the trick. Instead of open raw data, APIs work for the common good. And that’s great, celebrate while the GPL revolution eats its children.

For me, however, if there is such a thing, there is a clear winner in this debate – Matt. I might disagree with the fundamental goodness of the GPL, but I appreciate a calm, level headed argument over egotistical chest thumping. I can “see” Matt’s point, I can’t see Chris’. Matt is a business man. Chris? He reminds me of all the other SEO types, the “don’t take no for an answer” attitude, the car-salesman manual, the stringent repetitiveness of small, ultimately fallacious, arguments until they become, at least in one’s own mind, true.

So, why am I still using Thesis, then?

In one sentence – because it, the code, the environment, sucks less. Ideology, friendships, and inherent good aside, none of Matt’s GPL’d framework options comes close.

I was all ready to leave, purchased Genesis from StudioPress. Turns out there’s a clause somewhere that I can’t get a refund if I don’t like it. Because, as StudioPress says, it’s downloaded code and therefore can’t be refunded. That very statement, right here, sadly invalidates Matt’s argument. Thesis, while restrictive and without the openness Matt seeks, at least gives me the liberty to drive before I buy (or ask for my money back). A liberty much, much, more fundamental than the implied contagiousness of the GPL which, as I said above, becomes a non-issue for the vast majority of theme code users.

I’m out sixty bucks, Genesis made some cash on me, and the code, free or not, now rots in my inbox. Until a commercial theme providing the same new-user friendliness (not by Chris, mind you, but the many users in the forums – once you strip the web business weirdness), a chance to test-drive the framework and the features of Thesis 1.8 comes along I simply can’t afford switching.

And that, sadly, is the issue all along – ideology should never override good business sense or serve as a substitute for good salesmanship.

Regular readers (all three of you) know, that I don’t eat or serve veal. Unless, that is, it’s raised with its mother instead of being nailed into a box and fed ProViMi (a mix of – you guessed it – Proteins, Vitamins, and Minerals). This is where your veal should come from:

This is, where your veal should come from

Taken at the Kampenwand at 5400 ft. looking south towards Chiemgau and Prien am See.

In Soviet Germany, Hell’s Kitchen GIVE you jacket before you leave:

Hell's Kitchen clothing store in Heidelberg, Germany

Gordon Ramsay is wrong.

No, not about that “head chef” myth Fox and he are spreading despite the fact that not one winner in six seasons was made head chef (and, seeing the quality of cooks, I can’t say I am surprised). And, no, not about calling amateur cooks “Master Chef” after six weeks of light cooking. We’ve gone over that one before. No, it’s about something so basic, every non-cooking dishwasher knows after a month in a fine dining restaurant:

Demi Glace is not a mother sauce.

If you watched today’s Hell’s Kitchen, you indubitably didn’t miss it – the “mother sauce” challenge in which demi glace (pronounced “demy glaze” by Scott, the “Executive Chef with extensive French training”). Not only did he mispronounce the sauce, he lumped it in with the mother sauces. And Ramsay agreed. First week culinary students would fail over such a faux pas.

What is a mother sauce, then? Strictly spoken, it’s a basic sauce used to create “small” sauces which, in turn, are used on dishes. Careme named four sauces, Bechamel, Allemande, Veloute, and Espagnole. Since Allemande is based on Veloute, Escoffier, whose definition stands to this day, removed it. Based on his nomenclature, mother sauces are:

• Bechamel – a sauce made from roux (equal parts of butter and flour) and milk.
• Veloute – made from white stock, that is stock made from unroasted bones.
• Espagnole – made from brown stock, stock in which roasted bones are used.
• Tomato Sauce – made from tomatoes and mirepoix.
• Hollandaise – made from tempered egg, lemon, au sec aromatics, and butter
• Mayonnaise – made from untempered egg, vinegar, and oil

Except for Hollandaise and Mayonnaise, none of the mother sauces is used widely on dishes. Instead, smaller sauces are derived from it. Such as, yes, demi glace.

To make demi glace, first make Espagnole. That one’s easy:

1. Prepare a dark brown roux
2. Add to brown stock (usually veal)
3. Add mirepoix (2 parts onion, one part carrot, one part celery)
4. Add parsley root
5. Add bouquet garni (parsley, thyme, bay leaf, crushed black peppercorns)
6. Simmer and reduce by half
7. Add more veal stock to replenish to full
8. Simmer and reduce to half
9. Remove (strain) all aromatics and bouquet garni
10. While simmering stir in pureed tomatoes or tomato paste when out of season
11. Let simmer for another hour, replenishing loss in volume with water or more veal stock
12. Strain

Even easier is to arrive at demi glace from here:

1. Reduce Espagnole by half
2. Replenish with veal stock

And then you have demi glace. Which goes great with meats :). Alternatively, to go even better with steaks or chicken, one could make a demi-glace au poulet or demi-glace au boeuf by substituting chicken or beef stock for veal.

Side-note: while writing this on my way to London via Edinburgh I was informed that Gordon Ramsay had to cut short a trip to return to London where his mother is in stable and good condition following a heart attack. Everyone at the House on the Hill wishes him and his family all the best. Those who do so will be praying for her speedy recovery tonight.

My name isn’t exactly common. In most cases I am able to get jluster as my username. There’s one other Jonas Luster in the world, and he’s 87 and in Sweden. Yet, gmail, oh faithful mail delivery and reading tool of mine, regularly reminds me that there are some others out there who share that first letter of their first name with me.

To date I have gotten post-one-night-stand declarations of love, tax documents, confidential doctor-patient communications, the newsletter of a radical fundamentalist Baptist church (including a graphical description of what Satan will do with gays. If that’s what happens to them, I know a few people in the kink community who’ll opt for hell in a heartbeat), and many, many, opted-in newsletters. All sent to a jluster at gmail.

Aside from the clear case for confirmed opt-in, it makes me wonder – considering the rarity of my name, how much cool stuff does amiller@gmail get? :)

I love Texas. Everyone seems so concerned about telling Facebook or Twitter they’re going on vacation. Not me.

“Yo, Dave, I’m outta town for a few weeks. You see anyone on my land, shoot ‘em”

“Ayupp”

Don’t I love it when things are uncomplicated.