Pictured: The breakfast of better days: Runny eggs on cheesy toast with potato fried in duck fat. Photo circa 2008.
Also, the way the tainted eggs are being tracked and reported on is starting to remind me of my childhood fear that migratory Killer Bees would eventually find their way from Texas to my backyard. They're coming! They're coming! Eve, fetch my shotgun!
There are a number of people in my orbit who like to boast about having seen bands like Nirvana, Nick Cave, or Interpol long before such artists became well known by the pansies and serfs. It's a primitive means of one-upmanship that can be found in just about any ad-hoc community—especially the kind where there is either real or imagined social status to be gained by saying things such as: "I liked blah-de-blah before you did, asshole". I don't engage in this practice very often, probably because most of the things I ever liked were either too weird or too pedestrian to end up getting popular. But for whatever it's worth, the one slice of the credibility pie which I can absolutely lay claim to is that I probably liked Ween before you did.
Actually, I probably saw Ween about fifty times before you'd ever heard of them. (Important aside: I am not gaining any social status by revealing this in 2010. I'm just laying the necessary groundwork for the rest of this article. Cut a brother some slack, will ya?) Ween were the unofficial house band at the Jersey weirdo rock
club I hung out in as a teenager, which is why their more recent popularity with college kids, Phish/Deadheads, and guys in their 40s who have ponytails and work in guitar stores still strikes me as so peculiar. No one ever thought Ween was going to get famous—I remember me and my skateboard-wielding, Parliament-puffing pals cracking up when we heard they'd gotten a record deal... with Twin Tone.
Nevertheless, beginning with the first time I saw them (1988, I think), and lasting until their homebase of City Gardens shut its doors (which coincided with me moving to NYC), I considered myself something of a Ween fan. Yeah, I wore down the grooves on the God * Ween * Satan double LP... I even mailordered the seldom-heard 12" EP that came out before that, on Trenton's short-lived Bird O' Prey record label, along with a couple of Ween's cassette-only albums. (The only other Bird O' Prey vinyl release was the Scornflakes LP, which is a blog post for another day.)
But what is perhaps most impressive is that I just spent twenty minutes of my life (twenty minutes which I will never get back, mind you) digitizing a Ween interview from a cassette that's been slowly decaying in my closet for the last 20 years. This originally aired on WTSR on the excellent radio program hosted by Mr. Bob Conrad, who edited a similarly excellent Trenton-area fanzine called This Zine Sucks. The funny thing is, I lived about five miles outside of WTSR's coverage area, so I would sometimes drive around the backwoods of Mercer County on Saturday mornings in order to hear the show. Furthermore, the car I owned at the time (an '81 VW Rabbit) did not have a functioning radio, so I kept a boombox in the backseat to play tapes on. I call attention to this detail only because all of this sketchy data seems to suggest that this recording of an FM broadcast was apparently made inside of a moving vehicle.
I totally did that before you did, mang.
Dean Ween Interview on WTSR—Original airdate unknown, but I'm guessing early 1989. Host: Bob Conrad.
[Listen]
For a more musical review of Ween's activities during this time period, get your lighters aloft for "Birthday Boy" using the Flash player below.
UPDATE: Bob Conrad was kind enough to pass along a couple of ancient Ween photos, possibly from their first ever gig at City Gardens. (See below.) Thanks again, Bob!
Mike Rep's legendary Stupor Hiatus discography has just been re-upped in swanky double wax edition by Siltbreeze Records. Get yourself a copy here.
No foolin': this one's easy as dirt and is crazy delicious. Never mind the fact that I had to stoop to the level of someone who buys pre-cut chicken parts (my #1 peeve of grocery shopping—everyone should know how to cut up a whole chicken)—the real stars of this show are the grilled plantains. I'd previously only had plantains as a side dish down at the local Cuban restaurant, where, I assumed, they were fried in unholy amounts of butter in order to achieve such soaring levels of sweetness. In fact, these were just as tasty, and needed only a splash of olive oil, some salt and pepper, and about 4 minutes on the grill.
As for the chicken, it is heavenly sweet as you might expect with all that molasses in the marinade. And by extension, that means you'll be on the wrong side of the battle when these beauties start flaring up on the grill. (No bangle bracelets or frilly pirate shirts for you, pal!) But unlike, say... bottled barbecue sauce, the sugar content in this marinade does NOT result in an unappealing charcoaly taste permeating each bite, even when the meat is thoroughly cooked through. (As your chicken always should be, duh.)
Overall, this recipe boasts a really fun and unusual collection of flavors that are probably hiding in plain sight for most of us—with the possible exception of molasses and plantains, everything you need is probably already in your cupboard. So why not make it for dinner tonight?
* = new or recent release
Matmos - "Z.O.C.K." - The Civil WarFood photography is one of the few areas in which I will acknowledge the existence of love at first sight. Or lust, anyway. Meat lust—the kind that's cooked over an open flame in the dwindling twilight of a mid-August weeknight, when the quiet stillness of summer is best punctuated by... a massive smoke condition in your backyard due to cheese and fat dripping into the fire.
Oh well. Nothing's perfect, but one gander at the photo accompanying this Batali-inspired beef pinwheel dish served up recently on Serious Eats, and I knew that I had to get on board with this artery choking grill-tastrophe. (The photo seen here is mine, and although it's certainly easy on the eyes, it really doesn't inspire the same involuntary salivating that the original does.)
I followed the tip about using flank steak over tenderloin, mostly for economic reasons, but also because I figured the salami would provide plenty of the fat that's normally absent in a flank. This proved to be true, however, my flank steak was already too thin to butterfly, but also too thick to roll up the filling in. As such, I chose to lay it out on the counter and smash the living hell out of it with the smooth side of my meat tenderizer. This took some work—flank steak can be pretty tough in its raw state, and it doesn't pound down into a thin membrane like chicken breasts do, so if you find yourself in a similar predicament, be prepared to make a major racket in the kitchen.
My flank steak was much smaller than the one called for in the recipe, so I just guesstimated the appropriate amounts for the filling ingredients, and that worked out fine. In the end, I had exactly enough filling to spread across the meat, which rolled up in a jiffy with very little in the way of jailbreaking on either end. I tied it up with about seven lengths of twine, and before slicing off the individual pinwheels about an hour later, I also speared each wheel with a wooden skewer to help keep them together on the grill.
We have a gas grill, and I quickly realized that this is a major handicap when cooking something that's predestined to drip cheese and salami fat down onto the heat tent (where they promptly caught fire.) As such, keeping the pinwheels from burning required constant attention on my behalf, not to mention the sacrifice of all the hair on my right hand's knuckles (and a bit from the wrist... I need longer grill tongs.) If you've got a charcoal grill, you'll probably be in much better shape.
Nevertheless, when I was satisfied that A) the pinwheels were cooked, and B) the grill fire was adequately doused, we beat a hasty retreat inside and gooey/meaty substantiation was immediately upon us. These are definitely worth the trouble, the bald knuckles, and even the hour or so it's going to take me to clean the disaster-grade mess it made of the grill.
