Hokum

Richard Quest, the object of a little fan club at work and the recent subject of a variety of misadventures, is back. He went through the requisite rehab — although we’re not sure there’s really a rehab program for some of his apparent predilections — and he’s been getting a little bit of air time.

We haven’t seen him yet on the Big Boy CNN Channel yet, though — we suspect he’ll have to do a little more penance on lesser-watched CNN networks before he gets to bring his screaming self back to the big leagues. But we’ll wait.

The Paw Paw party in West Virginia, where 100 or so people show up to camp out, eat a couple of pigs, have a few beers, float in the Cacapon River and listen to music for much of the night, is just a few weeks away now. One of my all-time favorite gig photos comes from Paw Paw:

I just got the annual e-mail from the folks who put the party together. Here it is. If you’re interested in going, write me and I’ll send you directions:

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RON’S CABIN PARTY AND PIG ROAST - 2008

On the beautiful Cacapon River in Wild and Wonderful West Virginia

WHEN: August 9, Saturday Noon until ??????????? WHERE: Near Paw Paw, West Virginia, about 20 miles west of Berkeley Springs, WV, just off Route 9. About 2 hours from the Washington beltway.

FOOD PROVIDED: Whole roast pig., maybe 2, (by champion pig cooker and brother-in-law Sam Bailey, served about mid-afternoon), corn, soda and beer

FOOD YOU PROVIDE: Homemade covered dish or dessert to share, preferred soft drinks, “better beer.”

ACTIVITIES: Swimming, boating, volley ball, hiking, bocce ball, bonfire, bird watching, animal watching (deer, bear {yes, we have seen a couple from the deck}, beaver, snakes, bats, Lions {as in International},bugs and other wildlife), and port-o-potties for your convenience, and fund raising for the Friends of the Cacapon River.

LIVE MUSIC: Nathan Wilson, star of Pittsburgh’s Squonk Opera , recently returned from concerts in South Korea; “The Cacaphonics” (their 21st year here and the only place to hear them; the Tone Popes; Jenny Wilson (Uno Duo; Flute A’More) and her 2 kids Ava and Evan). And probably others. Good dance music, if you can dance on grass.

BRING WITH YOU: Homemade covered dish or dessert to share, preferred soft drinks, “better beer,” swim suit, sneakers (or whatever for rocky river bottom), towels, lawn chairs/blankets, bug repellant. Children are welcome. No dogs and no guns please.

CAMPING: Over night camping at the cabin. Bring your own equipment (tents, blankets and flashlites) and food for the next day. Coffee and donuts are provided for campers in the morning. No hookups, but campers and RVs are welcome if they can get back up the hill!!

Lists of lodgings in Berkeley Springs can be found on the Internet: http:// www.berkeleysprings.com. Several B & Bs in Paw Paw and motels in Hancock, MD. Let me know if you need directions or lodging information.

My sister e-mailed me today, asking me for my smoked brisket recipe. Her gain is YOUR gain, too. Here it is:

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RANDY’S BRISKET

You can use a whole brisket (flat and point portions) or a brisket flat, depending on how much BBQ you need. Flats are great for smaller crowds but are considerably more expensive. I usually cook whole briskets now because there’s a lot of things you can do with leftovers, particularly the leftover point parts of briskets. I’ll get into that. So:

RUB:

1/3 cup sweet Hungarian paprika. Don’t buy junky McCormick cardboard-tasting paprika. A lot of groceries sell decent Hungarian stuff in a tin and it’s not very expensive. Use sweet paprika, not hot paprika.

1/3 cup turbinado sugar (”Sugar in the Raw.”) Can’t find it? You can use light brown sugar but I’d use a little less.

1/4 to 1/3 cup kosher salt, depending on how you feel about salt. I usually use about a quarter cup.

Cayenne pepper to taste. Start with a tablespoon, taste the rub and add. I typically might use about a tablespoon and a half.

One tablespoon of onion powder.

One tablespoon cumin.

One tablespoon dried basil (if you’ve got it, no worries if you don’t).

Maybe some chili powder if you’re feelin’ it — maybe a tablespoon tops.

BASTE

Four parts good-quality apple juice

One part bourbon, more or less (cheap-ass bourbon is fine. DON’T WASTE THE GOOD STUFF!). Don’t bother to measure; just eyeball it.

One hardware store-issue spray bottle

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ONE DAY IN ADVANCE:

If you buy a whole packer brisket in a cryo-pack, you’ll probably need to trim it. Cut off the fat so there’s about a quarter-inch left all around. This might require you to remove a LOT of fat — on a whole untrimmed brisket of 12 pounds, I’ll easily carve off more than a pound, often two. You’ll still have plenty of fat left to keep the meat moist. In particular when you’re trimming, target the really hard fat you’ll find on a lot of packer briskets. Smoke won’t penetrate that stuff.

If you buy a flat, you may not need to trim it at all. You do want one, though, that has a solid layer of fat covering one side of the flat — look for that when you buy one.

To prepare: Dump a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil on the brisket and rub it all around. You want a light coating on there and no more. It helps make the rub adhere to the meat.

Apply the rub. I pretty much cover my briskets with a solid layer of rub.

Drop your brisket in a food-safe plastic bag, tie up the bag, drop the package in a bowl (the bowl catches leaks) and put it in the fridge for a day. If you don’t have that time, you can just apply the rub and smoke the brisket, but leaving it on for a day lets the salt and sugar start to break down the meat.

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TIME TO COOK!

If you cook the brisket at about 225-250, it generally will take somewhere around an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half per pound. Set up your grill as you see fit. Hickory, oak or cherry all work well for smoking brisket. Don’t use mesquite — it’s too strong for such a long smoke. I usually use chunks of blackjack oak that the in-laws have sent me from Florida.

Don’t use too much wood. I use a vertical smoker and typically use four chunks for the entire cook.

The key to smoking brisket is to do everything you can to keep your temperature steady, and use thermometers to measure both your smoker temperature and your brisket temperature. If you need to speed up the cook, wrap the brisket in foil after a few hours. If you need to slow it down, baste it more often.

So: Get your smoker to the 225-250 range (don’t get your shorts in a ball if it gets hotter — the key is to avoid too many temperature ’spikes’ more than anything else) and drop on the brisket, fat side up. Do what you need to do to keep the heat constant, but the brisket itself doesn’t need your attention for many hours. Note that if you cook at this rate, it’ll take perhaps 15 hours to cook a 10-pound brisket (in reality, they often get done sooner, maybe 12-13 hours).

Using the hour-and-a-half-a-pound as a guide, leave the brisket alone until you get to the estimated halfway point of cooking.

You can baste it at the halfway point. Mix up the baste in the spray bottle and spray it on. This stops the rub from getting knocked off. You don’t have to make the brisket swim in your baste — just spray on enough to keep the meat moist. Baste again at the three-fourths point, then again every hour or so after this, but do NOT baste for the last hour.

USE A MEAT THERMOMETER TO TELL WHEN THE BRISKET IS DONE. I use a BBQ probe thermometer — I just put the probe in the meat at the halfway point, run the wire out of the smoker and plug in the little digital unit that tells me the temp. They’re widely available for under $20.

I pull my brisket off when the internal temperature reaches about 175-ish degrees. You can bring it all the way up to 185 if you want, but I find this makes it so tender that it doesn’t slice well — plus I like to really rest my brisket, which means the interior temperature will continue to rise after I take it off the smoker.

So: After you’ve pulled off the brisket, you need to rest it for at least 20 minutes. However, you can rest it for MUCH longer if you want/need to.

Cover it loosely with foil if you’re going to give it a short rest. If you want to rest it longer than that — and I think you’ll like the results if you do — wrap it in a double layer of foil, wrap your foil/meat package in two more layers of clean bath towels (old ratty towels are fine), and drop the whole package in a cooler — the smaller the cooler, the better. It will remain VERY hot for well over two hours if you do this and well within serving temperature for more than three hours.

To cut the brisket, separate the point part from the flat and ALWAYS cut the brisket AGAINST the grain. If you can’t find the line of fat that separates the point from the flat, just start carving at one end until you run into the line in the middle of a slice. Now, cut along that line and separate the flat and point.

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The point is considerably fatter than the flat. I often take the point and make “burnt ends” out of it that I subsequently use in chili, enchiladas, chopped beef sandwiches, BBQ beans and so on.

To do this: Take your point, cut it into cubes, dump the cubes into a foil pan or any container that can go in the smoker, coat the cubes with your favorite BBQ sauce and return the whole cubes, pan and all, to the smoker for 2-3 more hours. You get some really intensely smoky, chewy chunks o’ meat that you can use a lot of things.

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And there you go! — R.

I haven’t been picking up much music lately — I go through little jags of purchases, then usually lay off for a while — but here’s the last five albums I bought (aside: I still buy music by the album even though I buy almost all music online now. Some habits die hard):

Jaxonville — Self-titled eponymous EP (there’s another term you never hear any more) by two Australian twin sister country singers. The Kasey Chambers parallels are obvious and, although these two can definitely sing and this EP is well-produced, they’re still rough around the edges. I saw them play at a free concert last week at a county park — I have no idea why they scored a gig like that, which typically goes to local bar bands, but I did enjoy them.

Sharon Little — Perfect Time for a Breakdown — I’d never heard of her until I saw her open for Robert Plant and Alyson Krauss at their recent local concert, and at the end of the set, I headed straight for the souvenir stand and bought the CD. She was that good. This album doesn’t quite capture her stage strengths but it’s still a strong debut.

The Best of Simon and Garfunkel — I still haven’t gotten around to converting my vinyl(which includes several S&G albums), and Amazon MP3 put this on sale for cheap, so I just bought it for a few bucks to add to my collection.

Vampire Weekend — And we have another self-titled eponymous debut. These guys are too cool by half for an old man like me (they’re all recent white-boy Columbia grads who somehow have brewed up a stew of music heavily influenced by modern African sounds) but I really like “Mansard Roof” and “A-Punk.”

Southern Culture on the Skids — Countrypolitan Favorites. There are two groups of people: Those who like S.C.O.T.S. and those who should. Here, they cover (and fricasee) various popular tunes from the “countrypolitan” era of the 1960s and 1970s. They turn “Wolverton Mountain” into a rave-up and mop the floor with George Jones’ “Let’s Invite Them Over.” And then, for some reason, they cover T-Rex’s “Life’s a Gas” out of the blue, putting down the coolest guitar fuzztone you’ll hear anywhere. Still not convinced? S.C.O.T.S. usually serves fried chicken and vanilla puddin’ at its concerts. Really.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why people enter bids in eBay auctions. Sure, I understand the ‘buy it now’ feature that is becoming more and more popular there, but when you bid on an item in advance, you help no one other than the seller. Your bid is binding, so you’d better not change your mind; you’ve immediately put yourself in a competition with other bidders; and you always face the risk of getting out-bid at the last minute, while you’re away from your computer.

So, I don’t bid. I snipe.

‘Sniping’ is the time-honored eBay tradition of entering a bid with just a few seconds left in an auction. The reason it’s so effective is that your rivals have no time to respond.  You win the auction — if you get that bid in under the wire.

There are several obvious problems with doing this manually — you have to be at your computer, your internet access must be working, there must not be any of a dozen other problems and you must time things just right. I don’t do any of that. I use esnipe, an online service, and pay a small fee per transaction. Trust me: Esnipe pays for itself many times over in auction savings.

Also, by using Esnipe, I don’t have to be at my computer when the auction closes. And if I change my mind about whether I want to purchase, I simply cancel the sniping command before it’s issued at the end of the auction.

I’m sniping some speakers right now — some quality refurb Polks straight from the factory, which has its own eBay store. I’ve written previously about refurbs, and buying the speakers this way might save me, oh, 60% over buying them from a glass-and-bricks store. We’ll see how it turns out.

My sweet potato pie was a hit at the company July 4 Holiday potluck. Like most lightly planned potlucks, this one had too many desserts, but the pie still got sampled heavily and people (many of whom had never heard of such a dish) were complimentary. Score another win for the all-powerful sweet potato in its battle against the clearly inferior pumpkin!

Previously:

• Images of the season: Sweet potato pie
• Sweet potato pie superiority
• Evanston’s response
• Hokum retorts

My jaw dropped in 2001 when I first heard XM Radio. That was before the network even launched, back when it was broadcasting test signals, and my friend Bill showed up one day with a computer and a little black box and a cassette adapter for my car radio.

We drove through the mountains of West Virginia and I heard music the way I used to hear it — and by that, I don’t mean the actual songs. I mean the love behind the songs, the obvious thought that went into picking what got played. It was being done by people who loved music, not by people who loved money. And XM has mostly stayed that way over the years, even as it struggled to stay in business.

When I got my new car recently, I was given a free six-month subscription to XM’s main competitor — Sirius — and I was immediately struck at the sloppier, more commercially oriented playlists that it used. With some noteworthy exceptions, Sirius sounds like those stupid music channels you get with digital cable TV — channels where somebody just dumps a bunch of songs together under a united theme and shovels ‘em out. There’s no soul. And I loved XM more than ever as a result.

I’m thinking about that now because XM is about to go away. The feds are about to sign off on an XM-Sirius merger, and Sirius will become the dominant party even though it has fewer subscribers. I don’t understand how things can work that way, and I suspect the whole concept of satellite radio is on very shaky ground anyway, so I’ll try to enjoy my XM now. The music-lovers are about to lose another round and the weasels will do what they always do — ride creative enterprises into the ground, draining every ounce of cash along the way until there’s nothing left. And music will become less important to people than ever.

My house is hot as hell right now because I’m making a pan of Pioneer Woman lasagna on a 90-degree day. I’ve got a niece and nephew coming up from Florida in a couple of days, and they love this stuff (I sent the recipe down to the in-laws, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive), so I’m making it for them…and for me. I haven’t had any in a couple of months now and I really miss it, even in the heat of summer. It’s that good.

It sure doesn’t look like it would be that good. This is Betty Crocker 1950s cookbook Italian-American cooking: No fresh herbs, a tube of breakfast sausage, tomato paste and canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones, and cheeses that will cause your Italian friends to consider an intervention: Sliced deli mozzarella instead of the good fresh stuff, cottage cheese instead of ricotta, and freakin’ stinky-foot shake parmesan cheese instead of fresh grated parmesan. And it’s only two layers thick. And it’s got enough meat in it (2.5 pounds) to overwhelm an army, plus almost three pounds of cheese. You can get a good arm workout just lifting the pan.

But trust me: Follow the recipe. I’ve subbed in fresh mozz, ricotta and hot Italian sausage in the recipe, and guess what? The original is better. Your cultured friends will snub you, and you’ll want to do it the ‘authentic’ way, but you’ll know the truth in your heart of hearts.

And after you’ve made it and hated yourself for loving it, try this recipe as well (again, way better when the weather’s not hot): Pioneer Woman Pot Roast. I’ve never been a big pot roast guy — my mother’s pot roast tasted mostly like the pot — but I’ve come around over the years, thanks first to the Dixie Cafe pot roast and then because of this recipe. I think you’ll love it as well.

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P.S. to Mom: Look, you’ve been gone almost 20 years. I should be able to speak this truth: We all miss you terribly and we all hated your pot roast. There, I said it.

I am definitely on the older side of the people you might run across on Facebook, and I have an account there (and at MySpace and LinkedIn) as much to protect my professional name as anything else. I don’t generally update my status, I don’t go searching for friends, I don’t ‘kill zombies’ or order online drinks, and I really don’t drop by all that much. It’s not personal; it’s more a function of my age and the fact that most people my age aren’t even aware that Facebook exists, much less understand what it does.

But bit by bit, my age-appropriate peers are catching on. Those of us who spend a lot of time online have friends, and they have friends, and so on and so forth. Layer by layer, these friends are being dragged into Facebook, and they become little communities.

Example: As noted a few entries back, I played Patty’s annual Memorial Day Weekend Luau again this year. JohnDC, a perpetual hustler (in a good way), professional bass player and web designer, snarked up a bunch of photos and posted them on his Facebook page, including these:

When the same group o’ musicians reunited for a gig at King Street Blues recently, Patty used her Facebook account and connections to notify her friends…and sure enough, a number of them showed up. Result: A happenin’ little Thursday night party, all put together thanks to Facebook connections.

It made me want to start updating my status again.