Pictured here is my coffee making equipment. The grinder is a Braun. It is over 22 years old and still runs perfectly, even with daily use. I acquired it when I opened a coffee store, The Daily Grind, in the Peter Pond Mall in Fort McMurray in 1984. (I was 22.) The current model, the Braun CaféSelect KMM 30, looks similar and my guess is it will last as long. Mind you, I don’t use the finest grind. I set set it at about the middle. With a good full city roast” there’s lots of flavour.

The coffeemaker is a “6-cup” stove-top espresso maker from Vev Vigano. I bought in Montreal in 1990, so that would make it 17-years-old. I’ve used it at least twice a day since then. When I’ve been able, I’ve carried with me as I’ve traveled. Besides being placed on an electric stove element, it’s been used on wood stoves, on Coleman stoves, gas stoves, and on campfires, with remarkably little damage. And it always produces the same cup of coffee. Well, not exactly the same–really depends on the coffee you put in it, but it’s always strong. It’s called a “six cup,” but I get one big mug out of it, or two smaller cups. Vev Vigano makes a whole line of these makers, but I recommend this basic model because it isn’t too fancy and the owner won’t mind banging it around. Everyone I’ve bought this for loves it.

The Vev Vigano is stainless steel. Other manufacturers make similar models out of aluminum, but I don’t like those. Anyway, this sucker is tough. This morning mine was stuck in the dishwasher–loaded last night–and in my caffeine deprived state I didn’t realize what was going on. So I gave the dishwasher’s bottom rack a strong yank, which not only bent the lid of the coffeemaker out of position slightly, but also knocked off that top black piece attached to the lid. After fishing the piece out of the bottom of the dishwasher, I grabbed a hammer and pounded it back on the lid. Not a scratch. (My amazement at the success of this early morning brute force repair is what prompted me to post).

For those of you unfamiliar with this type of coffeemaker, you should know there are basically three parts to this thing–a top, a bottom and an insert which goes in the bottom part that holds the coffee. It works like a coffee percolator; the difference is, in the stove-top espresso maker the water only goes through the coffee once, whereas in a percolating coffeemaker the water circulates up and over, through the grinds continually which gives off that wonderful aroma, but makes the coffee taste very bitter.

The stove-top espresso maker’s top and bottom unscrew in the middle. The top part has a gasket or sealer ring. This wears out over time–mine usually last a couple of years–and you can probably purchase replacements at any store that sells the makers, or at any Italian supermarket. If you are giving it as a gift, grab a few extra rings and throw them into the package with maybe a note where they can get more, though they won’t need to know that for a few years.

Actually, I recall this maker comes with a fourth part, a piece that goes in the insert so you can use less coffee if that’s to your taste. I lost the part years ago and don’t miss it. My sister uses hers, but then she goes for the espresso roast with a fine grind, and so uses less coffee.

So there’s a couple of durable Christmas gift ideas, tested by time. I won’t be making too many of these types of recommendations because the only other things in my kitchen that have lasted this long are the cast iron frying pans. You usually don’t buy those in boxes, so they’re a devil to wrap.

Yes, chili con carne, a nice and easy way to ease back into the blog. And easy, you know, does it. It’s a cold autumn day and the low gray sky overnight has spilled onto the frosted gray ground and grass. It’s one of those days where you want to fill up the house with warm, comfort food smells. Everybody knows how to make chili. Everybody makes it differently. And everybody believes they make the best. The basics are, er, basic, and yet a few personal modifications yield a complex, individual flavour. It’s a slow cook so there’s little chance of burning it. It goes great with beer. You can put cheese and sour cream on your chili to fancy-pants it up and impress your friends. You can go Texan and make it with just meat and hot sauce. (But most of us go with kidney beans.) Chili is a great side dish. Have it with a main course of a bratwurst on a bun, for instance; much better than baked beans. Of course, chili con carne can be macho if you make it really spicy. You can eat it cold, you can heat it up. You can freeze it for later. Best of all, you can have it for breakfast, lunch and supper on the same day and enjoy every meal.

It’s one of the first big dishes a young man cooks when he moves out of the house. I myself learned about it really early in life, first encountering a basic chili recipe when I was eight or nine, in a Homer Price novel I think. (I can’t recall which one so don’t quote me.) My favourite 1970s TV detective Columbo would eat chili for breakfast, with crackers, and I thought that was so cool. Chili is a social dish, with the chili cook-off getting its own Wikipedia entry, no doubt written up by someone from the Chili Appreciation Society International, Inc. Simpsons fans will recall the brilliant episode which featured a chili cook-off and a foxy Johnny Cash.

Let’s start with tomatoes. I like my chili with a nice tomato flavour, so keep that in mind as you read this and modify your own. At the beginning of October, I moved to nice quiet house on the other side of town and inherited a disheveled garden that hadn’t been weeded or watered over the summer, the vacating owners having reasoned no doubt they would not be here for the harvest, so why bother? In the back of this garden were six overloaded Roma tomato plants. So, here I’m using fresh tomatoes. Usually, it’s canned tomatoes. If I’m using canned, a general rule of thumb is; add slightly more canned tomatoes than canned kidney beans. Tinned tomatoes are usually bigger than the cans of kidney beans, so it just a matter of one-to-one; a bigger can of tomatoes to one can of kidney beans. If you want to get fancy and blow the budget, go down to your Italian market and grab a few tins of Strianese brand “San Marzano Tomatoes of Sarnese-Nocerino area” [sic, from the label] with basil, at $4.50 a can–it sounds outrageous but it’s worth it. Canned tomatoes are not something I would normally eat right out of the can, but to my complete surprise I discovered these ones I will, just like my Italian grocer said I would.

But now, as I said, I’m using fresh Roma tomatoes; more flavour and they look pretty cool when they are chopped up and in the pot, which is why I started photographing this little project in the first place. That pot is about 4.5 litres in size, btw, an Imperial gallon.

Into the tomatoes, dump in a couple of cans of red kidney beans along with whatever that slimy goo is that comes in the can with the beans. I used two 19-ounce cans here.

Turn on the stove at this point to start the pot’s slow cook, set at “Low” or just above. Plunk on the lid.

Next I chop up onions–about three or four slightly smaller than a baseball. Chuck ‘em in. Do not bother to cut uniformly. This is a homemade chili and the more irregular the chopping, the more homemade it will look and taste. So just hack away. Eventually, as the chili cooks out the smaller onion bits will dissolve, so it’s good to have some bigger onion pieces hanging around for variety in flavour and texture.

Following onions, it’s time for garlic. Here’s how much I use; too much for your average person, I’m told, and not enough for garlic freaks. Peel it, chop it up and throw that in. Stir.

I like to add tomato paste to my chili even when I’m using fresh tomatoes. For this recipe I dumped in a couple of those small five and a half ounce cans. Hunt’s sells a 13-ounce can of tomato paste, but that might be too much.

Now mushrooms and meat, ground beef. Mushrooms, I have been told, contain an enzyme that aids in the digestion of beef and that is why they are served with steak. I never looked that up. I add mushrooms because they are my canary-in-the-coal-mine, my flavour spies on the inside. As the chili slow cooks, the mushrooms give off a lot of water, and after they’ve done that, then they start absorbing flavours around them. So I watch the mushrooms. When I think the whole thing is done, the first thing I taste is a mushroom. If it has flavours, then the chili is good to go. Chop up the mushrooms and stir them into the pot.

Throw in some chili powder. How much? Your call. I would say for a pot this size at least a cup. I used a cup and a half. If you want to start experimenting with heat, chop up some fresh chili peppers and heave ho into the mix. Careful though, this is the trickiest part, the heat. If you sprinkle in crushed peppers, chances are you are going to add too many because when they cook out, look out. Expect to be experimenting all your life with peppers. Expect to kill yourself with peppers. This time around I didn’t add any because I didn’t have any. For heat, I used something called Ogopogo Sauce, a concoction I bought at a craft fair in town, and I added it to the bowl after the cooking was done, when I was shoveling it into my face.

But back to the pot. After whipping in the chili powder, give the raw mix a little taste. The chili powder you used probably contained a lot of salt (check the label). Now, on top of the mix sprinkle on some crushed black pepper and maybe some salt, again to taste. I tossed in a bit of Kosher salt which I use for cooking all the time because that’s what the TV cooks use. Buy some. Makes you feel like a pro. At this point, you’re probably saying to yourself, oh-oh, I’m going to need a bigger pot, and you may be right. However, as the heat builds, things start to break down and the level lowers, more so if you used fresh tomatoes. Put the lid back on and turn to the meat.

Pour some cooking oil–I used olive oil–on the bottom of a frying pan. Flip the heat up to medium-high and slap the ground beef down on the oil. Your purpose here is to “brown” the meat and cook out some of the water and fat.

Stir it around and when the meat turns “brown” (actually gray), drain the water and fat off and dump the meat into your pot. Stir it up.

You slow cook with the lid on for about an hour, stirring occasionally. Then cook it with the lid off for another hour to reduce the water content. Flavour-wise, if you go the tomato route and find it’s too tart, throw in some brown sugar. But not too much, no more than a small handful.

And there you go–(I’m addressing my always hungry teenage nephews “teach a man to fish” etc.), your own big pot of chili!

A couple of days after I scanned the picture, I had a chance to show it on my laptop to the young sons of a friend of mine, ages 11 and 9 respectively. My purpose was to encouraged them to find someone to give that nickname to in order to keep it going. “The name of Snerby Buckskin must not die!” I proclaimed. Oh yes, I almost forgot. “See if you can pick out that lady in this picture,” I said to the boys as I pointed to my mother seated on the sofa across the room from where the boys sat. Over the span of 62 years, without hesitation their fingers shot forth at the screen to the correct image, to the little girl seated bottom left.

There are a couple of interesting things in the photo that went unnoticed until I scanned it at 300 dpi (then bumped it up to 1200 dpi, then scaled it up to 12 inches before dropping the dpi back to 300). My mother had always noticed the two boys in the window but has no idea who they were or why they were there. If they were supposed to be in the photograph, why were they inside? she wondered. As we looked closer, we discovered there were actually three boys in the window, not two. You can just make out the ghostly image of a third in the middle. My mother has no memory of who took the picture, but the photographer seems to have deliberately moved the camera to include that window, so obviously wanted them in the frame. Also, there appears to be someone standing behind the young girl in the upper left. You can see what looks like a white shirt and a suspender, and a bit of a cap. What happened to this person? Who was it? Were they hiding? Another mystery in this delightful little photograph.

Testing, testing… is this mike on?

So I gets a phone call this morning from this Jeremy Lott character and he’s yelling at me to update my blog. I says, “Why?” And he shouts back, “Because it’s time to update it, #@%&*!” And I thinks, “What’s he know that I don’t?” Because as far as I know ‘blog’ stands for ‘weblog’ and I’ve been away from my computer and away from the web and so I have nothing from the web to log. I tried to explain. I added that I had nothing to say anyway, and it’s summer, blah blah blah. But Mr. Lott was relentless. “Just update the damn thing,” he says finally, like he’s paying me to do it or something.

So I cave and I says, “Okay, I do it.”

And now you’re here and I’m here and we’re sitting around staring at each other with nothing to say. It’s like we’re visiting our relatives or something which, at least in my family, happens more in the summer than in the other seasons. So I guess it’s all right for now.

How’s your sister doing? Is she still married to that [bozo who plays golf all day and dreams about it all night]… fellow? I forget his name. He makes pretty good money, doesn’t he?

And where are they living now?

That’s right, right. I was through there last year. I should have looked them up.

And how’s your mother? Last time I saw her she had a pretty bad hip.

That’s good to hear. Health is important. If you don’t have your health… as they say.

Fine.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It’s usually at this point that the nuclear bomb goes off, at least in my nuclear nightmares. More often than not in these dreams I’m sitting around in a living room having a boring conversation with relatives when I look out the window and see the mushroom cloud rising before the sound arrives. I’ve met other people who have had similar nightmares. These sequences are usually very vivid and the sense of boredom accentuates the shock that we are all about to die horribly without the faintest notion of why this is happening. I assume it happens because whatever part of my brain makes up my dreams is trying to spice things up a little and just goes overboard with the plot line.

So there, Jeremy. I’ve updated my blog. For those of you who are bored with this post, blame Jeremy. He won’t mind. He’s American so he’s used to getting blamed for all kinds of stuff.

For those of you who don’t know him, that fuzzy-faced fellow in the picture above is Jeremy Lott, a friend and a guy I used to work with. He is seated at a picnic table at the Northwest Washington County Fair, proudly holding a Dr. Pepper bottle cap that entitles him to a free soda pop. Big friggin’ deal, you say. Me, too. When he discovered that he was a winner he said, “I must have bought hundreds of these and never won anything. I think my luck is changing for the better.”

Well, right away he’s heading off to Washington D.C. to start a gig as an editor and writer at the American Spectator. So he’s gained some power and, possibly, some influence. Who knows where he’ll go from there. But no matter how high his star rises, we can always look back on this picture, at this moment, and say this, this is where it all started, with a humble bottle of sodey pop at a small town county fair, purchased not because Jeremy wanted to win and not because he needed to win, but simply because he was thirsty. That’s the kind of man he is, a straight shooter; a writer who talks your language about things that concern you. Read him three days a week in the Washington Post. Drink Dr. Pepper.

And now I better blog something. But what? What? What does the world need to know? If you are in the position of needing to know something, then what the hell are you doing here? Bah-doop-boom.

Here’s something. From the Vernon Morning Star: Curtain closing on auditorium

“It takes a couple of years for people to get used to a new building so the crafters in there would suffer,” said Rogers.

“If we can’t use the Priest Valley Gym, we will have to downsize. Chaos.”

Sounds pretty serious. I’m not a big fan of chaos and I bet you aren’t either. And wouldn’t that just be the way it starts? In a place where nobody would expect it? With a bunch of crafters (whatever they are) who are suffering (how I don’t know) outside a gym in some town you’ve barely heard of. And then it slowly spreads from there. That’s sort of how it works in horror movies, and so I assume that’s how it happens in real life.

Well, I’m blowing the whistle on it right now.

It’s good to be back. Glad I could help.

So while Pops was yakking to a saleswoman about grains (thank heavens he didn’t start talking about his bowels) I wandered off into gadget heaven. At first I made a beeline for the gargantuan cast iron frying pan. Okay, I have a thing for cast iron frying pans, cast iron anything for that matter. Maybe it’s a macho thing; maybe I don’t feel like a sissy if what I’m cooking with can stop a bullet. Yeah, like that dork from the sitcom “Home Improvement.” Take your Tefal and go cook at home, pretty boy. Lookin’ fer yer melon baller, pretty boy? Can’t bite a melon?

Okay. Moving away from the cast iron then.

All through my adult life, in various stages of culinary frenzy, I swore that I would buy myself a good kitchen knife. It’s no big deal obviously, since 20 years have gone by and I haven’t been able to sustain the thought long enough to actually go out and do it. Let’s not even begin to discuss how long it took me to remember to buy a decent can opener.

But here I was, facing a whole wall of Henckel knives, the full range, the entire line. A kindly saleslady approached me. She appeared to be in her early fifties, slim, with a beauty salon ‘doo from the ’60s. She wore an apron with the store’s logo on it.

“Can I help you?”

So I blubbered out my story about always wanting to buy one good knife, 20 years, blah blah. She smiled. I could tell by her eyes that this happens a lot.

“Okay!” she said brightly and started explaining the various levels of the product line, smoothly, slowly. She talked of balance, she talked of paring and peeling. “Balance is not particularly important if you are buying a larger knife because you’ll tend not to use it for long periods. But if you’re peeling a whole basket of apples and you’ve got that thing in your hand all day, then you’ll want something that won’t tire you out.”

This was a nice touch. Now, I’ve got to say that I myself would never peel an entire basket of apples. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve peeled more than a dozen in my life. Same thing with potatoes. A beautiful woman once told me that all the nutrients are “in the skin” and that was a good enough reason for me to leave the tedious enterprise of peeling everything except bananas in the capable hands of others.

Still, for a brief second, in the here and now of a northern February, with over two feet of snow on the ground outside, I imagined myself in an sunny orchard under a tree of blossoms, sitting beside a canish basket of ruddy red MacIntoshes, peeling to my heart’s content–”Tweet-tweet” sang an imaginary bird (an idiotic image to be sure because the blossoms and the fruit were seasonally out of synch).

“But I assume you’ll want one of these,” said my knife guide back on earth, “which come in various sizes.” She reached out and handed me the murder weapon from John Carpenter’s Halloween. “That’s a ten-inch. This moulding here on the stem is actually new for the company. How does that feel?”

Then something unusual happened. As I held and admired this “Key to the City of Good Living,” the saleslady grabbed the 12-inch Henckel, an almost absurdly huge thing (even though it was only two-inches longer than the one I had) like she had reached into another dimension–for instance Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town–and pulled it out. She held it up and said, not really to me, but to the wall, to the past, her personal past in fact, “You know? My old dad would have dearly loved to have had one of these in the barn when he was slaughtering pigs.” She then turned the knife over. “I can still see those pig heads in the basement over night.”

There was a bit of pause.

Finally, I offered, “A real horror show?”

The saleslady looked at me and smiled. “Oh yeah, sure. But they made great head cheese.”

There was nothing else to say. We walked together toward the cash register with a Five Star $150 ten-inch slicing knife.

It’s a thing of beauty. I’m holding it in my hand now, typing with the other. Cuts everything like ‘buttah.’ Sometimes you just know when to buy. As Bart Simpson put it, “Once again, a knife wielding maniac has shown us the way.” Perhaps I’ll start shaving with it. Perhaps in the years ahead, after I retire, I’ll take up slaughtering my own livestock in the apartment.