Risolaya, or is it Jambalotto?

There are a hundred “best part”s of living in the SF Bay Area.  One of those “best parts” is Dungeness crab season.  The oceans are full of crabs, but none of those other crabs can hold a candle to Dungeness crab.  As with all crabs, there’s a lot that gets thrown away, and only a bit that gets eaten.  This had been a puzzle to me for some time.

Then, last week, the solution occurred to me: crab stock!  My brother-in-law got a whole big bag of crab “leftovers” from a local seafood store: shells, the butter, the gills, all the parts that don’t get sold to the public when Dungeness crabs are cooked, cracked, and cleaned.  I filled my biggest stock pot with crab left-behinds, topped up with water, and brought to a slow boil.  After an hour, I strained off the liquid, pitched the crabby-stuff, and reduced the liquor by about half.  Now all I needed was something to do with my newly crafted liquid gold.

I had made a seafood risotto a few months back that was a big, big hit.  But my beautiful bride had asked for my Cajifornian Jumpalaya.  So first, I made a batch of my amazing Cajifornian (sometime called Creolifornian) spice:

5 parts sweet paprika
2 parts thyme
3 parts Italian herb
2 parts each granulated onion and  granulated garlic
1 part each ground black, white, and red pepper

Since learning the parboil trick, I now use short grain brown rice (Lundberg Farms) for both risotto and Jambalaya.  The result is not as seductively silky as with white Arborio rice, the texture is firmer, the flavor nuttier, the results healthier.  So here goes, Jambalaya a la risotto:

Parboil 1 cup shortgrain brown rice in 6 cups crab stock for 25 minutes, drain, reserve cooking stock in a microwave safe bowl.

Trinity:
- 2/3 cup diced green bell pepper
- 2/3 cup diced celery
- 1 1/3 cup diced yellow onion
2 clove smashed garlic
1/2 cup sliced green onion
2 tbsp EVOO
1 tbsp Cajifornian herb mix (from above)
1/2 tsp salt + more, to taste
2/3 cup dry white wine
9 oz Andouille/smoked sausage, diced
12 oz cleaned shrimp
12 oz firm white fish, cubed
Meat from one large Dungeness crab
(Optional) 3 oz grated parmesan cheese
1 can petite diced (no salt added) tomatoes

Put the shrimp shells and any leftovers from the Dungeness crab in the reserved crab stock and bring to a boil in the microwave.  Steep for a half  hour, strain, reserve this enhanced stock.  Keep it handy to your cooktop, you’ll be using it very soon.

In a 5qt enameled Dutch oven (or similar), add 1 tbsp EVOO and heat to med-medhi.  When oil ripples, add the parboiled rice, stir to coat.  Continue stirring/shaking until the rice is hot and fragrant.  Add the diced Trinity, saute/stir/shake for a few minutes, until the vegetables  are fragrant and begin to soften.  Add the garlic, when the garlic is fragrant, add the white whine and stir vigorously until nearly evaporated.

Start a 25 minute timer.  Using a ladle, add about 1/2 cup of stock to the rice/veg mixture, stir frequently.  Keep the mixture at a vigorous boil.  You want the grains of rice to rub against each other, releasing the starch that forms the distinctive creamy sauce.  When nearly dry, add another 1/2 cup stock, continue for about 15 minutes.  Add the Cajifornian herb mix, salt, the Andouille sausage,  and the can of tomatoes.  Continue stirring, adding 1/2 cup stock when nearly dry.

At 20 minutes, taste test the rice.  The objective is tender but firm rice, with a rich creamy sauce.  Adjust seasoning if necessary, the mixture should be slightly tangy and salty at this point (you still have all that seafood to add).  Continue cooking and adding water to achieve the desired texture and consistency.

When nearly done, add the shrimp and cubed white fish, plus Parmesan (if using) and the final 1 tbsp of EVOO.  Fold together with rice, return to a low boil, cover the pot, then reduce heat to low.  Allow about 5 minutes for the shrimp and fish to just cook through.

To serve, put a large scoop of Jambaloto on the plate and top with green onion and a generous amount of crab meat.  Serve with hot sauce, a green salad, and beer or your favorite beverage.  Enjoy!

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Go visit Boonville

Just go visit Boonville, California.  Located in the Anderson Valley, Boonville is the major metropolis of this idyllic vale.  Thirteen hundred souls strong, Boonville should be on your short list of destinations.

And when you visit Boonville, plan to stay at the Boonville Hotel.  Visit their website,  here it is.  The Boonville Hotel is a historic part of Boonville, going back to the 1880’s or so.  It is also, now under superlative proprietorship, a world class lodging and dining room.  And the whole thing is a bargain!

Disclaimer:  I graduated from “Boonville High” (Anderson Valley High School, AVHS) in 1968.  My family continued to live in the Valley until too old to handle the lifestyle, without young sons around to help them, finally selling out and leaving in 2000.  I still have a strong affection for The Valley.

When my bride and I visited last weekend, we stayed at the Boonville Hotel on Friday and Saturday.  We had dinner in the dining room there both evenings.  Our room was the front half of a thoroughly renovated and redesigned classic Valley home on the hotel premises.  We had a fireplace, incredible workmanship, clever design, whimsical esthetics, and high functionality, all for a fair price.

Dinner is by reservation only, and the menu is prix fixe.  The four course menu is $50/person, the winelist is largely local, select, and reasonable.  They have a “$30 bottles” list that is a compendium of fine local wines at affordable prices.  Dinner on Friday was an amuse bouche, followed by PEI mussels in a tomato fennel broth over toasted homemade bread.  A beet and greens salad then segued into a slow roasted pork served with Gigando (my own term) white butter beans and elephant kale.  Dessert was another homemade delight.

Dinner on Saturday started with another amuse bouche, then on to a grilled calamari salad with frisee and roasted potatoes.  The main was an absolutely perfect chicken a la mattone (chicken under a brick), with brussels, lardons, and a mustard caper crème sauce.  We were then seduced by a cheese plate, finishing with a salted caramel torte under chantilly crème.

The Boonville Hotel is approximately like what the French Laundry would be if the gravity field surrounding the French Laundry weren’t so relativistic.

I’m tellin’ ya’, this is BOONVILLE!  I remember when the Redwood DriveIn (it used to be the “CBR [Charles, Bates, Rawles] DriveIn) was “fine dining in Boonville”.  The middle of Saturday morning, we drove from Boonville north on Highway 128 to Navarro.  We loaded up with a cup of coffee at the Navarro Store, then headed south (back toward Boonville), stopping at selected wineries along the way.  When viticulture began in the Valley, back in the 70’s.  It had a real counter-culture, hippy-dippy, hoofy-loofy essence.  They made some really huge, really awful wines, a total lack of art colliding with some incredibly inappropriate fruit.

Today, the situation in Anderson Valley is completely different.  These vineyards and wineries are enormously subtle, sublime, sophisticated, and accomplished.  A person could live a lifetime drinking only Anderson Valley wines, and never want for a thing.

The Valley itself, Hendy Woods, and the wineries are the reason to visit Boonville.  The Boonville Hotel is the reward in lodging and dining while you’re there.  This will not be a cheap weekend, nor will it be painfully expensive.  But compared by Napa or Sonoma Valley excursions, you’ll experience an authenticity, authentic quirkiness, and personal contact that you will never find in the big name California wine regions.

If you want to experience the full history of the hotel, stay in one of the upstairs front suites, #1 or #2.  The staircase in the hotel is a treasure of history.  Breakfast both mornings we were there consisted of the most outrageously seductive scones on Earth, and a fine pot of coffee.

If you are from France, Italy, Chile, or Australia, don’t visit Boonville, unless  you’re willing to not want to go home.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

2/22/2012 update

The following is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only and in no way, shape, or form do I recommend, much less encourage, anyone else to use this information for any purpose other than amusement.

G Fund: 65%

C Fund: 15%

S Fund: 20%

Analysis:  Greece looking shakier now than ever.  Iran/Bomb? (mehhh).  Sentiment seems to be pushing for a pullback.

Outlook: Holding, waiting for a buying opportunity.

A brief intermission

I had promised to get to Prosper-US, Part II, but I spent Friday volunteering at the NPS Maritime Museum and today doing errands and such.  I went to Home Depot for a faucet and met a builder who does what the British call “garden offices”.  That is a small, sub-permit, standalone office building in one’s backyard.  Around here, we’re allowed 120 square feet, maximum height of 8’, and no electricity.  I can’t wait.

Anyway, to get back to nuts and bolts, one of my pet theories is that the purpose of labor is to become a capitalist.  That’s what it takes to retire, and eventually, we all have to retire.  Saving and investing is the most reliable way to become a capitalist (inheriting a bundle, hitting 44 home runs, cutting a hit record, or inventing perpetual motion being the other options).

So I’m going to start posting how my own TSP account is invested .  Granted, if you’re not a federal employee, you can’t have a TSP account, which is an absolute crying shame.  Every American should be eligible for a TSP account.  But the five funds that make up the TSP do have close analogues among ETFs.  So you can decipher what I’m saying by consulting this reference material.

The following is provided for informational purposes only and in no way, shape, or form do I recommend, much less encourage, anyone else to use this information for any purpose other than amusement.

2/18/2012

G Fund: 40%
F Fund: 0%
C Fund: 30%
S Fund: 30%
I Fund: 0%

YTD: +4.8%

Factors: Will the S&P hold a new 12 month high close (~1363)?  What’s going to happen with Iran?  What’s going to happen with Greece and the EU?

Leaning: Hold

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Prosper-US, Part I

My apologies for the misspelling, it should read “ProsperoUS”, but that domain name is taken.  It’s the Internet, all the good domain names are taken.  So I’m left with cuties misspellings.

I’ve been talking with a lot of people about our American recovery.  There are two things every American can do right now, without spending a lot more money, to put a booster rocket on the recovery.  In Part I, I’ll write about the first thing that every American can do.

The beginning step toward helping the American recovery is to re-evaluate one’s skillset and career goals.  Let’s face it, we work to make money.  If we’re enthralled and engaged by our work, that is simply wonderful.  But for almost all of us, happiness is a good job that pays a living wage with decent benefits, that leaves us alone when we’re not at work.  Too many people in America have taken someone else’s generally bad advice and ended up either without a skillset, with the wrong skillset, or with a skillset that drives them to misery.

A four year college bachelor’s degree is not the be all, end all route to a comfortable middle class life for you and your family.  By all means, if you are good at academic work, and you enjoy academic work, and you have seriously, personally gone out to look at what the resulting jobs will entail, and you like that future, then please do pursue that degree.  If you have the academic chops to hack a STEM or professional degree, and you have the drive not only to do the schoolwork, but to do the job for 30-40 years afterward, then absolutely, go to college.

If the above doesn’t describe you, then you owe it to yourself to consider the alternatives.  There are literally millions of really good jobs that a person can qualify into to alternate routes.  The best alternate route, hands down, is to ace the ASVAB and enlist in the Navy or Air Force for a technical specialty.  If you can meet their standards, they will give you $10,000 – $100,000 worth of training in a highly marketable skill, pay you while you’re learning, total door-to-door benefits including the GI Bill, give you tons of valuable experience you get to take with you, and send you back to civilian life with a world of growing up under your belt.

If you’re too old or otherwise can’t pull off a stint in the military, your next best option is a union apprenticeship.  Against, you’ll get a paycheck and benefits while you’re learning your trade.  Still a good choice, but last in my book, is a vocational or technical course at a community college.  You’ll have to pay for that training, and won’t get paid while you’re learning, but the cost is a fraction of what colleges charge for bachelor’s degrees, and you know what you’ll be doing once you get your certification.

The bottom line is that unless you’re from a wealthy family, you need to be thinking of your future in terms of how you’re going to finance it.  The crushing burden of student debt for a degree that qualifies the graduate for a minimum wage job is a stupid plan.  No reasonable person would do that.

Tomorrow, Part II.  I call it “the fun part”.  Studying isn’t fun, shopping is.  Tune in again tomorrow.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America.

Whatever happened to the Progressive movement in America?

I grew up as a Kennedy liberal, a Progressive I suppose.  Something happened to Progressives since then.  I think it was LBJ and the incredible juxtaposition between his Civil Rights Act side, and his war in Viet Nam side.  It seems like that just tore the Progressive movement apart, and took a good chunk of America with it.

Between 1968 and 1972 it’s as though the Progressive movement came to think that America is eternal and invulnerable, that no matter how our nation is attacked that someone, somewhere will keep things running.  A nation where the citizens don’t share a common vested interest in that society cannot endure.  It’s not good enough to say that I’d love my country if my country became just what I want it to be.  On some level, ridiculous as it’s often been made to sound, there has to be a strong element of “My country, right or wrong.”  Somehow or other, we have to come to terms with the idea that if we pull as hard as we can, we can pull this country apart.

Humphrey gave us Nixon I, then McCarthy gave us Nixon II.  And that gave us Carter.  And history since then has been steering itself.  Of course it’s idle speculation, but to think how things would have turned out if not for Nov 22nd, 1963.

But I’m seeing some hopeful signs.  Maybe we’re coming to our senses at nearly the last moment.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Obama and the Bishops

I’m going to use some shorthand here because I’m assuming that you know what I’m talking about.  This isn’t about women’s rights, birth control, abortion, freedom of religion, or any of that stuff.  It’s about the federal government extending it’s reach and authority into new areas, at the expense of Constitutional principles of federalism.

If you think that Sebelius was “right” to issue the policy that forced religious activities to provide contraception, then you simply haven’t thought the issue through.  You’ve let the vertical pronoun short-circuit your logic and foresight.  Frederick Douglass said that power never yields without demand, and the federal government is rapidly becoming the most powerful agent in our nation.  The federal government will not yield power without demand, and that will eventually lead to the following situation.

Science shows that circumcised heterosexual males are vastly less likely (44%-71%) to become infected with HIV.  Check out the science right here.  Circumcision is largely a religious ritual.  So what is the reaction going to be, from those who now support government intervention, when the next administration mandates circumcision for all male babies based on the public health science?  Please don’t say, “Nobody’s talk about…” unless you finish that statement with the key word: “yet”.

JFK, in his only inaugural address, warned of the dangers of riding the tiger.  Allowing the federal government into this issue is the exact same thing as mounting the tiger.  In the lifetimes of those voting today, the outcome will be catastrophe.

This is not a women’s rights issue.  Any woman in America can get contraception and other reproductive services.  And nobody should ever conceive of denying that right.  The issue is whether the federal government will break down this protection between church and state, the sole objective of which is expanded federal government power.

That is the issue, and those are what I believe the outcomes will be.  An old white guy a long time ago said, “Those who would sacrifice freedoms for security will end up with neither.”  Our freedom is not free, and every time we allow the federal government another permission, we pay with our freedom, one way or the other, now or later.  I hope that many Americans will consider this issue from a fresh perspective, realizing that we don’t need for the power of the federal government to grow in order for women to get the health services they need.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America.

I got a new computer.

I’ve been busy with other things, and some computer adventures have kept me from doing any work here for a few months.  As you know, I’m retired.  I work on a notebook computer here at home, at Starbuck’s, wherever.  I had an HP Mini 210 netbook computer that gave good service for two years.  Then I decided to install Linux; why, I have no idea.  That worked, but I lost some tools.  Because I’ve moved almost everything I do ‘online’, I didn’t lose anything important, just the ability to easily post here.

Then I spilled a cup of coffee into the keyboard.  I remember reading that the right thing to do in that case is to flush the computer with fresh water (preferably distilled water).  My major mistake was not turning the computer off, first.  So I ended up with a dead, and leaking, computer.

We’ve become an Apple family, so that was my first impulse.  However, my growing unease with Apple smugness in the face of revelations about their business practices, not to mention the stunning purchase prices of Apple products, led me to shop around.  Unlike information I’ve read about Apple, I’ve seen reports that HP has a good reputation for working with their supply chain vendors for mutual benefit.  So I shopped HP notebooks.

Compared to Apple, the HP computer lineup is an indecipherable mess.  It literally took me three days to grasp what the models and designators all meant and how they translated to consumer (my) needs.  I shopped the HP website, BestBuy, Staples, and others.  I’m willing to write off a dollar ($1.00) a day for my computer, so a one year warranty for a $400-ish computer is fine.  On an $800 computer, I need a 2 year warranty.  Since that was the price range I realized I was going to be shopping in, I needed an extended warranty.

That made Costco the easy choice.  Not only are their prices competitive, they also extend the manufacturer’s warranty to two years at no additional cost.  That’s a roughly $100 value for an $800 notebook, so I picked up an HP Pavilion DM4-something-something-I-forget.  Suffice to say it’s the nicest computer I’ve ever owned.  Unlike computers past, it isn’t overloaded with “bloatware” (unwanted free and trial software).  It has a 14” screen, very bright and sharp … nice.  The keyboard is way better than the “90%” keyboards of netbook computers, as is the trackpad.  Even the audio system, the eponymously named “Beats Audio” is pretty good!

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, time to get out to the garage and reclaim our parking facility for our cars.

G’day all, may God continue to bless America, and “Go Giants!”