Mr. Skimpole (center)

Ah, back to Bleak House. Chapter V contains the delicious description of Krook’s rag-and-bone shop.  It’s so vivid that it makes you see and even smell the place, with its towers of junk always threatening to topple over, like an entire Goodwill store crammed into one tiny room. It’s testament to how the Victorians recycled before the word was even invented. Very little had to be thrown away in Victorian times: if you had leftover junk like bones, grease, clothing, or scraps of fabric, paper, or metal, there was always someone lower down on the social ladder who’d buy it and use it up.

After that scene, it’s a mixed bag. In Chapter VI, we meet the worthless freeloader Skimpole, whom Dickens wisely lets implicate himself through his dialogue. My dissertation director hated Skimpole with a passion, and I can see why: the guy’s the Hipster Grifter of the Victorian era, getting by on his charm until others wise up to him. Skimpole claims he has the “soul of a child,” and therefore such concepts as time and money have no meaning for him. Consequently, he’s always in debt and needing to be bailed out. If he was around today, he’d be a reality show participant.

Skimpole reminds me of those people who go around acting like jerks and insulting others to their faces, and then, when called out on it, say, “Hey, I’m just being myself. This is who I am. If you don’t like it, don’t hang out with me. You don’t want me to be fake, do you?” Ah, the last dregs of the great Romantic movement. Authenticity is overrated.

Chapter VII of BH is of less interest: it’s  full of mainly dull exposition about the Dedlocks and their circle. Then chapter VIII comes along to renew my irritation with both Dickens and Esther.

Visiting the poor with Mrs. Pardiggle (seated). I love her expression.

In chapter 8, we are introduced to Mrs. Pardiggle, another iteration of Mrs. Jellyby. Unlike Mrs. Jellyby, though, Mrs. Pardiggle is allowed to speak for, and thus damn, herself. She does some kind of nebulous “improving” work among the poor of London, who neither want her help nor profit from it; she gives her (miserable) children allowances merely so she can brag about the kids “willingly” donate them to charity (reminding me an awful lot of this Slate column.) Dickens skillfully likens Mrs. Pardiggle’s “charity work” to the empty work-for-work’s sake that goes on in Chancery; she’s a human bureaucracy, endlessly preaching, hectoring, lecturing, and asking for contributions, to no end other than to prop up her own self-image as a “busy” person (“I am incapable of fatigue, my good friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.”)

Where Dickens loses me, though, is when he once again contrasts Pardiggle with the sainted Esther Summerson. Esther says:

I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself

and I think we’re meant to take it as the right and “natural” approach to charity. The other non-satirized characters in the book—the Bleak House coterie of Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Richard – certainly have no end of praising Esther for her “kind services” to them.

But Esther’s position is a very conservative one, and one very much in keeping with a constrained vision of woman’s proper role. It’s classic angel-in-the-house: the good that Esther does for her family and friends is supposed to somehow seep out into greater society. If Pardiggle is ineffectual through lack of substance, Esther is ineffectual through narrowness.

And we’re inadvertently shown just how ineffectual Esther is in the final scene of the chapter, in which she witnesses one poor woman comforting another after the death of her baby, and can only make the episode into a sentimental tableau:

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten [by their husbands; emphasis mine], so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

In her way, Esther’s as bad as Pardiggle: using the poor for a melancholy thrill,  a pretty mental engraving instead of using them as badges of her moral worth, but using them all the same.

Are you a Trekkie with latinum to burn? If so, you must check out this auction.

On August 12, Propworx will be auctioning off tons of Star Trek memorabilia. Spock’s ears, Worf’s latex forehead piece, phasers, tribbles, models of Quark’s bar . . . The catalog alone will have any self-respecting Trekkie drooling. Never have I so wished I was worth my weight in gold-pressed latinum.

PSA: Wear gloves when chopping or deseeding jalapenos!

We broiled the chicken in the oven for about 18 minutes (far longer than the recipe specified), then simmered it in the sauce for a few minutes and served. The result was the spiciest tikka masala we’d ever tried — it had vindaloo levels of heat and the jalapeno flavor overpowered the milder ingredients. The pepper, which I associate with Mexican cuisine, just tasted out of place amid all the Indian spices. But below the peppery heat lurked one delicious dish: a smooth, creamy sauce enlivened with sweet and savory notes of cinnamon, cardamom, and cumin. I’ll try this again without the Mexican interloper, and I think it will be incredible.

The naan was surprisingly easy to make. It consisted of just four ingredients: flour, plain yogurt, salt, and baking powder. I let the dough rise and then separated it into ten balls. As John and I had commandeered the kitchen’s rolling pin for our pottery projects, I had to flatten the balls by hand, so the dough-pancakes didn’t come out quite as thin as they should have. We then fried the “naancakes” in skillets until they began to brown on the bottom, then broiled them in the oven until they swelled up into that characteristic bubbly naan-texture and browned on the surface. And that was it–no tandoor necessary! The naan were a little on the thick and undercooked side, but their flavor was excellent: like Lebanese bread with a slight sourness from the yogurt. As always, the blackened crispy parts were the best. We finished the naan before the chicken and couldn’t stop munching it — we had to cut ourselves off so we’d have some left to dip in the tikka masala sauce.

John cooked basmati rice to round off the meal. He cooked it in the rice cooker the same way we do regular old jasmine rice, and it came out just fine. Another mystery of Indian cooking debunked!

I had always thought of Indian cuisine as esoteric and difficult to make, and assumed I couldn’t approach the wonderful flavors a place like the Sitar Palace pulls off in my own kitchen. Well, I still can’t and probably won’t ever reach Indian-restaurant heights, but I can come pretty close (and, if you’re a halfway decent cook, so can you). Now I’m excited to try vindaloo, korma, saag, daal, rice pudding, and all our other favorites.

John and I picked up twice the amount of tomatoes we used last time at the farmers’ market — 8 lbs. in all. John cut x-shapes in the bottoms of each one and I blanched them in boiling water for a full 20 seconds, which made the skins slide right off. We also skipped squeezing the tomatoes this time around in hopes of getting a wetter sauce.

This time the tomatoes did boil down to something resembling a sauce, rather than the tomato sludge I wound up with last time. The problem was that there was a bit too much liquid in the sauce, even after I let it reduce for 40 minutes, with the result being that the basil-and-garlic flavors of the infused olive oil were a lot more muted than they were last time. The dominant note of the sauce was of ripe, bright, fresh tomatoes, with the garlic and basil playing in a more minor key in the background. I would have liked those flavors to have been more pronounced, but the sauce was still very tasty. You can’t go too far wrong with ripe, NC-grown tomatoes!

This batch made more than enough for the 9 oz. of pasta we cooked (a good amount for the two of us), and it looks like we can get 4-6 more servings out of it! Maybe the key is to only squeeze half the tomatoes, or to squeeze them all and add water back in as needed. The squeezing step definitely makes a huge difference.

I could pretty much live on carbs and tomatoes, but John needs his protein, so he made another favorite of ours, Mussels Italiano, to accompany the pasta. I usually use crushed tomatoes instead of the diced ones the recipe recommends because otherwise not enough tomatoes get into the mussel shells for my taste. (Also, that way there’s more delicious sauce left over to mop up with some crusty bread.) I’m wondering if the mussels would also work cooked in the No Rez sauce–might be worth a shot, if I can get those proportions right.

Re-reading books after a few years have passed is always interesting: you’re a little older, you’ve had some new experiences, all the cells in your body have regenerated—you are, in effect, a different person. And so the book seems different. You notice things that weren’t on your mental radar screen before. Different themes take on new resonance. Characters you once disliked now appeal to you because now you understand their motivations—or maybe you now can’t stand them, because you finally see what they’re all about.

So how’s Bleak House? To be honest, it’s getting on my nerves.  There’s a smugness to the novel, a moral surety to its narrators that I find off-putting. Dickens assumes that we readers are standing with him, loftily above his characters looking down on their foibles with bemusement and dismay. Sometimes, it seems a little unfair, even catty, as when the narrator says of Lady Dedlock:

She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals . . . Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and . . . can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her whole troop [of fashionable people] after them . . .

If you agree that Lady Dedlock (who you’ve barely even met when this passage appears in the novel) is a pompous fool, than this description is apt. But if you’d like to know more about her, then this passage has a Mean Girls ring to it. I can’t just sit back and complacently poke fun at the rich, at least not in this vein. It’s discomfiting.

Esther, self-effacing as ever.

Then there’s English literature’s greatest Mary Sue, Esther Summerson. Esther is given to utterances like the following:

My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she made so much of me!

As the Valley girls used to say, gag me with a spoon. If this woman were any more full of sweetness and light, she’d evaporate. But the thing is, we’re supposed to look past Esther’s self-effacing why-lil’-ol’-me? truckery and see her as the very soul of caring goodness. Maybe it’s a product of living in the Silicon Age, or maybe I’m just a crabby old sourpuss, but I can’t do it. I want to give her a few margaritas, intravenously, if needs be, and then hear what she really thinks about Lady Dedlock. (“You abandoned me, you — mildly irriating person, you! But I’m sure you had a good reason for doing so. And I forgive you. Not that you need forgiveness from me. Oh, I’m being so presumptuous!” See, I can’t even imagine her drunk.)

Then there’s Mrs. Jellyby. I harbor a certain sympathy for Mrs. Jellyby, perhaps because, were I not married to a very organized man, my house would resemble the cluttered nest in which she lives. Dickens means us to “tsk-tsk” over the fact that Mrs. Jellyby’s house is going to rot and ruin because she spends all her time canvassing on behalf of African natives—a pretty damned obvious “irony,” if you ask me, that Dickens sees fit to underscore with Esther’s observation that her eyes “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!”

Obviously, Mrs. Jellyby is that worst of creatures, one still condemned today—the bad mother. She can’t find anything in her house, her stays are showing out the back of her dress, and her astoundingly stupid children are too uncoordinated to prevent themselves from falling down the stairs or getting their heads stuck between the railings. (One of these kids is named Peepy, which always makes me think of Peepers from Sam and Max. Really, the chapter’s  a lot funnier if you imagine Mrs. Jellyby’s kids as the Soda Poppers.)

Sure, Mrs. Jellyby is a nincompoop, but I dislike the thinly veiled implication that if a woman has any interest outside house and home her domestic life will fall apart. And, yes, Dickens does make a valid point about do-gooders who ignore the problems close at hand in favor of the more romantic ones abroad—but he does pay a lot more attention to Mrs. Jellyby’s shortcomings as a mother and housekeeper than he does to her dubious moral stance. In fact, I think he missed an opportunity to show in greater depth how Mrs. Jellyby looks down on anyone not so devoted to a “cause” as she is. That’s something that would really strike a nerve among today’s “telescopic philanthropists.”

Still I prefer kooky Jellyby, with her hairpins askew and her curtains propped open with a fork (I once propped up a shaky table with a copy of The Closing of the American Mind, so, heh) to saccharine Esther. Will I be able to put up with Esther for the remainder of the book? I’ll give it a try.

That’s one offer Spielberg should be glad to accept. Jaa, a martial arts star of almost superhuman abilities, knows how to an execute a thrilling action sequence. And he and the directors appear share the same fundamental belief about action/adventure films, namely, that it’s fine to suspend logic and plausibility as long as you make things look really, really cool.

Spielberg’s influence is apparent throughout Ong-Bak. The film borrows much of its slender plot from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Bad guys steal a sacred relic from an impoverished village, causing drought and misfortune. To win it back, the hero must face a series of calamities, fighting off squadrons of goons before defeating the kingpin bad guy in a final climactic sequence.

But there’s a key difference. Temple of Doom harbored disturbing colonialist overtones: It featured a tribe of helpless Indian villagers menaced by a barbaric pagan cult (characterized by human sacrifice and the eating of monkey brains), who were saved by the intervention of two white people and one Chinese stereotype.

Ong-Bak, however, reclaims Temple of Doom for Asia. Its hero, Ting, is a native-born villager and a devout Buddhist. The bad guys, in this film, are the ones with no respect for religion, whereas Ting would risk his life to restore the head of Ong-Bak, a sacred statue of Buddha, to his hometown. He is seen praying and at a critical juncture in the film he draws strength from gazing upon another Buddhist statue.

Ting’s sidekicks, a con artist named Humlae and his partner, a tomboy called Muay, also owe something to the Indiana Jones trilogy; they’re reminiscent of Sallah and Short Round, respectively. Like the Indy characters, they follow the hero around, getting into trouble and having to be rescued and taking part, to comic effect, in his battles.

Ong-Bak also features one incredible fight scene almost certainly inspired by Indy’s escape from Nazi agents in the Cairo bazaar in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like the Cairo scene, the Ong-Bak set piece takes place in a series of alleyways lined with vendors’ stalls. But here the alleys will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s spent time in an Asian city: the vendors are cooking dumplings and kabobs and selling knives, clothes, cheap sunglasses, and all manner of motley items. It’s a little love note to Asian urban life, combined with one killer, over-the-top action sequence. Jaa fights off his enemy’s goons with Muay Thai boxing moves while hurtling around and over cooking stalls, cars, kids blowing bubbles, a knife seller’s cart, and sundry other obstacles. At one point, in an absurdist touch worthy of the Simpsons, he squeezes between two panes of glass being carried by workmen. Goofy? Sure. But also breathtaking. Time and again and I found myself gasping and marveling, “How on earth does he do that?”

What’s even more remarkable is that Jaa does all his stunts without the aid of wires or CGI trickery. This gives the film a visceral feeling welcome in an age of overly slick, artificial-looking imagery. Spielberg—he of the corny monkeys-on-vines scene in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull—ought to be taking notes.

His daughter translated the lyrics for him:

What is the best thing to arise from 5,000 years of Chinese culture?
That which is played by the most people throughout the ages is the best!
Everyone knows how to play the East, West, South, North, Bamboo, Circle and Character tiles,
I can play three days and nights without leaving the table, so Im the most awesome!

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Plum, Orchid, Bamboo, Chrysanthemum,
If I get one, I score one!
5 matching sets, chancing upon a winning tile, winning without discarded tiles,
This will leave you all looking like morons.
I strive to reach the highest score with a dragon set, or one of each kind,
But unless I complete the set, all my efforts are in vain (epic fail)!

Hoarding tiles, hurling insults,
This shows your character is the suckiest.
When you discover the tiles you relied on to win were being hoarded,
You curse the heavens for your misfortune.
When luck is not on your side or you commit a fatal blunder,
Others will laugh at you in their hearts, but wont show glee on their faces.
Hoarding tiles, counting tiles, if I dont win, neither will you!
Sabotaging you is exactly my intention!

When your victory is imminent, people play it safe and the round has no winners.
When you dont need other players tiles to win, then divinity is shining on you.
With the help of the heavens, victory is certain!
Win with a middle-fortune-blank set, a directions set, a dragon set, or an all-one-kind set,
And everyone will envy you.
Long live mahjong
Long live mahjong
Long live my wife!

Tonight I made one of my favorite dishes, Spanish Chicken with Saffron Rice. I use a simplified version of this recipe from Epicurious.com that I got at A Southern Season. They were selling saffron that day, and this recipe is as good a reason as any to splurge on some.

The changes my recipe made to the Epicurious verson were: using 3 lbs. of chicken breast instead of a whole chicken and omitting the peppers and peas. My version also didn’t specify that you were to cook the rice in the sauce, so I’ve been “mistakenly” adding already-cooked rice to the sauce. (This is how you can tell I’ve been married to an Asian guy for almost two years — I see the word ‘rice’ in a recipe and automatically throw a couple of handfuls in the rice cooker!) Looking at the picture on Epicurious, I realize the dish is supposed to consist of large chicken pieces atop dry, seasoned rice with a lot of vegetables in it.

But, you know, I like saucy, stewlike foods (yes, I’m a big fan of Indian cuisine, and I won’t say no to a risotto), so I’m going to stick with my version. I even swapped out diced for crushed tomatoes tonight to amp up the stewiness factor. And it was good.

Though in the pictures the dish looks like some kind of Indian curry, the aroma and taste are very different. The bitterness of the saffron, the tang of the tomatoes, and the salty-savoriness of the olives combine in a piquant way that gives the sauce a lot of character — there are multiple, harmonious flavors going on in every bite.

Next time I make this, though, I’m going to cut the chicken up into bite-size pieces or maybe shred it. Even with lots of salt and pepper and being browned in olive oil, those chicken breasts were bland. They need burying in that aromatic sauce to be palatable.

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This is part of a new series on cooking and cuisine my husband John and I are doing. If you prefer your food blogging straight up with no Star Trek chaser, check out our Posterous blog, Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah.

I try to cook like this dude. Toolishness ensues.

On the heels of our very successful attempt at making the French fries Anthony Bourdain featured on the “Techniques” episode of No Reservations, John and I decided to try the pasta with red sauce Scott Conant made on that same episode. The results were mixed: The sauce we made was extremely tasty, but the recipe didn’t make nearly enough to coat the amount of pasta it called for. I’m guessing that Conant cooks the way my father-in-law does a lot of the time—without using a recipe or measuring, as he’s so familiar with what goes in each dish he can do it by memory alone. That’s a great trait for a chef, but it doesn’t always translate well when scaling down a recipe for a home kitchen. Sometimes Conant seemed to be describing the way he’d make the dish for restaurant use, making figuring out the proportions a little tricky.

One problem we had, for instance, was that Conant didn’t specify the amount of tomatoes needed during the TV segment, so we turned to the similar-but-not-identical recipe posted on the Travel Channel website, and used the 20 plum tomatoes and 1 pound of pasta that recipe called for.

The technique of blanching the tomatoes and then plunging them in ice water worked well, though I think the tomatoes could have stayed in the boiling water a little longer than the 15 seconds the recipe recommended.

Once in the saucepan, that big pile of tomatoes reduced waaaaay down to about three-quarters of an inch of funky-looking, delicious-smelling tomato sludge that in no way resembled the thick, rich, deep red saucy sauce Conant had going at this point in the recipe. I’m guessing he used a lot more tomatoes than I did. His also looked to have more fluid in them, even though he squeezed them beforehand. Next time we try this, I’d probably double the amount of tomatoes and just take the seeds out without squeezing out the juice to try and get a more fluid consistency.

40 minutes also seems like too long to cook the tomatoes—mine were as soft and pulpy as they were going to get about 20 minutes in (which is what the online recipe recommended anyway).

I infused 2 cups of olive oil with the basil, garlic, and crushed red pepper as shown on the episode. From the TV segment, it was hard to tell how much of that oil Conant put in the tomatoes. It looked like all of it, but that seems like a ton of olive oil unless you’re making a mecha chef-size potful. The online recipe called for 1/3 cup of oil, which sounded a lot more reasonable . (Plus, if I added 2 cups of oil to my tomato sludge, I’d wind up with oil with some tomato bits floating in it.)

My oily tomato sludge

Here I missed an essential step. I combined the tomatoes and the infused olive oil in a sauté pan instead of in the saucepan, and then tried to put as much of the pasta as I could into the saucepan to finish cooking. Only about 2/3 of a pound of pasta would fit in my pan that way, and it was impossible to flip. And, despite the fact that the sauce looked awfully oily, pasta still managed to stick to the bottom of the pan. After rewatching the segment, I found that Conant was finishing the pasta in individual portions, adding only 4 oz. of pasta and 6 oz. of sauce to the sauté pan at a time. D’oh!

The result came out tasting less like ‘pasta with red sauce’ than ‘pasta with an insufficient quantity of deliciously seasoned tomatoes.’ The bulk of the pasta tasted like olive oil with a little hint of flavor, though every so often I’d get an especially tomatoey bite. But those few tomatoey bites were delectable: bright and fresh-tasting, redolent of garlic, basil, and olives, like a burst of Italian sunshine. (And this with anemic April tomatoes, too!) They were enough to convince me that I need to try this recipe again—and get it right this time.

The finished product.

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