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Pimientos de padron

Pimientos de Padron

For the last two years or so, as I've been reading more food books and cooking more food, I've read about pimientos de padron a number of times, and they've always sounded delicious. I read about them first in Spanish Country Kitchen (still one of my favorite cookbooks), and then again in Calvin Trillin's Feeding a Yen, and they sounded delicious: tiny green peppers, cooked simply with olive oil and salt, with a wonderful smoky taste.

But I could never find them anywhere!

Until last Saturday, when we went to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. And just as we were about to leave, I spotted a stand--Happy Quail Farms--with a bunch of peppers, and with bags of pimientos de padron. I bought two bags, and that night I dropped them in some hot olive oil until their skin blistered, then dusted them with sea salt. And they were delicious!

Two makes a pattern

When Movable Type 3.2 was released a little over two years ago, I wrote a plugin just for fun (and, well, to make Anil happy).

Tonight, the team has released Movable Type 4, pretty much the best MT release, ever: a beautiful new UI, great new features, powerful developer changes under the hood, a gorgeous new website, open source, &c. I'm so proud of the team that worked on this release.

And... I've written a new plugin for it. Refeed builds reblogging into Movable Type: configure a list of RSS and Atom feeds that you want to pull in to your blog, and new posts in the feeds will be spliced into your main blog automatically.

It was fun to write, because there are a ton of new features in MT4 that make it easy to set up configuration settings for plugins, make use of scheduled tasks, &c. And so, of course, Refeed requires MT4. :)

Anyway, congratulations to the team for such a fantastic release!

Where I am

I'm posting over at Vox, now.

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel

This weekend, I finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which--despite an ultimately far-fetched explanation for the central plot point--I absolutely loved. The marvel of the book is that the world Chabon creates feels so real that it's easy to forget that all of it--Sitka as the temporary Alaskan homeland of the Jews, the various sects, &c.--is imaginary.

As the review from the New York Times puts it: "More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and byzantine political and sectarian divisions — that the reader comes to take its existence for granted."

One of my favorite passages:

Landsman taps the wheel, considering his promises and their worth. He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman's lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be. The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.

Some Links

IFC is showing a new chapter from Trapped in the Closet every day until August 21, with R. Kelly providing bits of commentary. Today: chapter 13.

From 2003, a fantastic Believer interview with ?uestlove of the Roots. This makes me smile: "I have this ritual of buying Straight Out the Jungle a billion times, acting like it’s the first time again." (via Idolator)

Fiery Furnaces, Widow City

The new Fiery Furnaces album, Widow City, reminds me again why I love them so much. What gets me most about my favorite FF songs are those moments, always unexpected, where they just hit me with something that sounds like the greatest thing in the world. It's the third or fourth act in "Chris Michaels," around five minutes in; it's the rambling political screed of the "Tropical Ice-Land" single version of "We Got Back the Plague", the first FF song I ever heard; it's the third act in "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" ("well, I rode up to Springfield..."), or maybe it's the fourth act ("so I went down to her dad's bakery..."), or fuck me, maybe it's the guitar solo (!) at the end. It's the sort of stuff that makes me amazed & happy at how great music can be.

Restorative Beer

And on Widow City, for example, there's that heavy guitar in "The Philadelphia Grand Jury" around 4 minutes in that just appears out of nowhere; there's the gorgeous (& "Evergreen"-esque) "My Egyptian Grammar"; there's the Led Zeppelin-esque guitar riff in "Navy Nurse".

And then there's my favorite, so far--"Restorative Beer" (listen), which, in addition to its wonderfully refreshing title, has both a lovely Harrison-esque guitar and lyrics:

She tells me about last night at her 103rd birthday, she counted... she counted her pairs of pants again, "I've only got 53, minus the ones I've got on"--I want a restorative beer, to take my mind off these tears; I want a restorative beer. [1]

I am absolutely in love with this album: the FF still sound like no one else, and they still sound better than everyone else.

[1] Or something like that.

Spatula!

Like Anil, I am so, so excited about the upcoming release of the new chapters of Trapped in the Closet. Back in November 2005, I posted about chapters 1-12 and called the collection the best album of 2005, which--despite the fact that it's not really an album proper, I guess--I still stand by.

It's incredible, and listening to a couple of chapters on the way to work this morning brought me back to hearing it for the first time in 2005.

And so yes, I was thrilled--thrilled!--to see this teaser trailer for the new chapters.

R. Kelly - Trapped In The Closet