I just wrapped up watching At the Table with Anthony Bourdain, an experiment on the part of one of my favorite personalities in the world of food, a sort of dinner party talk show rather like After Hours with Daniel Bouloud. I rather enjoyed the show for the most part, I was fascinated by much of the conversation. Bill Buford in particular is an utterly absorbing individual to hear discussing the nature of food.

It was not without it’s faults, admittedly. Tony at certain points seem to play the bully pulpit a bit too much, some of the guests did seem like they weren’t entirely comfortable with the whole concept, and the in between segments of individual quotations I was not fond of at all, they brought down the show and made it feel rather like an extended promo, like they were trying to sell me the show, when what I wanted to see was more dinner conversation with some fascinating people. Tony himself has discussed in brief on his blog his dissatisfaction with how things turned out, but I must say I think over all he was a bit hard on himself, as were the fans.

Towards the end of the show of course, Tony asked The Death Row Question he always asks when surrounded by a table of chefs and foodies. Basically, you die tomorrow, and you have one last meal before you shuffle off this mortal coil, what do you choose?

The common answer to this question of course is more often than not some sort of home cooked, or more specifically, Mom-cooked, comfort food. Amy Sacco answered her mother’s spaghetti and meatballs, while Chris Wilson mentioned a Brussels sprout, bacon and mayonnaise dish. Having watched his shows for some time, this does seem to be something of a pattern. Buford, of course, had some thoughtful statements on the how and why of it.

The thing that struck me though, is that these days the first thing that comes to mind when I ask myself that question is not my Mother’s dish, or my Father’s dish, its Mine. More specifically, the smoke roasted pork shoulder that has become one of my single greatest pleasures in life.

I can certainly think of a few dishes from my childhood that always stood out in my mind. My mother’s baked macaroni and cheese, my father’s Italian sausage burritos, an improvised beef and rice with cream of mushroom dish my father once made in a rush. But two of the three I honestly think these days I can make better myself, leaving only the burritos as something I have yet to be able to improve upon.

It got me thinking what that says about me that, instead of most people’s first instinct to go back to their childhood when someone else cooked for them, instead my instinct is for something I myself have crafted. Is it simply youthful arrogance, perhaps, that I consider myself to have grown not so much out of, but perhaps “above”, the food of my childhood? Or maybe it’s that after having had something of a coddled childhood, the moments and memories that provide the most comfort aren’t the ones where someone else took care of me, but instead the ones where I took care of myself, or even when I took care of someone else.

I think perhaps this is why cooking appeals so strongly to me, because it’s the only part of my life where I’ve truly felt self-sufficient, and even capable of providing something for someone else. It is a role reversal into a more dominant role than I have been used to in my life, having so often been, in one way or another, in the care and mercy of others.

Cooking isn’t just what I’m good at, it’s where I find my strength.

I’m planning a Dark Heresy campaign soon, and one of the things I wanted to get together before I started was some miniatures. The combat system is relatively simple, but it’s easier for me to keep track of distances and such if I have minis.

Unfortunately, I’m also quite broke, and GW minis are freaking expensive. I dug around on the internet for some paper minis of GW stuff, and found mostly only vehicles, none of which is particularly useful for Dark Heresy purposes. I also really liked the One Monk approach, of paper minis with actual wargame style scale bases, over the A-Frame approach that is common in paper minis targeted at RPGs, but found assembling his design was rather fiddly and awkward.

It became apparent I would have to create some myself. I then realized that the easiest way to do so was to create some sort of template, that I could just paste some images into, print out, and assemble into paper minis.

The result is now up my download page, where you will find Inkscape SVG, PDF, and PNG versions of the template, as well as a PDF with instructions on how to assemble them. If I get around to it later I might also post up some sample pages of various minis.

Site downtime was longer than I expected,partly my fault, partly my hosts. One of those miscommunication-y things really.

Not much going on at present, sadly. Still without a kitchen, job op after job op winds up with me getting strung along for weeks at a time before finally amounting to nothing. The one place I did get in was the worst bloody kitchen I’ve ever worked in in my life, and I lasted all of like two weeks before I just couldn’t stand anymore. I’m feeling sort of frustrated, I’m sort of trapped in a useless mid ground between knowing too much and not knowing enough when it comes to finding a good kitchen.

On the PC Gaming front, well, Spore is out! Yay! It’s fun! YAY! I intend to get a proper review written at some point soon I just haven’t gotten around to it just yet. Sadly however, my Windows machine is currently down for the count, so I’m stuck doing all my gaming on my roommate’s PC, which has resulted in less of it than I’d like.

Tabletop wise, well, I’m planning a Dark Heresy game to run soon. The campaign idea thread itself, about sinister mind worm symbionts, made the front page over at Dark Reign, so that’s cool I guess. I’ve got another super secret project in the works, for an open source sort of system inspired by a certain old classic, but I kinda put it on hold while I focused on something that would lead to actual play.

Sunday rolled around, and it was time to cook the pork. It turned out to be a surprisingly exciting event, mainly on account of the terribleness of my smoker, and it’s state of disrepair.

The heating elements at the bottom kept catching fire, you see. It actually burned out my brand new meat thermometer. The meat survived unscathed thankfully, but after about 2 hours of fidgeting with the damn smoker, I finally just migrated it to a propane grill to finish off for another 2 hours or so.

Thankfully, the meat survived quite nicely regardless of the event, and proved to be every bit delicious. The lime in the brine shone particularly well, which was quite a nice touch. It was also much less salty this time, owing to a mere 16 hours of brine-time, compared to 2 days previously.

In other news, I may have some exciting news about a new job soon. Pray my luck holds.

For the second time now, I have come under the possession of two monstrous slabs of boneless pork shoulder, and so of course that means it is time for barbeque.

Step one occured this evening, as I prepared a brine in which the two mounds of pork flesh will rest for about 16 hours prior to going in the smoker. I put about two gallons of water in a large stock pot with 2 cups of kosher salt, 1 large sliced shallots, 3 sliced limes, 8 or 9 cloves of garlic, a couple tablespoons of whole coriander, one whole small packet of Mexican black peppercorns, two cinnamon sticks, and a good sized handful of dried chiles japones. Heated that up just to enough to ensure the salt was fully dissolved, then transfered it to another large plastic container with a bit of ice, and then put in the fridge for about 2 hours to cool.

I wound up having about twice as much brine as I actually needed, so when time came to add meat to liquid, I transferred the brine back to the pot, put the shoulders in the plastic tub, and then set about ladling on the brine, being sure to fish out as much of the solid bits as possible, before draining the excess liquid, conserving the peppercorns that had settled on the bottom by this point to also add to the plastic container. I figured that at this point there had hardly been enough time for the flavors of the various components to have really given their all to the brine, so it was best to save them and let them continue to work their magic overnight.

Tomorrow comes cooking time, and I can’t wait. I’ll be sure to give all the gory details of the event when I return.