Friday Night Update (cont'd (cont'd))

In answer to the first question ("What the heck do I do with it now?") there are options: carnitas, pulled pork or plain pork roast. To make it perfect, get a large roasting pan with a rack (I use a rusty old cooling rack that's larger than the pan), very carefully (it tends to fall apart at this point) transfer the meat to the rack, pull the shoulder blade out, hose it (the roast) down with cooking spray and put it back in the oven at 400F for 45 minutes. Turn it down a little if it smokes. This will crisp up the outside and render a little more fat.

While it's still hot, rip the roast up with a coupla forks in a big bowl and season it with chile, onion, garlic, etc for carnitas or with vinegar-based BBQ sauce for pulled pork. If you serve it as a roast, don't forget the applesauce. Lotsa applesauce. Let it rest for twenty minutes when carving as a roast; otherwise it will just fall apart.

In answer to the second question, yes, your oven does have a setting for 180F, it's just not clearly marked. On mine it's the "m" in "Warm."

Take any large oven-proof vessel with a close-fitting lid, put in a gallon or so of water in it and pop it in the oven. Set the dial on the "m." Come back in a few hours and check the water temp with a good thermometer. Adjust the oven up or down and check again in another coupla hours. Repeat as needed. When you get it right mark the dial.

For leftover roast: Dice meat 1/2" to 3/4", brown well in skillet with lotsa diced onions. Add soy sauce, black pepper and Five Spices seasoning, toss until mixed. Add any combination of celery, napa, bok choy and/or cabbage, toss until the greens wilt. Serve over rice.

Friday Night Update (cont'd)

Friday Night Update

A 15" x 5" cast aluminum pan with one jumbo yellow onion, sliced, five cloves of garlic, sliced, a buncha crushed red and whole black pepper and a tablespoon or two of liquid smoke.



Add two Boston Butt pork shoulders, ~15 pounds.

Into the oven, covered, at about 180F for fourteen hours. Continued tomorrow...

Friday Night Update

I was going to blog on "Hearts of Darkness" which I watched last week, but in the meantime I picked up the copy of "Stranger in a Strange Land" that's been drifting around the puter room for the last few years (I think Spud left it here). The evening was late, but hadn't yet cooled off enough for comfortable snoozing so I started reading.

The first half was just as I remembered it from back in the late sixties: pure corn. The cloyingly cutsie-wootsie banter; the sitcom sterility of Heinlein's idea of paradise in the Poconos; the painfully crafted innocent nobility; the odd (even for 1961) featherheadedness and dependence on men of the womenfolk. For all that, the chase plot was fun, with Michael saving the day and Jubal twisting the tails of the Powers That Be. Then we get to the second half.

Even when I was a brainless teenager I found the "Church of All Worlds, Inc." segment foolish and tiresome, but reading it now also brings a good whiff of the loathsome stench of Jonestown, the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, etc with it. Thirty-some years ago I finished the book just to see how it turned out. Didn't bother this time.

I'm now tackling "Starship Troopers," a "Controversial Classic of Military Adventure." Hmm. I'm two thirds of the way thru it and still waiting patiently for a smidgen of either controversy or adventure. The central figure, "Johnny," is a nullity; he has no personality, no inner life, no imagination, no intellect, no relationships, no desires, no vices, no nothing. The story would be better without him, I think, except that Heinlein needs him hanging around to hear (or overhear) steaming heaps of pompous sermonizing from his betters.

The book does clear up some confusion that I had about the wrenchingly godawful Verhoeven movie version: Why, oh why would an interstellar military force consist solely of footslogging infantry? Why no tactical or strategic air cover, tanks, artillery, mortars, armored ground transport, etc? You know, all the basic battle-deciding military hardware that might keep those poorly armed and virtually defenseless troops from getting chopped to ribbons by twenty foot tall bugs every single time they went into combat.

In the book, the troops individually *are* all of those things each in their own personal two-ton-armored-jumping-flying-grenade-projecting-flame-throwing-rocket-launching suit complete with low-yield nukes. I guess Verhoeven decided to leave out the one thing that would have made the battle sequences in the movie at least mildly rational because, having already made "Robocop," he didn't want to be tagged in Hollywood as "That Robot Suit Director."

More later, if and when I finish the book.

Blame it on the 70's

Pictured above are, from left Henry Microfarad aka C-Baba and next to him A. Srnoda aka R. Srnoda aka Hans Castorp aka Nicholas Stavrogin (yes that was his real hair). They were members of the Omaha-based proto-punk band called “Chimbley’s Butt” which became “The Oxcart Creek Band” which begat “Evil Death” which recorded as “The Stench Band” which then could have morphed into “Plastic Ono Traveling Silver Wilberries” which subsequently mutated into something else entirely.

Rumor has it that their set lists included “Mr. Plaster,” “Be So Cruel,” “Holiday in Omaha,” “The Dead”, “Take Me to the Bughouse,” “Veteran’s Day Poppy,” “Split Endz,” “The Brain Police”, “Doggie Gardens,” “Disaster at C,” “Through It All,” “King Neptune’s Tapeworm,” Wildman Fisher’s “Merry-go-round,” “The Happy Leper,” “Cowboy Burt,” “A Wee Deoch-An’ Doris,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “The Recent Future”, and their hit “Dry Heaves in Blair, Nebraska”.

The band once played at the Glenwood Home for the Mentally Insane, the Stockyards Ballroom, and Papillion’s world-famous Cabay Lounge all in the same week. In fact, when C-Baba started up the band at the Cabay Lounge, his first words were, “Do you mind if we’re louder than the TV?” Hey, what can I say? It was the 70’s.

P.S. Has anyone seen Roger?

RBFM

Damn, are my eyes are bleeding? Look...

No? Really? It feels like it...

Anyone who crows about the demise of the studio system should be chained up and forced to watch an endless loop of Billy Bob smoking the same f**king Chesterfield for a month or two. Or else watch "The Man Who Wasn't There." Same difference.

Painful. Grueling. Torturous.

Pardon me, I gotta go watch Blood Simple and drink heavily.