Adam was amazed, entranced, and confounded by the concept of coloring eggs, though not opposed. “I am going to colol those eggs, yes, YES! But what are dey FOR, papa?” he wanted to know. “What are dey FOR?”
[Egg salad.]
Adam’s aunt, my sister, thought it would be a good idea to send him a SNAKE EGG for Christmas. Her package, full of good stuff otherwise, arrived just hours before we were departing for our our trip to Poland, so coupled with that and the inherent horror of a Chinese SNAKE EGG the thing sort of got put on the back burner, by which I mean put away in a reinforced steel cell deep in an underground bunker. But somehow Adam found it and began agitating to hatch the egg. And once that boy begins agitating, well, eggs are going to hatch and no one is getting any rest until they do. So Adam and I decided that hatching a SNAKE EGG would be a good weekend project, a little bonding exercise, Cats-In-The-Cradle etc.
Fortunately, Adam is exactly 3+.
According to the box, it appeared to be a trivial thing to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for make pet hasten out of the shell. Throughout the entire process, we were careful to keep the full water into the container.
The box’s side panel helpfully chides the hatcher not to swallow the egg. Fortunately, we were able to safely immobilize Adam with some long tongs and a snare-pole, and pry it from his disarticulated lower jaw just in time.
Here he prepares to begin the experiment:
Fortunately, we had the appropriate laboratory glassware in the house for this project.
Adam was extremely impatient during this phase of the hatching. He obsessively checked the egg every two minutes or so for the first four minutes, after which he forgot all about the horrid snake egg and threw himself back into Thomas The Tank Engine’s deathless embrace.
When that video was over, he recalled his incubating responsibilities and rushed over to indicate the egg with the relentlessness of a true scientist. Then it was time for supper. Magda had made some nice chicken curry, but Adam opted to strangle and swallow whole an adult goat, which he digested over the next several weeks.
“Papa! Somefing happenin’!”
By the next morning, the snake was beginning to emerge from the ovum, which peeled away with a leathery wretchedness.
As soon as his transparent, permanently-closed reptilian eyelids had not snapped open that morning, Adam rushed to the kitchen to check on his snake. Well, okay, he rushed to the kitchen after leisurely awakening, having a wee, and then being languidly carried thither as per routine to get his usual sippy cup of yogurt and in the course of all this he incidentally noticed that a horrible slimy creature he had completely forgotten about had spent the long night inexorably breaking its way out of its miserable shell. ‘Hasten’ might be stretching it, but it was well within the 12-24 hour window promised by its child-labor manufacturers half a world away.
Note the egg tooth.
Like any good herpetologist, Adam takes time to document the animal’s lifecycle.
Once fully hatched, the snake was relocated to a more roomy container, which he quickly outgrew. Magda then moved him to the enormous pickle jar she uses to make kisli ogorki.
Here the snake settles into his final incubation station.
The increase in size continued over several days, but when it seemed to have peaked we dumped out the snake and his turgid water. Adam declined invitations to hold, or even touch, his new pet, pictured here next to his original hatchery.
This project has brought us closer together than ever! Thanks Auntie!
This weekend we’ll be doing some other, less odious, egg-related projects.
One thing cheese will not improve
For any who never had the joy of working in the food service industry, a “sheet tray” or “sheet pan” is a heavy-gauge aluminium rectangle with a high lip and far more uses than simply turning out large, flat cakes, the function for which it was designed. A “full sheet”, at 18 x 26 inches (45 x 66 cm) is rather enormous and unwieldy, but the “half-sheet” is easy enough to handle and indispensable for many kitchen tasks.
The summer following my tenure as Salad Boy I graduated to Head of Food Preparation at the same seafood restaurant on Block Island. This was a good job as restaurant jobs went. I had daily tasks to perform at my own pace within banker’s hours, and I was almost entirely insulated from the frenzy of weekend dinner rushes and unpredictable crises that working on the line inevitably entails. I could enjoy my shift drink at the bar at a decent cocktail hour rather than gulping Long Island Iced Tea from a soggy paper milkshake cup while mucking out the Frialator
I spent my days stocking and portioning. Through the morning I’d be up to my elbows in fresh haddock and sole, portioning it into baking dishes and ladling drawn butter over it before dusting it with paprika to prepare it for cooking. The completed pre-cooked fish, ready for broiling that evening, would go onto half-sheets and be covered with plastic wrap before being refrigerated within easy reach of the broiler (name of both appliance and operator). For the cook assigned to saute I would portion scallops to top linguine, make seafood stuffing for gigantic shrimps, and garlic the holy hell out of scampi. Anything fried, which I also spent long hours portioning out, would leave the kitchen accompanied by a glop of cole slaw dumped from an ice cream scoop onto a bed of lettuce by any of my various replacements in the role of Salad Boy, so in the course of that summer I also created one hell of a lot of cole slaw from endless cases of fresh cabbage. About 16 tons of cole slaw, by my calculations, of which only the smallest fraction was ever consumed.
But this is not the story of cole slaw, or of scampi, nor even of scallops, that most noble of bivalves. This is the story of a sandwich.
I give you the BLT.
I was responsible for opening the kitchen in the morning, before any cooks or salad personnel arrived. The first order of business was a matter of debate; should I T.C.B. or nourish the body with a BLT? Fortunately, the two were not mutually exclusive.
As I write this I cannot recall what it was that called for so much bacon in that kitchen. We did sell an enormous number of burgers, many of which were apparently of the bacon-cheese- variety, but there must have been some other reason I spent the first half hour of every day cooking off half-sheet after half-sheet of bacon in the broiler. The bacon came in a large, flat box (the same size as a half-sheet) on layered waxed paper, about 20 slices per layer. I would cook a few hundred slices of bacon, scooping them out of their own golden grease and layering them up on absorbent paper pie plates until the stack of bacon/pie plate/bacon etc. was in danger of collapsing. Once the bacon-cooking was in train, I would toast some whole wheat bread lightly, and then repair to the walk-in to seek out the nicest-looking head of iceberg lettuce and the ripest tomato in the place.
The BLT is a model of synergy, a perfect example of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. All of the ingredients in the BLT are humble, but it’s the commingling of them that makes the sandwich, the way the tomato’s juices combine with the grease of the bacon and the mayonnaise, the give of the toast and the crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the tomato and the salt of the pork. In the best BLT each element is sublime, but gives itself over to the whole. The BLT is the chamber music of sandwiches. I ate one every morning of that 16-ton summer and never grew tired of the beautiful marriage of bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
Sometimes I added cheese.
This entry is part of The Sandwich Party
Other sandwiches at the party:
Simon’s chip butty
Ham and macandcheese
Erik’s eggy Spanish goodness
[UPDATE]
That’s as far as I got before lethargy took over, and now it seems unnecessary to link to each sandwich individually when the organizers have already done all that lifting here and here. These ladies know how to throw a party.
Earlier today Magda posted the 3000th
Two friends, both readers of this site and enthusiastic photographers, are regular correspondents on topics that range far and wide, but which frequently touch on Backing Up. One, just today, writes:
“From what I can tell, you two are at opposite ends of the pack-rat
spectrum. What do you do about saving old photos? My iPhoto library
is over 25 GB and things are getting cumbersome. My little macbook
only has a 120 GB hard drive.”
Here’s what we do:
That’s it. Our so-called system is all but non-existent. There is a movement afoot to create a Platonic ideal of an iPhoto library consisting of both archival material and ever-changing new photos. For this task I am using the freeware iPhoto Library Manager to enable multiple libraries. This is a great thing; keep a small, manageable, portable library in your laptop and a master or archive library on an external disc. In theory, anyway. The problem with this system is that you have to manage it, and when I say ‘you’ I mean ’some human’, which is the weak link in our system to begin with.
I’d say (and my saying it does not mean that I actually do it myself) that the way to manage a large photo library is simple enough given a modicum of self-discipline:
Other than the imperfect but (for us) currently adequate Flickr arrangement, we don’t have any experience with a backup-to-internet solution, but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who does.
The writer of the question above is highly conversant with tech of all kinds, and I doubt that any of what I’ve written above will be news, or even much help, to him. But he did ask, and he’s contemplating a move to a camera that will produce larger files even than those clogging up 25 GB of his disc drive.
So what advice would you give about managing photographs?
* Edited to add this note: Magda was unhappy about the wording of my reference to “super-secret private” photos, thinking it made us sound like basement pr0nographers, and has requested clarification: a handful of our photos are marked private pending Christmas.
The cast must include Karen Black
What began in the Flickr group known as IWUS has now crossed an ocean and invaded our home. The BITWRATHPLOOB, discovered by Flickr users Marigoldie and Tina, first made its way to Virginia to alarm and harass Jagosaurus before being forwarded on so generously to the former Yugoslavia. According to a label affixed to the bottom of the, the, thing, this is not its first time on Europe’s shores: it was crafted in Denmark.
While the BITWRATHPLOOB is reasonably benign, it encapsulates so many of the traits of items I do not want in my home. So the BITWRATHPLOOB will be moving on one of these days, maybe soon, probably in an easterly direction. But we will not have heard the last of him…
[Update — Magda’s reaction:]
What is this thing? What IS it?
Um, I don’t really like that thing. I just don’t like it.
Could we, um, put that thing somewhere where I don’t have to look at it?
Why would someone make that? I mean, things should have a purpose and this has none. Someone made this. What is it for? Why would you make it?
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