Monstrously Good Karachi Curry

Preparation time:  45 min. if preparing with soaked beans, otherwise 25 min.

Serves:  Three

You will definitely need:

two cups brown rice

1 1/2 lbs of most any sort of cheap beefsteak

at least half a bottle of curry powder (4-5 tbs)

5-6 tbs of tomato paste/sauce/etc.

1/2 pint cream/milk/coconut milk

1/2 cup dried pinto beans, or tinned equivalent of garbanzos et al

spices such as fennel seed, celery salt, brown sugar, mustard, etc.

any number of supporting ingredients

Quite the process here, but it'll be well worth it!  The day prior, take your meat and cut it into strips, then cubes.  Pop them into a freezer bag, and add a tbs of Grey Poupon (the roughest, brownest stuff possible), a tbs of yellow curry powder, crushed fennel seed, and a bit of water.  Shake well and slag it into the fridge.  If you opt to use dried beans, put half of a cup or so in a Gladware container atop the fridge with some water; soaking now will save a lot of grief at cook-time.

Day next, ponder hard at what you'd like to eat in curry form; I decided to go for two red potatoes, chopped yellow onion, two hardboiled eggs, five chopped mushrooms, a generous handful of raisins, and the meat and beans.  Other tasty possibilities might be peppers (hot or not), sweet potatoes, celery, any sort of fruit (dried or not)... use your imagination!  But begin boiling your soaked beans in a pot of water and a liberal dash of salt; shouldn't take more than twenty or so minutes, if you've soaked them overnight.  If you opt for red potatoes, chop and add them to the boiling beans about ten minutes in.  Once they're all done and edible, consider them just another ingredient to momentarily add to the mix.

Otherwise (if dried beans are not your thing) cover the bottom of a sizable wok with butter and turn on to HI or MED-HI.  While that's heating up, begin preparations for yon rice; I use a rice cooker (Yan Can Cook!) and two cups of brown rice, which should about sync up with the curry preparation.  Once that's begun, add your drained marinated meat to the wok and begin dicing the onions, mushrooms, et al and add them along.  Pretty soon you should have a fairly wonderful-smelling affair cooking up!  Next, take a bowl and add several heaping tbs of curry powder, half a pint of half-and-half (or coconut milk, or milk) and four or five tbs of either tomato paste, spaghetti sauce - basically, something tomato-based that should serve to add color, flavor, and substance to the curry mixture.  Mix well, then add to your wok and again mix well.

At this point, assault your soupy mixture with HI heat and a barrage of spices.  Essentials include something hot (a nice spiral of Sriracha for me), something salty (I opt for celery salt, as it is an earthier flavor that shouldn't overpower the curry), and something sweet (a small handful of brown sugar should work wonders).  Other spices may include garlic (mushed, chopped, or powdered), fennel seed, mustard powder, soy sauce, paprika... again, beyond the essential three it's up to you the consumer to decide.

Once the wok is a bubbling stew of good flavor, try and let it boil on for three to five minutes, stirring and turning, really nannying your curry.  Otherwise, it will become a thick crunchy mess to scrape off the wok later.  Once it's reached that prime consistency (neither too soupy nor too dry, just nice and thick) turn it down to LO and give it a spoon-taste to see what you think; is it missing anything?  Now is the time to nitpick.

Another thing to consider (hopefully you've read this recipe well before mulling it through on the stovetop) is whether or not a side bread is to be considered.  I broiled up two thick slices of cheesy garlic bread for three minutes, towards the rice's completion.  However, there are many fine naan and flatbread recipes out there, for the adventurous.  Try them out!

Once the rice is done cooking, the meal should be ready to dish out.  Bowl up the rice first, then cover with a liberal quantity of your curry, bread possibly to the side.  (Goes well with coffee, although a tall glass of milk might be nice.)  And maze karein!  Guaranteed, you and your friends/family will be sprawled about on the furniture within half an hour!  

No Offence to Squirrels...

Thanks to my friend Adam (via the Facebook) I had the extraordinary opportunity to see this little blurb of a speech.  Ordinarily I wouldn't think twice about anything said on the Hill, but I enjoyed Rep. Weiner's candor.

It almost makes me want to watch C-Span more often.  Almost.

"The Maelstrom"

It was raining particularly hard the day I ran into a childhood friend from the neighborhood.  I say friend in the sense that he wasn’t an enemy, but more or less a fellow victim of the times.  But time heals all wounds, as I am told, and where Eddy had been a gangly, ugly youth in grade school I had little trouble recognizing the strapping, ugly adult he had more recently become.

As I had said, it had been raining buckets that day.  It was lunch time and I was on my way back to the office from the diner on 16th and Lacrosse, a greasy little spoon in an ugly drawer that needs no further mention.  I was only a few blocks away when the darkened sky finally opened up on me.  I’ve always enjoyed watching heavy rains, and being in them whenever possible.  It rains a lot on the coast, and I’ve learned to love every cleansing drop.  But it was a bad day to stomp about in puddles and revel in pleasant memories, on account of a new pair of shoes I was breaking in.  They being leather and I being not so foolish as to ruin new leather shoes on a whim I took shelter in a bus stop that was handily nearby.

I sat on the bench, I suppose giddy as a schoolboy.  The water thundered off the clear bubble of a roof and pounded the pavement with that satisfyingly flat smack, like the sound of marbles dropped on concrete.  I was enjoying the hell out of it all, watching sheets of water crashing against the shelter’s dome and running down in rivers.  Impervious to everything except the cold damp air that is nearly always inescapable.  But God, I loved it.

And that’s when fate threw Edwin Archbuck inside the shelter with me.  He had a sopping wet rag of a newspaper above his head, which he threw against the wall and it made a nice wet flump against the plastic.  His makeshift umbrella didn’t work as well as he’d hoped and his light grey suit had turned to charcoal, the pink hues of his skin showed through his shirt, and I won’t even go into the state of his tie.  In short, it was an awful mess and his clothes hung from him like he was some sort of stocky towel rack.  Yet he was indefatigable.

“Jesus, it’s a mess out there!” he exclaimed with the breathless enthusiasm of one who has survived an ordeal.  It was then that I recognized the flattened nose and set-apart eyes of a boyhood chum I could not put a name to.  Fortunately he also recognized me at that moment, as a monster grin overtook his face.  “Jimmy!” he roared with some delight.  Not a lot, but some, latently made up for by the sheer volume of his greeting.  He paused for a moment, perhaps unsure whether or not his memory served him well.  The pause was short-lived as he confidently thrust a sopping meaty hand toward me.  “Jimmy!” he reiterated, “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” 

Not quite remembering his name, I took his hand and responded in vague but pleasant tones.  We began to catch up.  His marriage, my divorce.  His dogs, my window box of tomatoes.  His gammy leg, my ulcers.  He managed mortgages at a nearby bank and - my own reminiscences notwithstanding - I found that he had gone to high school in Iowa, come back here for college, has no children, likes to golf, and myriad other wearying details that make up a life. 

As we talked, my thoughts drifted back to our childhood.  Our childhood; I thought back to the ass-kickings in the lot behind the abandoned grocery store, to the darkened alleys and the isolated places of our youths.  I remember being made a hell of a lot older than I should have been, a lot quicker than I’d have liked.  Dozens of such memories passed before my mind’s eye as we talked, every fiber of me wanting to know how he, Eddy whose name I could not at the time remember, how he dealt with the similar demons that must have haunted him.  But they must have!  I had to know, if only to know whether or not I was the fool for dwelling on the past, for malingering upon long-closed closets filled with dusty skeletons and velveteen ghosts.

Finally we came to a pause in the conversation, though the rain continued to thunder above our heads.  “So…” I began.  All hard topics begin with a drawn out so, in my experience.  “Do you ever think about it, back then and all?”  Perhaps he had, because suddenly Eddy’s countenance darkened.  The smile vanished and the brow tightened and Eddy could no longer look me in the eye.  I regretted this difficult turn in the conversation, but - as I said before - was driven forward by a need to know.

From within someplace deep in his personal crawlspace, a battered and fatigued reply escaped Eddy, “Time heals all wounds.”  Time heals all wounds, that dreadful shrug of the oppressed, the naïve psalm of the vanquisher.  Life continues forward, never ending like the rain above us.  The world breaks us or makes us stronger sort of a thing.  I felt for the wounds of a fellow traveler yet felt better that I was not alone on my road.

A short silence followed, no doubt spiked with a bit of bitter retrospection.  It wasn’t long, though, before Eddy’s grin returned in a sense.  The sense of it being that it was at least half what it was when he first saw me.  He was as transparent as he was brief.  It was nice to see me.  We must have lunch sometime.  I should take care.  We exchanged one last bit of eye contact before he turned to depart.  His eyes were the same as mine; I may as well have looked into a mirror.

“The rain is clearing, I think.”  He said it with such conviction that I might have agreed with him had I not known it to be a lie.  Such as it was, he ran off down the street into that interminable maelstrom that had descended upon us.  I remained on the bench and watched the rain crack against the roof and pour down the sides of a handily available bus shelter, enjoying the hell out of it all.  Knowing full well I would never see little Eddy, or little me, again.

A Little Bit of Self-Marketing

So I recently wrote an article for the AC earlier; ordinarily I wouldn't tout, but hell!  I'm pretty proud of it.  So Mr. Music, would you play?  --->  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8075993/ipad_factory_explosion_kills_two.html?cat=3

“Dramatic Affect”

     It’s another Wednesday night at the Blue Rider, same as always.  The four of us sit around our usual table, in the corner nearest the door.  I’m finishing my third Michelob Ultra, having recently jumped onto the low-carb bandwagon.  It’s not a bad beer, so far as the light stuff goes.  With me are my friends Phil, Michelle, and Karin, whose pleasant descriptions of their weekends are fast coming to a grinding halt.

     “…so I think I’ll start wearing Patagonia instead,” Phil finishes saying, followed by the appropriate murmurs of moral assent from the rest of us.  Ordinarily the talk at the Blue was a round-robin of conversation, one of the three picking up the tail end and setting off again, leaving me pleasantly to my thoughts and drinks.  But tonight was altogether different, lacking in a certain zest or interest or energy.  No joie de vivre, like.

     “This sucks,” Karin at last says huffily.  “I mean, like, this dynamic.”  She motions around the table.  “We’re just a bunch of boring white people.  We suck.”

     “I know,” Michelle agrees, her biff Phil nodding along in agreement.  “We need a gay guy or something, like all the cool groups seem to have on TV, you know?  Somebody to liven things up a bit.”  And she gives me one of those withering looks.  I don’t add much to the dynamic, I know, but in all honestly there isn’t much more to add.  Ordinarily the three have their bases pretty well covered.

     I get up and grab myself another Ultra, wishing they didn’t go down so quickly.  Not only am I drinking more of them than usual, but the blasted things are a dollar more expensive than the Pabst.  When I return to the table Karin is already on the phone, doing that head waggling emphatic voice thing she does when she wants something.  “Could you please please please come down,” she was saying.  “We desperately need to hang out.  Really?  Alright!!  See you in a bit, hon.  He’s coming,” she tells us triumphantly as she pops her phone into that outlandishly sized pink purse of hers.

     “Who is he, then?” I ask, but nobody hears me.

     With the expected arrival of another the talk picks right back up, Karin describing her friend Colin with Michelle and Phil winding themselves up into an absolute circus of excitement.  When this Colin finally strolls in after maybe ten or so minutes, Karin and Michelle both jump up to hug him.  They briefly introduce Phil and myself, and with an emphatic whoop-whoop Karin orders up a round of brightly-colored Mike’s Hards, which I suppose is the new Zima.

     The gals hedge Colin in between themselves, their combined energy about double what it normally runs at.  Phil leans in to Michelle’s left, doing his best to outdo them in the gesticulating party atmos they’ve created.  Even I take things up a notch, leaning forward on my elbows and nodding here and there as I sip at my Mike’s.  It’s a sweet thing, a sort of cappuccino of the beer bar universe.  Frankly, I’m not much into sweet anymore.  But they’re unstoppable as the next two rounds come to table, sickly pastels in clear bottles.

     It’s my turn to buy another round, so I belly on up to the bar to order myself a real beer in addition to four Mike’s.  Not even an Ultra; I’m thinking Guinness or the like at this point.  Something bitter and real and palpable to savor.

     “Gawd, she never shuts up,” Colin hisses as he unexpectedly sidles to the bar beside me.  “Why do you hang out with them?  No offense, but you don’t seem to be their type.”

     I think about it, having not really ever thought about it before.  True, that nameless feeling crops up from time to time, that out-of-place sensation.  I suppose it’s always been a for-granted, ‘Wednesday nights at the Blue.’  Like church.  “I dunno,” I tell him.  “I like this place, I suppose.  And listening to them lets me unwind a bit.  It helps to sort of go limp and tune out, just listen to the sound of their talking like.”

     Colin laughs.  “Buy me a drink?  Like, a real one?”

     “Yeah sure, those help too.”  I order two pints of stout and three candied Mike’s, and looking over at the corner table I don’t think they’ve noticed Colin’s gone.  

A Medley of Blends for Each and Every

     As I sit here smoking my pipe on the deck, it occurs to me that a good blend should (and usually tends to) reflect on its namesake.  For instance, an English blend generally has the good, robust flavor one might associate with the John Bull, ‘keep calm and carry on,’ dashedly sporting spirit of that island nation.  And once I had the opportunity to try a Rhodesian blend; a bit abrasive and harsh to the palate at first, after a while one grows fond of it and begins to enjoy its candid earthiness.

     If I could produce a distinctly Dakota blend it might be a touch drier and blander than the rest, with a dash of caramel to affect flavor.  There would have to be an enjoyable subtlety to it, but after a bowlful one’d be left wanting a more exotic blend to excite the spirit.  But at least for a time, one can take quiet delight in the Dakota experience.  A plain sort of satisfaction that will always be there for when the throat has had enough of the rough-and-tumble of adventure.

"The Crossroad"

“Whoa man, you’re reeling.  You okay to drive?”  I only ask because Dwayne is, in fact, having a bit of trouble unlocking his door.

“I’m good, man,” he assures me, and I have to admit he isn’t slurring any.  Once he unlocks the car I climb into the leathery passenger seat, feeling rather good and slurry myself.  The iron beast purrs to life and we’re off, avoiding the staggering folk caught in the general exodus as we slowly roll through the parking lot.  One guy is propped up against his trunk, sloppily pissing on its bumper.  Another guy and his gal are making out by the road, practically afire in the blues and reds cast by the sign they press against.

Dwayne honks his horn at them as we turn off down virtually deserted 8^th Street.  “Get a room, you two,” he mumbles to nobody in particular.  He’s seemed more melancholy than usual, and I ask him what’s up.  “Oh you know me, man.  Same old, same old.”  I figure he means Angie, and leave it at that.

The streets, as I mentioned before, are fairly lifeless.  The odd car carefully - soberly - makes its way home, creeping past the darkened street-lit apartments of downtown.  Even the main avenue - Main Street, they call it - is unusually sparse, given the bars have only just spewed out the last of their clientele into the gutters and dimly-lit alleys.  Not even the prowling white cop cars are about; when the bell strikes one, they’re usually out in full force.  We drive a ways unmolested and unnoticed, and turn off again onto the darkened backstreets of town.  It’s an unusual evening, and not at all unsettling as my thoughts skulk about in different directions.

I’m thinking about Easter baskets, actually.  Wondering what awful trinkets children might sometimes find in them that most joyous of Sunday mornings.  I have to wonder if anything could top the year my brothers and sister and I all found little plastic fetus replicas planted amid the jelly beans and coated chocolate eggs in the paper green grass.  Each came with a little card, facts and appalling figures on the one side and a particular prayer on the other I presume was meant to ward off unexpectant mothers.

“What are you thinking about?” Dwayne asks me.  “You’re god-awful quiet tonight,” which is a bit like the pot and the kettle, I suppose.

“Fetuses in my Easter basket,” I tell him.

“What, you mean like eggs?”

“No, I mean plastic ones with fingers and toes.”

“You’ve got a fu-” he starts to tell me, when he has to hit hard on the brake as another car roars on through the yield with wild abandon.  “Jackass!” Dwayne shouts, and I have to say I added a few things of my own.  I’ve more or less been a bit blue around the mouth, since middle school.  It’s developed into a bit of a bad habit actually, precluding what most people would consider a properly professional type manner.  Many an eyebrow raised, like.  But getting back to the intersection, the car roared right on past, slowing only once before disappearing up the road.

“Are your lights on?” I ask him as my heart resumes skipping to its regular rhythm.  In no uncertain terms he lets me know they’re on, have always been on, will never not be on.

“I’m in control!!” he roars as he puts his foot down on the gas.  “You sound like Angie sometimes,” he tells me in a very annoyed fashion, but again it’s best I leave it at that.  He flies off on his own tangent; about how he knows these streets by heart, how he feels great and very sober, how he is an excellent driver and how he doesn’t understand why girls can’t let a good thing simply be.  And all the while the car picks up its pace. 

“Chill, man,” I tell him, feeling a bit uneasy what with the speed and all.  I’m not so much afraid that he’s going to hit something, or even someone.  Rather, I’m still thinking about the unusual lack of police about; at some point there’s bound to be one or two floating around, waiting for the likes of us to speed on by.  I can’t remember, but I’m thinking that drunken passengers get into trouble in a DUI situation as well.  Accomplices to the fact and all of that.

We’re roaring up the street - he talking about boundaries and responsibilities, me thinking about jail - when we nearly get sideswiped by what at first glance looks to be the car that we’d nearly run into earlier.  “Oh hell, yield!!” I shout, but they come to a halt and we zoom right on.  It’s funny, almost like a reverse déjà vu.  The car, the intersection, et al.

“Bleedin’ Zarathustra,” I say, downright awestruck.  “I think we just passed ourselves.”

Dwayne slows down a bit, craning his head around to catch a glimpse of the other car.  “You think so?”  But the car is out of view and we carry right on.  “Is that sort of thing possible, passing ourselves?”

            “I’m not exactly sure.  I wouldn’t think so,” I reply, at the same time unsure quite how to know for certain if it was or was not so.  If I’d paid attention to the time on the dash, for instance, I could verify if we’d transcended the bounds of time and space.  “How did we get onto this road?”

“I don’t actually know,” he says, biting his lip.  When he makes to hit his blinker I can see his hand shaking.  “We’re more or less still going in the right direction, though.”

“I thought you knew these streets by heart, et cetera and so forth.”

He shrugs.  “I’m a bit tipsy, you know.  Cut me some slack.”

RudianBM

Although it's fair to say I keep pretty well abreast of current events, it's not often that I watch the news.  Partially I find myself irritated by the commercials, although I think I just more-or-less dislike that stereotypically 'American' anchor voice.  It's the spam of accents, devoid of flavor or charm... but that's neither here nor there, so far as this little blurb is concerned.

Even reading the news online, one cannot escape the near-ubiquitous promotion of social media bastions Twitter and Facebook.  Twitter particularly bugs me, I suppose.  It's a network that devotes itself to the by-the-minute update of people's personal mundanities, of every thoughtless blither and vacuous mood swing, peppered with the moronic OMGs and ROFLs and the like (Lol) that will keep Orwell spinning well into the next century.  Call me a stodgy old Luddite bastard (go on, do it), but I'm bugged past reconciliation with the idea.

Bearing this in mind (or don't, it really doesn't matter) I'm pleased to announce the launch of RudianBM, to keep the world afloat of my each and every movement.  It's one of those half-baked sorts of ideas that end up getting scrawled onto a bar napkin and implemented later in the wee hours of the morning.  But unlike the tribal armband or the poorly worded text to a once-was-significant-other (once was, before said text), I can look at the previous evening's handiwork through my daytime eyes without regret.  Yes, "I think I'll go with it," this somewhat unnecessary adventure into personal exploitation.  If nothing else, it's a bit of a throwback to those asinine hijinks of my college days.  So what the hell, let the unrelenting flow of information commence!