By Laura Grimes
(Editor’s note: Sorry, you seem to be stuck with me. Mr. Scatter appears to be AWOL. Well, not AWOL. More like … A. He’s been traveling. B. He’s been canning. C. He’s been busy. … Hope you don’t mind.)
Perfecting the art of preserving requires more than an oversized canner and a jug of formaldehyde. It requires knowing all the naughty little secrets. Let me save you the trouble of trial and error and spill all the valuable lessons I’ve brought to a boil over the years:
By Laura Grimes
We stumbled upon chutney lust quite by accident. One summer we had a gangly vine in the backyard that produced nothing but tiny green tomatoes. Lots of them.
So I checked into what I could do with them and picked a recipe as much for its liberal use of a certain bracing spice as for its green tomatoes. I had a largish stash of crystallized ginger in the cupboard that I needed to use up.
The chutney flavor was an irresistible blend of sweet and tangy with just a little pow of hot. We were hooked. And when a neighbor handed me a grocery bag full of apples from his trees, I was ready to experiment some more.
I found another recipe, cooked up all the apples in a blink and still had ingredients. Somewhat sheepishly I took the empty grocery bag back next door and said, “Please, sir, may I have another?” I thought I could rummage around on the neighbor’s lawn for fallen apples and reach some low-hanging branches, but the guilt really set in when he immediately fetched a tall ladder and climbed way up into a tree to pick some more. I had to foist a lot of jars of chutney on him to make up for it.
By Laura Grimes
Sorry we’ve been neglecting the blog. Mr. Scatter is finally home and we’re in the throes of passion.
We’re making pickles. (What were YOU thinking?)
As you’ll recall, we’re The Condiment Family. In fact, we even have our own motto:
Practice safe snacking. Always use a condiment.
Read last year’s pickle post here. It’s about love, death and those crunchy little cucumbers — sometimes sweet and sometimes sour.
Making pickles is a many-day endeavor that begins easily enough with a many-store shopping trip.
By Bob Hicks
CRACK! DOOM! CRACK! DOOM!
The sky splits above the high desert. Great bursts of lightning roil the midnight blackness with a frenzy of white heat. The thunder rattles deeply like the cries of gods at war, and the rain is rain — hard, fast, fierce, a gullywash of frantic energy that, soon spent, will sink meekly back into the sand.
In the morning the sun is out, the air has the fresh bite of swiftly drying earth, the small life of the arroyo a few dozen yards beyond our windows chirps placidly on. A couple of years ago we watched transfixed as a sudden storm turned the same dry creek bed into a swift flood of churning water, a rampage that rose rapidly from nothing almost to the undercurve of the little bridge on the nearby road. Hours later the arroyo was dry again, but these torrents can shift a creek’s course: in the desert, water makes up its own mind.
Mr. Scatter hasn’t been writing a lot lately, at least not for print. Lots of notes, lots of transcriptions, lots of interviews and looking at stuff and thinking about it, but not so much for instant gratification — Mr. Scatter’s or his readers’.
In case you missed it, he did have this piece in last Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, a reflection on that not-so-polite (and extremely loosely organized) form of art known variously as folk, outsider, naive, primitive, self-taught, you name it.
A recent trip to the Bay Area has got him to thinking about artists like The Hairy Who (from Chicago, but they had a big influence on the Bay Area Figurative Art scene) and Robert Arneson, and of course the splendidly loony master cartoonist R. Crumb, whose surprising take on the Book of Genesis is at the Portland Art Museum right now, and fun and funk, and the disappearing distance between high and low art, “taught” and “outsider” art. That’s what the A&E piece is about, in the context of Portland’s variously beloved and maligned Alberta Arts District scene. ‘Nuff said. Read it for yourself.
While he was in Baghdad by the Bay, Mr. Scatter stayed in Japantown, where the view out his window was the pagoda at right. Best thing about the very good hotel where he stayed, thanks to an excellent online deal: the long deep Japanese soaking tub, which he filled with hot water nightly to wash away the stress of those up-and-down hills. He tried not to think about the ungodly amount of water he was using. Sometimes, a person splurges.
San Francisco is a great place to eat, maybe right up there in the United States with New Orleans and New York, and Mr. Scatter had a bite or two. About a third of the city’s population is Asian, and it follows that eating in Asian spots can be a good bet, even little ones that don’t get much press. That was the deal with a little Korean diner he found one night: good bubbling stew with soft tofu and little oysters. But the side dishes, or banchan, were knockout: nine little bowls of kimchi and other various fermented sprouts, cucumbers, radishes and the like, including a dish of dried anchovies that had been partially reconstituted with oil, giving them a sharp funky taste and a chewy, almost woody texture. Outstanding. San Francisco treat or not, Rice-A-Roni didn’t stand a chance.
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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:
— Tabor Porter, carved devil figure, courtesy Guardino Gallery.
— The view from Mr. Scatter’s window: the pagoda in San Francisco’s Japantown. Wikimedia Commons.
By Laura Grimes
Shhh! Be vewy vewy qwiet! Educational systems are done for the season in these parts and the Large Smelly Boys and I are hoisting secrets in the cargo hold and heading north.
JoJo is beside himself with anticipation to see Uncle The Pantsless Brother again. Daughter of Uncle The Pantsless Brother, otherwise known as Stinkerbell, is graduating from high school. By loose blog association, that would make JoJo and Stinkerbell cousins (she’ll be surprised to hear this).
Also, Mother of Daughter of Uncle The Pantsless Brother, otherwise known, by loose blog association, as JoJo’s Aunt Who is Mother of Daughter of Uncle The Pantsless Brother, recently celebrated a birthday. Yes, seriously, we have relatives to fete. We have feted (not fetid) relatives. We have serious fetting to do.
Continue reading Headed north to feted (not fetid) relatives
By Laura Grimes
(Editors note: For the safety of our readers, Art Scatter insists on maintaining proper blog decorum. Translation: We don’t swear. Mr. and Mrs. Scatter at all times maintain proper blog decorum in their everyday lives, inside and outside the computer screen, in order to set prime examples for their tender Large Smelly Boys and for the general public.
Also, Mrs. Scatter searched the interwebs high and low for a proper photo and finally picked the one above from Wikimedia Commons and then looked at the caption. It’s from a Fred Meyer store in Portland, Oregon! Hullo! Cue the dialogue, puhleez!)
Mrs.: You park over here? I never park over here.
Mr.: Where do you park?
Mrs.: I park over by the sidewalk so I can safely walk into the store without getting run over.
Mr.: This area is closest to the entrance. (Points in a general direction.)
Mrs.: You go in that door? I never go in that door. You just like to park near the coffee shop, don’t you?
Mr.: I never go to the coffee shop.
Mrs.: We’re going to get run over.
By Bob Hicks
It’s the morning after the election, and Mr. Scatter has done his level best to tend to his civic duties by turning in his ballot (and Mrs. Scatter’s, since she’s off to London to visit the queen). As usual, he voted for a few losers (or as he prefers to put it, solid candidates who did not persuade the electorate of their worth) and even a few who emerged triumphant.
Trends and counter-trends popped up. Former NBA center Chris Dudley beat Alvin Alley and John Lim in the GOP race for the governorship nomination, and former governor John Kitzhaber waxed former secretary of state Bill Bradbury for the Demo nod. The lesson: being tall is a game-winner for Republicans, but not Democrats. Trend confirmed: Earl Blumenauer and Ron Wyden would have to be caught canoodling with drunken donkeys on reality TV to lose an election in Oregon.
Conjecture: Could be that Mayor Sam Adams‘ graceless smackdown of commissioner Dan Saltzman the week before the election actually helped Saltzman get reelected without facing a runoff: How many people voted for Saltzman out of sympathy for the way he was treated or as a way to take a jab at Adams? Then again, with eight other candidates splitting the anti-incumbent vote, Saltzman probably would have won no matter what. Either way, keep an eye on those city council meetings. Looks like the gloves are off, and things could get a little testy.
But enough about politics. Speaking of fisticuffs (and speaking of canoodling with drunken donkeys), the real headline-grabber in this morning’s Oregonian was Leslie Cole‘s front-page report Iowa Pork Sets Off Ham-fisted Brawl, about a knock-down drag-out fight between local chef Eric Bechard (Thistle in McMinnville; ex-Alberta Street Oyster Bar in Portland) and Brady Lowe, an Atlanta-based foodie who tours the country arranging friendly food and wine smackdowns among the locals. Seems Lowe offended locovore Bechard by importing an Iowa pig for the cook-off. And the brawl took place in front of the Magic Garden, an Old Town strip club. That’s the sort of energy Oregon politics needs: passion worthy of a Wilbur Mills or a Huey Long! More on the fracas from Food Dude and Willamette Week.
I have a dirty little secret. It’s so dirty I don’t even add commas between adjectives.
It starts out innocently enough. I poke around the fridge and come across a jar with a few floaty thingies and a bunch of brine. And I realize the fridge is full of jars with a few floaty thingies and a bunch of brine. And then I determine to do something about it.
“Honey, are you thirsty?”
“Why?”
“We have too many floaty thingies.”
Mr. Scatter gives me that look through his eyebrows. He mildly shakes his head.
“We have a problem here!” I get a little defensive. I’m a bit sensitive about My Issue and I’m looking for some sympathy. Mr. Scatter knows I have a dreadful disability. Making fun of such an acute condition is not humane.
Continue reading The dirty little secret behind the dirty little secret martinis
This chilling report just in (OK, actually it was in early this morning, but Mr. Scatter was busy) from the Official Website of the Punxsatawney Groundhog Club: Looks like Phil’s laid a six-week egg. Temperature in downtown Punxsatawney at 5:06 p.m. Pacific time: 31 degrees. Not too bad for Pennsylvania this time of year, actually.
Long, long ago Mr. Scatter lived within a groundhog’s toss of Punxsatawney — all right, it was 260 miles, but cold is cold — on the banks of the beautiful Chenango River. He stored quart bottles of locally brewed soda pop on his back porch. One morning he discovered twelve neat popsicles sticking up from a dozen bottlenecks, each crowned with a neat crimped cap. That’s what Phil’s talkin’ about.
Here at Scatter World Headquarters we haven’t watched Groundhog Day this season, but Mr. Scatter maintains the foolish fiction that given as many do-overs as Bill Murray got, he could play a mean piano, too.
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Instead of breaking off popsicles, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter donned their short-sleeve Hawaiian shirts last night and ambled over to Kaul Auditorium to catch the Kronos Quartet‘s three-encore show, presented by Friends of Chamber Music. A wonderful concert, which our friend David Stabler wrote about compellingly here for The Oregonian.
With music by a young Serbian woman (Alexandra Vrebalov, born 1970), a youngish Polish woman (Hanna Kulenty, born 1961) and an elder statesman of new music (Terry Riley, born 1935), plus fresh arrangements of a couple of moving traditional songs, the concert gave hope to the proposition that, nearly a decade into the 21st century, the music world is at last moving beyond the 19th.
Mr. Scatter has long thought of Kronos as invaluable curators of music from around the globe, bringing to our attention a wealth of sound we might otherwise miss. Last night’s concert underscored that. But we were hearteningly reminded as well that these are also superb musicians who have developed an uncanny ensemble sound. Someday we can tell our doting Scatter grandchildren that we were there when the great Kronos was more than just a recorded memory.