Come all ye amateur chefs and free yourselves from the confines of prescriptive cooking!  Cooking is a loose, creative, and sometimes dangerous thing.  What will you do with a fridge full of ingredients and no recipe to guide you?  Trade in your cookbooks and think about what really makes those recipes work.  Recipes are a crutch that can hold you back, if you rely on them you’ll never become the culinary MacGyver you could be. 

The first is Ratio by Michael Ruhlman.  It explains the relationships between basic ingredients in a way that Alton Brown likens to a “secret decoder ring.”  Having this kind of knowledge in the bank can free you to focus on creativity.  From Ruhlman’s site:

Ratios are the simple proportions of one ingredient to another. Biscuit dough is 3 : 1 : 2 — or 3 parts flour, 1 part fat, and 2 parts liquid. This ratio is the beginning of many variations, and because the biscuit takes sweet and savory flavors with equal grace, you can top it with whipped cream and strawberries or sausage gravy. Vinaigrette is 3 : 1, or 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar, and is one of the most useful sauces imaginable, giving everything from grilled meats and fish to steamed vegetables or lettuces intense flavor.

A hat tip goes to Kottke for that one.  And the next book is something gansie over at ES blogged about back during the holidays.  The newest holy book in the food world, the holiest of the holy Flavor Bible.  Gansie calls it “the anti-cookbook,” because there are no recipes.  Its all about the concepts from individual ingredients to execution.  It also has exhausting lists:

Starting with achiote seeds and ending with zucchini blossoms, authors Karen Page and Andrew Dorenburg list every single food product available and then name all of the other ingredients that could possibly be paired with the starting ingredient.  Each ingredient is also defined by its season, taste, weight, best cooking technique and flavor affinities.

Going without recipes can be scary, but not if you know your stuff, and it sounds like these books are a good place to start.  Anybody know of more resources like this?

Or, how to get me to read fiction; a literary mashup coming in April.  From the description:

“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action…What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.”

The new content is written by Seth Grahame-Smith, author of “How to Survive a Horror Movie” and “The Big Book of Porn.”

25% off if you preorder with the promo code at this link.

ISBN 9781594743344
ISBN10 1594743347

Hat tip:  Crooked Timber, the comments section has a discussion of proper way to kill, and nature of vampire-zombies.

Tyler Cowen’s ethnic dining guide is specifically for the Washington DC area, but his general remarks are relevant for elsewhere around the US.  Here are some of his tips:

Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism.  Entrepreneurship, international trade and migration, and cultural exchange all come together in these communal eateries…Effective consumer choice improves your eating and, in the long run, improves the quality of available restaurants.

…The better ethnic restaurants tend to have many of their kind in a given geographic area.  Single restaurant representations of a cuisine tend to disappoint.  Competition increases quality and lowers prices.  The presence of many restaurants of a kind in an area creates a pool of educated consumers, trained workers and chefs, and ingredient supplies - all manifestations of increasing returns to scale.

The best ethnic restaurants are often found…where rents are lower and the degree of feasible experimentation is greater.

After you have chosen a restaurant, you must order.  Ordering is often a more important decision than choosing the restaurant.  Keep in mind that restaurant staff can be unreliable; sometimes they will steer you towards something safe and uninteresting.  (Many Chinese still express amazement that many Westerners can eat with chopsticks, for instance.)

Some rules of thumb, none of which are absolute:  Continue reading this post…

Last May a bunch of us went to a Karaoke bar to celebrate Su’s birfday.  Long story short, we all got up and sang “Don’t Stop Believin‘” as our grand finale song as passionately as we could into the two mics.  We earned a 100% score, the only one of the night I believe.  After much rejoicing, we emerged from our private karaoke room to discover that the bouncer of the bar had been shot.  We were shocked, and spent the rest of our night miserably waiting to be questioned by the police detectives so we could go home and nurse our hangovers.

Once we read the news report about the incident and found out the bouncer was in stable condition(he was a really nice guy for a bouncer), the jokes ensued.  I made the photoshop of Tom pictured above.  We laughed about one of the comments on the news report:

THE BEST WAY TO ENJOY A KARAOKE PARTY IS IN A PRIVATE SETTING WITH DECENT PEOPLE THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW. ANY OTHER WAY, YOU ARE TAKING A CHANCE WITH YOUR LIFE.

Emphasis mine.  Ha!  What the heck is this loon talking about? I mean, karaoke is supposed to be a fun, good-humored activity, right?  Wrong.

I recently linked to a story in the Times about an incidence of karaoke violence in Malaysia.  But the most shocking part of this post was the following from the Guardian:

Karaoke rage is not unheard of in Asia. There have been several reported cases of singers being assaulted, shot or stabbed mid-performance, usually over how songs are sung.

Frank Sinatra’s My Way has reportedly generated such outbursts of hostility that some bars in the Philippines now no longer offer it on the karaoke menu. In Thailand this year, a gunman shot eight people dead after tiring of their endless renditions of a John Denver tune.

Wow.  WOW!  Karaoke is starting to sound like one of the most dangerous things you could do out on a Friday night.  WTF?  To top this all off, I just heard of a book, through my first Goodreads friend Jesse, all about karaoke.  And guess what it’s called?  That’s right, its called “Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life.”  And of course, the first thing I saw when I visited the author’s blog was a post about karaoke violence, mentioning even more incidents that I hadn’t yet heard of.

This is madness.

I’ve been writing a lot about books lately so I thought I’d share this.  Goodreads.com is a social network for people who like to read books.  You can add books to your bookshelf, including books you wish to read in the future.  Then you can rate books, write reviews, and see others’ reviews.  You can even update what specific page you’re on and include twitter-like brief updates as you go through the book.  The idea I think is for you to connect with like-minded people and use that as a way to discover new books.

This site has been less a social network for me (I don’t have any friends in my friend list because I’m too cool for friends) and more a way to motivate myself to finish reading books and save my thoughts about them.  I spend too much time reading on the computer, its hard to put it down and pick up a book sometimes.  Goodreads is also a great reminder list about what books I’m interested in.  Just last night I printed out my “to-read” bookshelf and brough it to the bookstore with me.

You can read more about goodreads and its vision here.

Continue reading this post…

Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. This is one of the only books ever written about dub reggae, the first style of music to put audio engineers in the spotlight.  Its written by ethnomusicologist Michael Veal (mm veal, what a tasty name!).  The writing is very technical and academic, but there have been some great passages so far.  Veal examines dub in the context of 1970’s Jamaican society and culture, and the global markets for reggae following the success of Bob Marley.  Also interesting for audio engineers, as it really picks apart certain songs and explains how the pioneers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry pushed their mixing equipment to the max to come up with those effects that we take for granted now.  I’m less than half way through, but I’m also looking forward to where he gets to the influence of dub in other music styles, particularly with Hip Hop and Punk.  Listen to Bauhaus and tell me they didn’t love King Tubby!

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Yep, John Maynard Keynes.  Picked it up at Barnes & Noble last night.  Marginal Revolution is doing a book club on it, so what better time to read it?  This is a great example of the internets providing quality education directly from college professors for free!  Its his ideas that are going to save or destroy the economy, right?  There’s a lot of hatred for Keyenes on the internets from respectable Austrian blogs to blabbering fanatics on Digg and Youtube.  Believe it or not his ideas are actually respected by most economists, even if they don’t completely agree with them, so I want to see what its all about.  I think heterodoxy is a good thing here.

Note for nerds who want in on this:  I like to have the paper book but it is available online for free.

Here’s my review of Behind The Housing Crash:  Confessions from an Insider, a book by frustrated economist Aaron Clarey.

The aftermath of the current housing crash is a complicated mess, but this book is a great place to start if you’re looking for a perspective from inside the housing market where it all began.  With chapter names like “My Ex-Girlfriend Was Subprime,” this book is entertaining.  This isn’t some exhausting academic empirical study.  Its not too bloated with numbers and technical finance jargon, and where there is technical stuff its explained very well.  Instead, it takes you through real life anecdotes from an economist who worked in the real estate finance industry while the bubble was blowing up.  Its full of first-hand accounts of incompetence, greed, and outright corruption in the world of real estate finance, with just the right amount of graphical charts and data to go along.

Clarey goes after bankers, brokers, developers, and borrowers, but he spends the most time on bank management.  Despite his objections and warnings, management had him write up a multitude of bad loans to satisfy their appetite for sales commissions.  In the end, he drops a sweet bit of schadenfreude as he watches it all come crashing down.  Finally, he offers some preventative solutions, the most convincing of which is elegantly simple:  tie bankers commissions to loan profits instead of loan sales.

Clarey isn’t the most professional author with lots of books under his belt, but he was compelled to expose the banking industry.  You’ve got to give him credit for sitting down and independently publishing a book about it.  I felt like the author overused the sentence structure “Not only X, but also Y” a little too much, maybe its just me.  Other than this little peeve, I found the prose to be clear and easy to read, accessible even for people with little economics or finance background.

Like most books, the one thing this one was really missing was more illustrations.  Yeah, the charts are pretty, and I know how much Mr. Clarey loves charts.  But I took it upon myself to do my own artist’s rendition of the author’s legendary “Credit Union Face:”

Visit Aaron at his blog or buy his book from Amazon.

“Behind The Housing Crash: Confessions From an Insider” is on its way in the mail and it looks like a really interesting read. This independently published book is written by Captain Capitalism, a blogger who’s been in the game for a long time. I’ve been following him for several years now, and if the book is anything as indispensable as his blog, its guaranteed to be good.  Listen to the talking heads say they saw this crash coming all you want, but the Captain’s been talking about it for a good while and the release couldn’t have come at a better time.

Here’s Amazon.com’s description:

“Behind the Housing Crash – Confessions from an Insider” is the authoritative book on the housing crisis. It is an expose written by Aaron Clarey, a credit analyst who worked at various banks in the Twin Cities and saw first hand the unethical, if not, illegal dealings that led up to the housing bubble and subsequent crash. Stories of commission-addicted bankers, bribed appraisers, FBI investigations, IRS raids, offshore bank accounts and more regale the reader with a blood-boiling story of corruption, incompetence and limitless greed. However, the book goes beyond exposing those responsible for the housing crash, and does an exemplary job of explaining, in clear and simple language, the economics behind the housing crisis and the consequences for us all. If you are looking for an excellent expose on the banking industry, an explanation why your house is worth $100,000 less than it was before, or are just curious as to what happened, look no further. This is the book to read.

If you’re interested and you want to support the Captain, you can buy the book here.