Via Sullivan…

On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.

A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc…

Therein follows many months of building a house, raising livestock, planting gardens, realizing he needs to mine his own salt, needs not one but three cows (one for milk for butter, one for the beef, one for rennet for  the cheese)…and so on…

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society…

Some would say that’s a good reason not to have a post-agrarian society. I strongly disagree. Never mind steel and integrated circuits. The Industrial Revolution gave us Cheeseburgers.

Ayn Rand placed the dollar sign as the iconic symbol of capitalism and the Industrial age…proof I submit, that the lady had no art in her soul. She should have made it the cheeseburger. Seriously. When her and Owen Kellogg left the abandoned train at the end of part two, instead of revealing himself as an agent of the strike by pulling out a cigarette with a dollar sign on it, he should have started snarfing down a cheeseburger from Hugh Akston’s diner. That newstand at the end of chapter three should have been a burger joint and the old man reminiscing about when they made burgers out of real meat and cheese, not collectivist tofu and soy.  He should have said to Dagny Taggart, “I like to think of burgers held in a man’s hand. Big fat juicy ones dripping with cheddar cheese and mustard.  Food, a dangerous force, served with a side of fries and maybe also a dollip of coleslaw…” At the end of the book John Galt could trace the outline of a cheeseburger in the sky.

Germany seriously challenged America’s dominance in the Preserved Food You Can’t Imagine Ever Taking Off The Shelf Even In Your Most Desperate Moments category with their mighty Cheeseburger In A Can…

Well I’m here to tell you we Americans, the people who gave the world SPAM, Individually Wrapped Slices Of Fake Cheese, Fake Potato Chips In A Can (we call them Pringles on this side of the pond) and Cheese Puffs, the snack food you can put in your will, just couldn’t stand idly by and let some other country desecrate the joy of eating better then we can.  Well I’m happy to say that good old fashioned American Know-How has risen to the challenge with (drumroll…)…

Chicken In A Can!

Just the thing for that swine flu shelter you’re going to be building this weekend…

Top thAT Deutschen…

…like my first try at egg nog for instance.  It wasn’t…wonderful.  Oh it isn’t horrible either…but the recipe I used called for Way too much booze in retrospect, and for some reason the ingredients mixed up a tad flavorless.  You could tell it was rich…I used the best milk and eggs and cream I could find at Whole Foods…but it didn’t have much egg noggy flavor.  Or maybe the smell of the booze was just overpowering it.  My nose isn’t all that great at the task of smelling stuff anyway.  So I tossed it and I’ll spend New Year’s Eve at the drafting table with the last of the store bought I have here at Casa del Garrett. 

It’s okay…my first attempts at beer batter fish frying didn’t work out either, but I kept on tweaking and tweaking some more and now it’s a neighborhood and co-worker favorite.

Saving grace is I taught myself how to separate eggs and fold ingredients.  Not that hard really…I’d just never done it before.  I have long narrow fingers so I started out by dumping the contents of an egg into the palm of my hand and letting the white drip between my fingers into a bowl.  The other method is to shuffle the yoke back and forth between the two halves of the shell you’ve just opened, letting the white drip off in the process.  But the egg in the hand trick works for me like a charm.  I’ve never held a yoke in my hand before.  Felt…odd…

Me and some friends, sampling the Virginia vintage over the weekend…

They suggested a trip to some wineries in Northern Virginia last Saturday and I took them up on it.  It’s part of my initiation rites into middle-age yuppydom now that I have the Mercedes.  No, I have not cut my hair.  Are you kidding?  It’s tied in a ponytail which is not visible there.  I ended up taking home two bottles of really nice dessert wine, charmingly labeled "Moonstone".  Then we all drove to Harper’s Ferry and wandered around for a bit. I hadn’t been to Harper’s Ferry since the middle 70s.  Any excuse to drive Traveler somewhere.

Yay!  My 32 inch waste 501s have been feeling a tad loose this past week…so I decided to go see if I could fit into 31s today.  They fit perfectly, not even a little tight.  Yes!  So I bought 2. For some reason I usually take a one inch smaller waste in low risers (and two inches less in the inseam…go figure…).  So I tried on some 527s in a 30 inch waste.  Success again!  The 30s fit perfectly, and look much Much better on me then the 31s (you really don’t want low risers to look frumpy on you).

Swear to you…Swear…I thought I’d never get back into 31s again.  This feels so damn Good!  I can look in a mirror now and think yeah, I’d hit that…for the first time in ages, just ages.

Size small shirts fit me now like they always used to.  I don’t have to worry about them being too tight around the waste anymore.  When I was packing more weight then I should have been, finding shirts was the worst.  If they were right in the waste they were too big in the shoulders.  Right in the shoulders and they were too tight around the waste.  Now that I’m getting my hourglass back…at least slightly…it’s suddenly not hard to find shirts that work and that I actually look good in.

It’s still basically a no-junk food diet.  No sugar in my drinks.  Whole grain instead of white bread.  Lean meats, high protean.  I’ve added a basic multi-vitamin to my day.  I’m eating out more regularly with friends in D.C.  Yesterday we did a happy hour at our regular bar and then ate at a really nice Armenian place just down the block, where we started with a really nice fry bread plus this-and-that appetizer course, then I had a entree of lamb, chicken ka-bob, fried shrimp and rice.  So I’m not starving myself by any means.  Yet I am still…slowly now…very very slowly…loosing weight.  This is why I spent the money on that beam balance doctor’s office type scale when I started this…so I could monitor my progress when the weight loss curve started flattening out.  I am just amazed every day now, what simply taking the junk out of my diet did.  Or conversely…what the damn junk was doing to me all these years.

And now I’m slowly adding regular exercise into my life…and I mean slowly.  They organized a yoga/pilates class and I signed up for it.  It’s just one day a week, but I like the mix of stretch-exercise-relax-repeat in the mix of yoga and pilates, and I hope to learn from it.  My torso is starting to get a little workout now…but it surprised me how much I have to work to get flexibility back.  At my age, flexibility is something guys have to work on.  But I really want to get my stomach area a tad more defined.  It doesn’t have to be ripped…I don’t think I even Can at my age now…with so many years of not exercising at all behind me.  But if I can get some definition there I won’t be embarrassed to take my shirt off at the beach or when I’m out doing lawn work at home…

…like I need to this weekend.  I’ll try to take some more photos tomorrow.  I’m really feeling good now about how I’m looking.  But I have a load of yard work to do now that the weather is good again. 

P.S. To A Certain Someone:  I don’t know if you even bother reading my blog or not…you said that you didn’t use the computer much, that you were more into nature then technology…but if you happen to read this…thank you.  Much.  It was the thought of you laying your eyes on me again after all these years, with all that weight I’d put on since I started working as a software engineer, that motivated me to get myself looking good again.  I don’t know if we’ll ever lay eyes on each other again in this life.  But…thanks.  For waking me up.  Again.