Tallinn, Estonia Memory

I had a coupon for a free breakfast sandwich so I was driving to McDonald’s to redeem the coupon and I was listening to Jack FM because I like to keep up with the Jack Jackpot amount and a 10,000 Maniacs song was on the radio and that reminded me of a story from my past about a weird girl who looked like Natalie Merchant who I made out with in the bathroom of some Soviet-era pasta joint in Tallinn, Estonia. This is the summer of 1996.

I had gone to Tallinn from Helsinki to get a visa to visit Russia. I had just turned 21 a couple of weeks earlier, celebrating by myself by eating a reindeer steak in Copenhagen. The waiter, sensing my loneliness, planted a miniature American flag into my steak. That didn’t make me feel any better. That’s another story. Tallinn was awesome! I was traveling with these two Quebecois kids that I met in Finland: Marc-Antoine and Olivier. Olivier didn’t speak much English, and I don’t know any French, but Marc-Antoine and I really hit it off. When he was 19 he said he published a book in Quebec about the Mississippi Delta. He knew all about all these old Delta blusemen. He knew the landscape too, having gone there doing research. So that was cool. (Aside: another Mississippi moment in Scandinavia: On the train from Berlin to Copenhagen there is a time when your train drives itself onto a ferry and all the uniformed officials stop being German. So this uniformed Dane is re-checking my passport and sees that I am a Mississippian. He gets excited and tells me how much he loves Eudora Welty. I tell him that my grandmother was Ms. Welty’s roommate at Columbia and I grew up knowing her as an acquaintance and would on occasion bump into her at the grocery store and exchange pleasantries. He sits with me for a while and we talk about Mississippi before he goes on checking other people’s tickets and passports.)

There’s a strip club next to the youth hostel in Tallinn. Like in the same building. You go in a door, up a flight of stairs, take a left you go to your room, take and right and you get a face-full of Eastern Bloc titty. So that was awesome, and that provides some general idea of the party-like-it’s-1999 post-Soviet atmosphere of the place. Here’s another clue: They love rockabilly.

My fellow lodgers, at least the ones that I hung out with, were the aforementioned Quebecois, a crazy rowdy fight-ready Aussie, some nerd from Calgary, and this American chick who was the principal of an American middle school in Warsaw. She looked exactly like Natalie Merchant.

That exact group of people, myself included, go for drinks one early-afternoon in the central plaza. There’s a lot of Saku being drunk. There’s a noisy group of people from Alabama witnessing to the meandering crowd. They have a little PA system and are warning of the end times in 2 languages. It gets annoying and Marc-Antoine suggests we go to a, his words, “proletariat bar” he had discovered in his wanderings. So we decide to go to the proletariat bar and eat the spaghetti of the people, or something. He was not kidding. This place was downright Soviet. It was located in the outskirts of town, among those awful Soviet non-descript high-rises, and was populated by unhappy-looking old men scowling behind yellowed newspapers. One wall was dominated by a large poster of Lenin, and that’s weird because the Estonians generally hate the Soviets! So into this place walk 6 drunk tourists who are there to essentially mock them. I’m not proud of everything that I’ve done.

So we order a bottle of vodka and plates of spaghetti. We’re doing shots and eating spaghetti and I notice Natalie Merchant is getting downright flirty with everyone at the table. Being a lonely traveller, I decide I need to take advantage of this opportunity before any of the other 4 males at the table. Natalie Merchant gets up to go to the bathroom and I follow at a respectful distance.

So we’re making out in this dank Soviet lavatory and I learn the most distressing thing about Natalie Merchant: she has hairy nipples. Thick black hairs ring her areola. I guess I was in there for a while with Natalie Merchant when the rowdy Aussie decides that he wants to be the one to go home with the girl. So he bursts into the bathroom and Natalie Merchant, who at this point is wearing very little clothing, starts making out with him. So this Australian dude making out with the girl with the hairy nipples I was just making out with starts to weird me out. But I didn’t have time to really do anything about it since the Aussie had left the door open and now there were bunch of indignant, old, angry Estonians witnessing a drunken tourist menage-a-trios in the only restroom in their Soviet pasta bar. The sun was still out.

So we get kicked out of the proletariat bar and make our way to some other watering hole. Natalie Merchant goes about deciding which guy she’s going to spend the night with. One would not be lying if one were to describe her behavior as highly inappropriate. I lose interest because the whole thing is so incredibly unhygienic, but the nerd from Calgary is just thrilled to be getting a piece of ass, no matter the cost. So damned if he doesn’t full-on fall in love with Natalie Merchant with the hairy nipples!

Later that night I got ejected from the strip club for falling asleep during a lap dance.

The next day I woke up to find that the nerd from Calgary and Natalie Merchant had taken a early-morning train to Poland together at the last minute. They left in a hurry. The nerd left a fair amount of the stuff he was traveling with, which was then divvied between me, the Aussie, and the Quebecois kids.

Natalie Merchant had a boyfriend in Warsaw. I wager that the nerd from Calgary tasted true love and heartbreak in a single day.

My Cassoulet, or, What I Did Over Spring Break

I decided that I wanted to make something big and decadent, and so I decided I was going to make cassoulet, the French country fare which is nothing if not an unctuous celebration of the deliciousness of fat. There are a lot of different approaches to the dish; I went with Anthony Bourdain's recipe from his Les Hales Cookbook. It seemed to me to be the purest approach - no tomatoes, no breadcrumbs, really nothing but pork fat, pork belly, duck fat, duck confit, sausage and beans all slow cooked together.

My first step was to make the confit. I was able to special order some duck hindquarters from Paul Anthony's market. I picked them up Wednesday evening. The cassoulet was eaten on saturday evening. I salted the duck, let it rest overnight, and made the confit on thursday, the same day I picked up the pork belly I special ordered from Paul Anthony's. This is my first pork belly:



I suspect that this pork belly had the skin itself removed, but I didn't let that bother me and trimmed the hardish layer of fat from the belly and cooked some of it with the beans (the bean-cooked rind was pureed with onions, garlic and duck fat and used between all the different layers of meat and beans in the dish), and used some of it raw layered like a pie crust (yes, porkfat piecrust - awesome) on the bottom of my cast iron dutch oven (the recipe said that I should use earthenware, but my only earthenware casserole was a mere 4 quarts - what may be the most ridiculous thing about this recipe that uses like a pound of duck, more than a pound of sausage, like 2 pounds of pork belly, another pound or so of rind, and 5 cups of beans is that it "Serves Four." Mine served more, comfortably. Also, regarding the rind, I was a little worried about the prospect of hair, so I suspect my fat was just fine.).

On friday, which was the day everything got put together, my entire kitchen glistened with a with a thin veneer of fat. Even this morning, monday, when I put some water in my kettle for some coffee the kettle began to smoke and filled the kitchen with the smell of cooking pork fat. The kettle got put in the washer.

After cooking for a couple of hours on friday, resting overnight, and then another hour or so on saturday, this is what my cassoulet looked like:



It was good. I had never even had cassoulet before, so I had no reference point or ideal when it came to this meal. But I figured it would be hard to make it taste bad. But it tasted great. All the meats and fats melted together beautifully without any losing the flavors that made them distinctive. The pork belly just melted in your mouth, the duck was like an extra-delicious confit, which is already extra-delicious. And the crispy bean crust made for a perfect texture counterpoint to all the gooey goodness within.

We had some good wines too:



One thing though, eating piping hot mouthfulls of fat and drinking good wines makes for sleepy times. I didn't last too late, and in the morning I found the dutch oven to be empty (after waking up on the couch with my jeans nowhere to be found).

I hope everyone who got some enjoyed it. I probably won't do that again for a while.

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I know I've been a little delinquent here. here's my tumblr if you care.

Into, and Call of, the Wild

Impression after seeing Sean Penn's Into the Wild and then re-reading Jack London's Call of the Wild:

Preface: I've never read Jon Krakauer's book about Alexander Supertramp, nee Christopher McCandless, nor did I ever meet Alexander/Christopher. The movie, however, suggests that London's book fed heavily into the young man's worldview.


vs.


Alexander Supertramp was one far-ass cry away, one distant, plangent howl away, from Buck. Buck recognized the call of the wild well before he consented to submit to it; he had to hone himself through experience, trial, and hardship before he was ready for it, before he and it could be parts of each other. Supertramp, suburban naif that he was, just figured he'd skip the middle parts of the book, the parts Buck spent learning shit, and just throw himself right into the final chapter - the dollar-menu enlightenment practiced in comparative religion classrooms and yoga studios across the country (that's not fair, I know).

Being an idiot, and a pretentious one at that, allow me speculate that while Buck lives a bildungsroman, Supertramp makes but a picaresque.

I will also speculate that this is a pretty piss-poor way to start blogging again after a near yearlong hiatus.

And, btw and in a nutshell, for you readers of recent entries in the outstanding prettyfakes:

THE CALL OF THE WILD = WOLF ITCHED LETHAL

whereas

INTO THE WILD = HOLED NITWIT

Jeff Lewis - Will Oldham Horror Video

The State of the Union

Who wants to sex Mutombo?

Bloodbath

This morning driving to work I passed a white pickup with stars and bars on the bumper and a gun rack. the most interesting thing about this truck was the copious amount of blood staining the sides and rear quarterpanels as if someone had had a literal bloodbath in the truck's bed and there was a lot of splashover.