Nermo

Info:
Wikipedia
NY Times Article
Miracle Fruit Facts
Magical Fruit Info Site
The Old Sweet Lime Trick
Wall St. Journal Article
Freedom to Tinker

Sales:
Miracle Fruit Man
Miracle Fruit Tab

Note: I think I am going to order a Miracle Fruit Tree tomorrow.

            

I was tragically too late to buy tickets to the Flavortripping SF party at Prana on Monday.

Essentially, you pop a Miracle Fruit (Sideroxylon dulcificum), and for the next hour or two it makes everything bitter or sour taste sweet in mind-bending ways. They serve a variety of food and drink that, under the influence of miracle fruit, take on the characteristics of sweet delights. According to Thrillist:

Upon arrival. you pop your berry and hit Sup’ and ‘Stache’s largest buffet to date: puckering garnishes, wretched fruit, sauces, etc, painstakingly picked to showcase dulcifuma’s transformative powers, from cheeses that evoke frostings to grapefruit that tastes of pixie stix (you don’t even want to know what an actual pixie stick would do to you). Beverages also get the treatment, with unsweetened juices that’ll taste like Five-Alive, plus a bevy of lambic beers and stouts that’ll go down like milkshakes and tequila that’ll taste so much like lemonade, you’ll be tempted to sell it to neighborhood moms for a quarter.

I’m jealous that they sold out before I could buy tickets, but I have resolved to do a little research and design and host my own Miracle Fruit Dinner Party. Look out San Francisco.

            

I spent most of last week camping at Big Basin with a half-dozen other people. I brought a huge pile of tri-tip to grill on “our night” to do dinner, and I was looking forward to it. I bought the meat, TSB marinated it, and then I totally got bumped off the grill when it was time to cook.

I’m not the territorial type, so I tried to let it go, but these guys had absolutely no idea what they were doing and it was killing me to watch them butcher my meat (figuratively). I thought I could step back, but I found myself hovering, saying things like, “you really don’t need to flip it so often,” and, “you want coals under the grate, not flaming, smoking logs,” but to no avail.

Here are a few tips for campfire grilling. Please memorize them if you ever want to go camping with me and intend to hijack my tongs.

• Coals, not Carnage:Let the wood burn until the flames are gone but the coals are hot. You want the heat without the sooty deposits that seriously spoil the flavor.
• Flip a steak ONCE. No more, no less.
• No stabbing: Don’t poke it, squish it down with a spatula, or cut into it. Squeeze it if you need to see how well done it is.
• Let it rest: Don’t cut into the meat until it’s been off the grill for 10 minutes. You’ll survive the wait and the meat will be juicier for it.
• Bank the coals so that there is a hot side and a cooler side so you can seer the meat and then move it over, but not immolate it.
• Relax:There’s no hurry. You’re in the woods. There’s nowhere to rush off to after dinner, so relax and let the meat cook a little more slowly than your primal instincts drive you to do.

            

A couple weeks ago I hosted the Backyard Zombie Film Festival and Obscene Barbecue at my place. We fired up the grill, filled the cooler and set up a projector to watch a couple of zombie flicks.

We promised a “three-corpse meal,” and my contribution to the appetizers was a platter of brain matter. I made Olive Tapenade, Baba Ghanouj, Red Pepper Hummus, and Edamame Hummus, served with tortilla chips and pita wedges. Each one, ultimately rather grey and mushy was labeled with a toothpick flag as one part of the brain. I think I served them as “Medulla,” Cerebellum,” “Cerebral Cortex,” and, “Frontal Lobe.”

I brought some into work for the office picnic too, but decided to just use the traditional names. People in both groups asked for the recipes, so here they are.

Olive Tapenade
2 c pitted Kalamata
1 cups pitted nicoise
1 large shallot, finely diced
¼ garlic clove, finely diced
8 sun dried tomatoes, finely diced
Juice of one lemon
1 tablespoons capers
½ teaspoon black pepper

1. Combine all ingredients in a food processor.

Baba Ghanouj
2 medium eggplants (about 1 pound each)
Juice of two lemons (about ½ cup)
¼ cup or ½ cup tahini (I forget)
¼ cup olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Halve eggplants from end to end and lay open side down on a greased baking sheet. Bake 45 minutes.
3. Peel while still hot, squeeze out some of the moisture and cut into several pieces.
4. Combine all ingredients in food processor and pulse until almost smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
5. Refrigerate until room temperature or cooler before serving.

Roasted Red Pepper Hummus
2 16-ounce can of chickpeas
½ cup tahini
¾ cup roasted red peppers
juice of 2 lemons
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup olive oil
Salt and pepper

1. Combine chickpeas, tahini, ½ cup peppers, garlic and lemon juice in food processor. Pulse to combine.
2. Add olive oil while pulsing until smooth, and desired consistency (you may not need all of the oil). Season with salt and pepper to taste.
3. Add remaining peppers and pulse until chunky.

Edamame Hummus
1 pound shelled, cooked edamame (don’t work too hard; buy a bag of cooked, shelled beans)
½ cup tahini
4 tablespoons soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon ( ¼ cup)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 shallot, finely minced
¼- ½ cup olive oil
pepper

1. Combine edamame, tahini, soy sauce, lemon juice, garlic and shallot in food processor until chunky but consistent.
2. Add olive oil while pulsing until it reaches your desired consistency (It’s better left a little chunkier). Season with pepper to taste.

            

I’ve been toying with the indulgences idea a little more.

I’ve been getting back into silkscreen printing lately, and was thinking it would be fun to hand-print big, beautiful, frame-worthy certificates of the indulgences as limited edition pieces of art. To tie them into the website, and reinforce the notion of the indulgences as the virtual, spiritual commodity, I’m thinking of encouraging their transfer, sale, barter, etc. and putting a tracking number rather than an edition number, and having the current owner “register” with the site. I’ll have to come up with some sort of incentive to get them to play along.

Also mocking a trend I so greatly enjoy, I was thinking of selling them as “sin offset credits” tied into the seven deadly sins and/or the ten commandments.

I’m thinking of calling it the First Hypertextual Church of Nermo.

            

My little sister just put me on to wordle.net. You paste a big text block, spin the dials and it spits out a gorgeous “word cloud” design.

            

Here’s my latest idea: set up the site as a non-profit org that works with communities to relocate their hipster infestation to other areas. As every city seems to have issues with young urbanites invading their neighborhoods, but nobody seems to view himself or herself as a hipster (none of my hipster friends would categorize themselves as such), nobody will be offended and everyone will love the idea. We could take a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach. There’s the Mission District in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago, and many more in every other city in the country.
80’s culture seems to be making a return (evident in hipster fashion), so why not the mantra of “Die Yuppie Scum!” There were also a number of projects in that decade to relocate the homeless by rounding up local derelicts, and giving them bus tickets to warmer climates. Even in my progressive hometown of Burlington, VT there was a notorious fund-raiser held at one of my favorite bistros to send the undesirables west (you can read a bit about it here). We could scour the country for a derelict industrial district rife with warehouses and factories ready to be converted into lofts, build up a buzz and throw a big send-off party. We could even just lure them all onto buses with the promise of free vintage clothing and an open bar, and once they’re all passed out drunk, just have the drivers take them all away.

            

While I’m on the topic of common misconceptions in contemporary American culture…

I went to a wedding reception last weekend which featured a martini bar. To me, that’s bottles of gin, vodka and vermouth with a couple lemons and a jar of olives. These items were relegated to the bottom of the placard as, “traditional martinis also available,” right below the appletini, chocolate martini, cosmo, lemondrop, etc, etc, etc.

Let’s clarify: PUTTING A COCKTAIL IN A MARTINI GLASS DOES NOT MAKE IT A MARTINI.

It seems that of late, any cocktail that is composed entirely of alcohol, more or less translucent and served in a martini glass is getting a “-tini” tacked on the end or being called a (descriptive noun) Martini. Just call it a cocktail.

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Good radio show about the recent cocktail revival/renaissance on KQED:
Download (mp3)

            

While I am on the topic of barbecue, let’s talk about the difference between barbecuing and grilling.

I, like so many, use the words interchangeably in conversation, but really barbecue is meat cooked over low heat for a long time, while grilling is what you do to steaks and burgers in the back yard.

The event where meat is grilled is called a barbecue, so that’s where I think it all got muddled, but I don’t want to be the poindexer who invites friends to a “grilling” on my patio.

Speaking of muddled, I could go for a mojito right about now.

Here, watch an irritating video on the topic: