I'll Make Mincemeat Out of You

The Yuletide has finally ebbed, but some of its effects on the Land of Food linger on. Here we believe that until the end of February it is still seasonally permissible to make Mincies. These little tartlets used to be made by my grandmother with mincemeat filling from the jar. They were damned good, but mine (made with a very un-difficult fruit filling) are better. If you have any doubts about how satisfying the result is, they will be banished by experience. This will have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not you think you like "mincemeat." Make these as an act of faith in the cold heart of winter, and you will, in years to come, wonder how you ever got through a cold afternoon without one.

Filling Ingredients
(These proportions make dozens of Mincies. It's always preferable to have more filling)

6-7 tart apples, peeled and minced
4-5 cups dried fruit: cherries, cranberries, currants, and golden raisins
1/4 cup citron/candied orange (optional)
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup apple brandy (or any brandy)
1-1/2 cup apple cider or cranapple juice
juice of 1-2 lemons
About 1 teaspoon nutmeg
About 1 teaspoon cinnamon

The crust

Whatever pie crust you like will do. The amount of crust for an ordinary two-crust pie will yield about 12-16 Mincies.

Making the filling

This is easy. In a big pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the apples and cook for 10-15 minutes. Add the dried fruit, the citron the brandy, the cider and the spices. Cook until the dried fruit is soft. Mash with a potato masher or heavy spoon to break up the dried fruit somewhat. Add the sugar and lemon juice, reduce heat and simmer until the whole thing is a sufficiently mashlike consistency. Add more liquid if necessary; add sugar if it seems to require sweetness, lemon juice if too sweet.

Making the crusts

Almost as simple. Make pie crust dough from the recipie of your preference. I usually use a box mix, but maybe you're a better pastry chef than I. Roll out a big flat sheet of dough until it's as thin as you can work with, and then using a circular cookie cutter or an empty (cleaned!) tuna fish can, cut out circles of dough. Arrange cut circles of dough on a cookie sheet. In the center of each circle, put a heaping tablespoon of the filling. Then, for each circle, rim the edge with a little cold water (use a finger or a teaspoon).

Sealing it up

Place another circle of dough on top of the fruit, and use fingers to press the edge of the top circle to the moistened edge of the bottom one, all the way around, sealing the fruit filling inside. Using a fork, press down all around the edges with the tines to create a nice pattern, and then poke the fork in the center to make some ventilation holes. Each should now look like a little pie. (My sister uses a diamond cookie cutter to make these, and she makes them a little smaller, more cookie-sized. These are slightly more substantial than your average cookie).

When you've got a whole sheet ready, put them in an oven preheated to 375 degrees. After about 10-12 minutes they should be done. They can be served warm or cold. They are suitable on all forms of transportation, including horseback. They can be eaten for breakfast, if no one is looking. A certain number should be hoarded for the personal use of the baker.

In Ben Benjamin's "net art work" What Would Lincoln Want to Tell Us? the artist proves that you can involve a bunch of people in a collaborative project and unintentionally create an almost perfect pastiche of a Donald Barthelme story. Benjamin's piece is offered by a site called ( HYPER-X ), which is full of work by a lot of people and may be excellent or may not be so excellent.

Exclamations

Even though their website still reflects last month's issue, the new Harper's magazine is out and features a brilliant and ire-inspiring blast by Thomas Frank about the current Social Security swindle being perpetrated. It isn't online: go and buy you a copy. Caution: do not read while babysitting, during Vespers, or in any other situation in which it would be a bad idea to repeatedly and involuntarily exclaim, "Those bastards! Those fucking bastards!"

Quack Frost

We all know how the traditional snow man can provide much-needed companionship in the dark solstice-season. But can our frosty chum snuggle up in your arms? Is he the cutest little thing ever? Not quite.

Don't you want a Snow Duck instead?

Well dog my cats, if this just isn't enough to turn a body Christian. ;-/

Comments are down for the moment. We regret any inconvenience.

Homeland Defense

In which the grinding mundanity of daily life is explored, online-journal-style.

The upstairs neighbors came down last night. They told us that they’d be having an all-night party on Saturday. They said they had the landlord’s blessing (The landlords live below us. They’re never home on weekends. They love our upstairs neighbors terribly, in the way that a certain sort of indulgent parent favors the “creative” and thoroughly ill-behaved child) and that they hoped we didn’t mind. It wasn’t at all clear that we were being given a choice. Our landlord hasn't returned our call.

Our upstairs neighbor runs a record label out of his house. He is a genial, outgoing sort, with lots and lots and lots of friends. He is a “cool guy.” He lives what might be said to to be the ideal lifestyle for a 25-year-old man. He shares the apartment with his younger sister. They have a sort of vibrant, friendly colony of hipster buddies. They like to hang out, make big dinners on Friday night, watch ball games, have people over to dance. You can tell that everybody likes him.

We are perhaps the only people in the world who do not like him. We feel about him the way we feel about certain kinds of extremely popular R & B music, the kind which features a lot of super-melismatic singing a la Mariah Carey: would that we could get into it. But we cannot. Our world – our quiet, increasingly boring world – is subject to our neighbor’s world of Happy Noise. Our neighbors walk loudly, laugh loudly, drink life to the lees, and suggest that the glory of living in a brownstone house is that we all cheerfully share in one another’s disorderly lives, a communal vision of felicity such as that represented by the Madness video for “Our House.” We walk softly on our dutifully laid carpets, ask our guests to keep it down in the hallways, and never invite people over for brunch before noon. We lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the crash of furniture being rearranged. We call. Volume is adjusted. We feel half-satisfied. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The last time the neighbors had this kind of a party, we had lots of warning. Ms. Claire was out of town, and I decided to stick it out. It lasted until five. I couldn’t have slept without borrowing some roofies off of one of the guests. This year, we’re not up for an all-nighter – at least not one of passive suffering. We don’t know quite what we’re going to do this weekend. Maybe the Four Seasons, with the bill forwarded to our landlords. Maybe we’ll just be getting to know the guys down at the precinct house really well; I’ll stock up on doughnuts and coffee for the various teams which will respond to our increasingly hysterical calls.

If up until now, you have found the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique to be a pleasurable but dimly apprehended stew, you may appreciate this guide to every single sample on the album.

"Paul's Boutique reinvented the group as cheeba-dazed California aesthetes, with their producers the Dust Brothers piling on samples like they were going out of style, which in fact they were."--Rob Sheffield

I used to hate bicyclists, til I became one. Here's to harmonious flat- and fleet-footed friendship.

Lines Composed in Recollection of a Trip to the Callicoon, NY, Area Along the Delaware River

Past Bear Mountain, rolling west
David's house for a country rest.
Buckwheat pancakes, cheap red wine
What means 'Posted' on that sign?
Saw a porcupine, saw some ducks
Guys with gun racks on their trucks.
Dead end roads on someone's land
All the bacon you can stand.
Vintage cars without their wheels,
Pregnant cows and snowmobiles.
One more line before we're through:
We like David's Subaru.

We're retreating to the country for the weekend. But we leave you with a handful of Wacky Packages to enjoy in our absence.

Also, you should go look at Shauny's snazz-i-rific seasonal redecorating job. Those Ozzies! Always with the upside-down! It amuses us, yes!

Comic Book Guy finally gets the recognition from the academy he's always yearned for: the OED solicits citations from science fiction fans.

Today's Meme
via harrumph!

Hey, kids, look at us! We're the Garden of Earthly Delights. ("I am decadent and depraved. I have an eye for small details and love to fit in as much hedonistic pleasure as possible in everything I do. I buck authority and am not afraid to make a statement outside approved channels.") Most of our acquaintance would disagree, but we got the Bosch-result straight from The Art Test. And we aren't going to argue with science.

Rant

This little slice of spam keeps landing in my inbox:

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With our revolutionary software you can copy virtually
any DVD Movie using your existing equipment!
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Our revolutionary software cost less than the price of 3 DVD Movies!
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Never mind the laughable syntax, the questionable claim, or even the for-suckers-only substitution of $$$ for “dollars.”

This otherwise unremarkable message gets to me because it reminds me how much I hate DVDs.

I hate them for the same reason that I hated CDs when they first came out; the way people talk about them, the way people refer not to watching or renting or movies or films but DVDs. I knew people back in the eighties who used to talk about buying “CDs” with a certain amount of relish, with the idea that you’d rush home and hear transformed the pompous, heavy-styled “greatness” of Roger Waters. While the easily duped part of me was beguiled by the notion that this magic technology would reveal endless depth in the records that I could only dream of, another part knew it was all a swindle, package-worship. By the last half of the eighties, CDs were a status item: it became possible to hear somebody boasting about “getting the new R.E.M. on CD” – the nonsense about the media didn’t restrict itself to dinosaur rock, although at least the lo-fi aesthetic of “alternative” stymied the highly irritating audiophile impetus that so many geeks like myself were prey to: we knew better than to remark on the crisp digital precision of a new Screaming Trees release.

It’s all water under the bridge, of course: now it’s owning vinyl that is the whole status deal, and for the record, I’m not a fetishist about that stuff either. But I’ve noticed how people no longer talk about buying records. They talk about going shopping for CDs. What happened to “record?” Now we’ve got to specify the technological medium? It sounds so absurd, as if one were to walk into Tower Records (not, you’ll note, “Tower CDs”) and ask if the new Digitally Encoded Playable Media by Pink were available.

With DVDs, that particular little bit of market-ready technophilia has been squared, if not cubed, and sold, sans the pretension, as the easiest way to squeeze extra cash out of an increasingly gullible public . “Own It On DVD!” insist the ads. First of all, what the hell was wrong with renting? How many of us need to watch most movies more than once -- particular the contemporary ones which are the first to be offered up for us to purchase and take home to keep for good? However much you like Jackie Chan, are you really likely to repeatedly screen Rush Hour? Should What Women Want really be in some permanent collection, shelved between West Side Story and You Can’t Take it With You? (If you’re in doubt about these questions, you haven’t really thought about it hard enough. Go sit in a quiet place for a little while and come back later). Renting DVDs makes fine sense, and allows us all to engage in a momentary wallow in Hollywood dreck without parting with too much cash. Buying DVDs is for cinephiles (hi there, Art!) or for cretins. Now, through raw promotion, what should be a niche market is being made into a Wal-Mart, where I’m expected to spend some predictable percentage of my salary.

(By the way, at an office party last year, we had “Secret Santas,” and someone gave me a DVD of Mel Gibson’s astoundingly stupid The Patriot. Watching it once was impossible: preserving it for posterity in a digital medium is obscene.)

Secondly, what the hell is wrong with that VCR you bought five years ago? The answer is probably nothing. Video tapes must be rewound, they get worn out, and so forth. But they still work, for most of us. Suck it up. Let us not go quite so gently into the land of planned obselecence.

Finally, there is simply no reason for any of us to take special pride in the posession of a digitally recorded form of a film. One does not, as a rule, acquire a superior experience. Particularly in regard to the "bonus material": It is my sad duty to inform you that the makers of Scary Movie and Analyze This have nothing of import to say about the art of film. Additional scenes and etcetera? These are what high skilled film editors make sure we don’t have to sit through. And you knew it. In your heart you knew it all the time.

Does this mean that it is wrong to want that nice digital reissue of The Draughtsman’s Contract? Unfortunately, yes. Greenaway might be worth having, but once you start making exceptions, there’s no way to get around the Director’s Cut of Shallow Hal. I maintain that no matter how cheap they make digital media, the real price remains too high.

* * *
You may now resume thinking about things that matter.

Today is World AIDS Day. While the Wombat File isn't officially participating in the Link and Think project, we were listening to Simon Schama talk about maps this morning on Studio 360, and we noticed this this arresting visual summary of the current state of the pandemic, supplied by the BBC. (link via today's special edition of MeFi.)

It's a lot of dying. We hope, as the current administration secures the Homeland and smokes out the Evil One, that they think for a few minutes about the microscopic, viral "terrorists" who will not be available for trial at Mr. Ashcroft's celebrated tribunals.