pantsfarm

Casually flipping through the stuff on Bakadesuyo I saw a link to this article.

Modern life is plagued by what’s been called “time famine”—the sense that we have way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Everyone seems to feel this sometimes overwhelming sense of having too few minutes, hours and days—and it leads to all sorts of untoward consequences. Perceived time scarcity has been shown to disrupt sleep, to sap our self-discipline and ability to delay rewards. It undermines health, leading to more fast food consumption and skipped medical exams. Rationing out our precious time leads inevitably to self-centered disregard for others. The list goes on.

It goes on to say that the remedy for all of this is to have or think about and awe-inducing experience.

…those who were primed to feel awe—those volunteers also saw time as much more expansive, less constricted. They felt free of time’s pressure.

This got me thinking a little and reminded me of a passage I read a while ago and posted here. The quotes, from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, slightly expanded as found elsewhere online:

It is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness….

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. That is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting-on a process, that is, of subtraction.

What around here is truly awesome? I suppose in the absence of ready answers to that question, I’ll just have to prime myself to think about the stuff from before. At least the wallpaper/background on my computer at work is this awesome photo of the US East coast at night, from space, right?

I was talking to a coworker today about this youtube video, If Doom was done today where some guys did a doom level in the style of modern FPS games.

In this conversation, I said that the last time I built a computer to play games with, the only games I was worried about playing were half life and quakeworld.

Then I realized those games came out in 1998.

So actually it’s not quite true — I upgraded in college but the fact is my pc gaming days basically ended at half-life 1, a game that is now about 14 years old.

With the optimistic plan to keep adding new posts as my fermenting projects go well, I’ve added a Ferments page, which you can see linked at the top of the site.

After some measure of success with breeding Melvin from nothing but flour, water, and air, I’d gotten it into my head that not only is fermenting delicious, but also easy.

I was introduced to nukazuke by a friend of mine who’d spent a lot of time in Japan. A bit of reading led me to believe that I could probably manage to pull off this kind of pickle, but then for years that’s where I was stuck.

I never actually got around to finding where to buy rice bran, or getting a container I could use to pickle in, or really doing any sort of actual prep or execution towards making these pickles.

Finally last weekend things came together and Cin and I managed to have time and supplies to get started.

I pieced together a plan from a variety of guides online.
Wandering Spoon‘s post about Nukazuke
Joi Ito‘s guide to Nukamiso
A post in the egullet forums by helenjp
The Black Moon‘s page on Tsukemono

Here’s what I came up with:

1kg of rice bran (米糠 mǐkāng)
670 ml of water
330 ml of tsingtao
150 g of salt （盐 yán）
a 2.5×5 piece of seaweed, soaked in cold water (海带 hǎidài)
1 slice of bread
a handful of cabbage, about 100g (白菜 báicài)

I also decided to try adding:
a few dried red peppers （干辣椒 gānlàjiāo）
a few dried mushrooms （干香菇 gānxiānggū）
a couple cloves of garlic, peeled （大蒜 dàsuàn）

These ended up buried in the mix.

I was going to do twice as much, but as I was weighing out the rice bran, I realized that it was a lot more voluminous than I’d expected.

The first step was to toast the bran. This proved not very easy to do in our limited kitchen, so we did it in a lot of batches. In our case, toasting meant mainly getting it hot, scorching the bottom, then making a mess trying to stir more. The end result is a very uneven toasting.

Next up, boil the water, salt, and beer. Then we broke up the bread and dropped it in and waited for it all to cool down.

Mixing up the bran and water to achieve a consistency something like wet sand.

After this, though we neglected to get pictures as our hands were covered in bran at this point, was burying the starter cabbage and then finally wiping down the sides and setting it down to wait for a day.

Some other (crappy) photos of this process are on my flickr set.

back to Ferments

Way back when, just after having started the sourdough project and maybe even before I first heard of these nukazuke, my friend and then-neighbor Sarah mentioned to me that she’d found this great little store up the street that sold all kinds of flours and grains. I filed it away at the time and totally forgot about it.

Later still, while living at the corner of Dongzhimen Beixiaojie (东直门北小街) and Dongzhimen Nei (东直门内）I came across a reference on a friend-of-a-friend’s blog (via a tweet of Beijing Haochi) about where to find specialty flours for bread making, and yet somehow I never actually made it 100 meters down the street to check it out. I even got my bike repaired next door!

Finally, last weekend I managed to swing by and check the place out, having already struck out trying to find rice bran at another grain type shop up near the Lama temple.

The place is kind of a mess inside, though the couple running the shop were pretty great. They’re from Dong Bei and offered me some really tasty hazelnuts. They mentioned that all sorts of foreigners come looking for special flours and brown rice and such, as well.

[Map]
19 Dongzhimen Nanxiaojie, Dongcheng District (150m south of Gui Jie)
Tel: (010) 8401 7569
东城区东直门南小街19号