ChuckDoherty.com

My cat behaves normally most of the time, but occasionally does things that seem very out of character, as though she was a kitty savant of some sort.  She is no good at math, and only meows and rolls onto her back when I offer her a Rubik’s Cube or a sudoko, but still, she has a few oddly human characteristics that almost creep me out. A while back, I mentioned that she had taken to washing her paws in the toilet when they were muddy.  Now, she has learned a new trick and taken another step in her ongoing pattern of disturbing behavior.

When weegee comes in the house with muddy little paws, she not only uses the toilet to rinse them, but has also learned to open the cabinet doors on my bureau, pull a T-shirt off of the stack, and use it as a towel to dry them off when she is finished.  The shirt is left wet and muddy, but her paws are nice and clean. You can’t tell me that this is normal cat behavior.

The Santa Fe police may have felt left out when their brethren in Boston were getting all of the attention for bringing their city to a standstill over unidentified LiteBrites.  So, in order to use up some of those Homeland Security grants that were just burning a hole in the pockets of their Kevlar pants, they created a bomb scare of their own today.  After someone left CD players in a church playing what one police captain called “pornographic messages,” they naturally assumed that these must be bombs. This is much the same logic employed by the Boston authorities, which is:  battery-powered thing = bomb. 

So, after rolling what I am certain was three or four miles of yellow tape around the area, crouching down behind their cruisers and, I am sure, having a helicopter hover loudly overhead, they hauled the offending CD players outside and blew ‘em up real good.

They spared one of the three players in order to “search for DNA evidence.” Getting to the bottom of this ghastly act of domestic terrorism is certainly just the sort of activity that will keep us safe from harm and show how much we need to maintain this state of hyper-vigilance.

There is no indication as yet if this incident will result in the nation’s terror level being raised from its current “yellow” to a slightly bolder shade.

If I were the manufacturer of the TV involved in this story, I would proudly say so in my advertising. 

Reprinted without any permission from the New York Times.   

February 18, 2007
New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
China’s True Dash of Flavor
By FUCHSIA DUNLOP
TODAY the Chinese Year of the Pig begins, and Americans across the country will venture to their local Chinatowns for a festive meal. Yet despite the enduring popularity of Chinese food, many still see it as strictly a down-market cuisine, more the stuff of cheap takeout than one of the world’s great culinary cultures. In the old days of chop suey and egg foo yung, this reputation may have been justified, but now that fine and authentic Chinese dining is available in the United States (if you know where to look for it), why do so many people still think of it as junky?

Looming large as an explanation is the use of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, in Chinese kitchens. For restaurant chefs and Chinese home cooks, MSG is a ubiquitous seasoning, considered as “normal” as salt, soy sauce and vinegar. Yet for many Americans, the fine white powder is a sinister food additive, tainted by association with industrialized food production and the garish, over-the-top flavors of packaged snacks.

And, ever since 1968, when The New England Journal of Medicine used the headline “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” over a letter from a doctor complaining that Chinese restaurant food gave him numbness in his neck and palpitations, it has also been fingered with medical suspicion.

While around a third of Americans say they believe that MSG makes them ill, reputable medical studies have shown that only a tiny proportion of people truly react to it, and then only when it is administered in large oral doses on an empty stomach. All this was explained, and the restaurant syndrome fully debunked, in great detail by the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten in a 1999 essay for Vogue magazine titled “Why Doesn’t Everybody in China Have a Headache?”

In the absence of medical evidence of any harmful physiological effects of MSG, the fact that the Chinese use it while Americans not of Chinese descent generally don’t creates a serious cultural barrier to the mainstream appreciation of Chinese food. Isn’t it time, perhaps, to cast off our prejudices and take a cool, steady look at MSG?

MSG is not, of course, a traditional Chinese seasoning. It was discovered in 1908 by a Japanese scientist, Kikunae Ikeda, who was trying to pinpoint the source of the intense deliciousness of broth made from kombu seaweed. In his laboratory, he isolated the natural glutamates in the seaweed, and to their marvelous taste he gave the name “umami,” derived from the Japanese word for “delicious.” His work led directly to the industrial manufacture in Japan and then worldwide of MSG.

Still, MSG was long considered simply to be a flavor enhancer, with little or no taste of its own. In recent years, however, there has been growing acceptance of the existence of a so-called fifth taste — an addition to the traditional quartet of sweet, sour, salty and bitter — known through an emerging consensus by Ikeda’s term, umami. Our tongues, biologists have shown, have distinct receptors that pick up on the taste of MSG and a wider family of umami compounds, and some of our brain cells respond specifically to umami.

The umami taste comes from the building blocks of proteins, amino acids and nucleotides, which include not only glutamates but also inosinates and guanylates. These delicious molecules appear when animal and vegetable proteins break down, for example in the ripening of Parmigiano cheese or prosciutto di Parma. Industrially made MSG is a chemically “neat” form of one of the umami compounds that delight our taste buds when they occur naturally in cheese, ham andseaweed, just as salt is a “neat” form of the saltiness of seawater and white sugar of the sweetness of sugar cane. Is it any worse for us than refined salt and sugar?

Western chefs, food writers and consumers are only now cottoning onto the existence of umami and its power as a culinary concept. In China, however, it has long been part of the daily vocabulary of the kitchen. Chinese chefs talk often of “xian wei” — their term for umami. They use many ingredients that are naturally rich in it — Yunnan ham, dried scallops and shiitake mushrooms — to enhance the flavors of their stocks and sauces (just as an Italian cook might use grated Parmigiano or truffles to enhance the umami taste of a dish of pasta). They talk of “ti xian wei” (“bringing out the umami”) in their cooking through the judicious application of salt, sugar, chicken fat and, nowadays, MSG.

Bad Chinese chefs, of course, just use MSG as a substitute for good ingredients and properly made stocks, just as bad American food companies cook up snack foods made from fat and carbohydrates laced with salt and sugar. But top Chinese chefs also use it, to refine and elevate flavors. There may be no need to add MSG to a delicate soup made from chicken, ham and dried scallops. But in some culinary contexts, it works wonders: a little MSG mixed with salt and sesame oil can lift the flavor of a simple bamboo shoot salad, or add a dash of ecstasy to a stir-fry of pea shoots and garlic. If you didn’t know it was MSG, you would simply find it delicious.

In the past, I was as closed-minded on the subject of MSG as the purists and hypochondriacs. When I started cooking and writing about Chinese food more than a decade ago, I decided not to use MSG. I wanted to stick up for proper ingredients and traditional cooking methods, and help to rehabilitate the reputation of Chinese cuisine by showing that it didn’t require this reviled additive.

But these days I’m not so sure. The scientific evidence for umami is persuasive, and as a concept it makes sense of a great deal of traditional culinary theory. I see brilliant chefs in China making subtle and skillful use of MSG. And if some outstanding Western chefs — like Heston Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck restaurant in England has three Michelin stars — are willing to risk ridicule and experiment with its culinary potential, perhaps it’s time I should as well. Intellectual curiosity is, tradition has it, a hallmark of the Year of the Pig.

Fuchsia Dunlop is the author of “Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.”

Just received this succinct gem:

MY DEAR,I AM DR.A.MUKOLU,I WANT TO TRANSFER $15M OUT OF MY COUNTRY,REPLY IF YOU RECEIVE IT FOR MORE DETAILS.ANENE.- DR.ANENE MUKOLU

Oh, come on. Now you’re not even trying.

Last week I learned that a nearby theatre company, the Attleboro Community Theatre, was holding open auditions for the Neil Simon play “I ought to be in Pictures” that they are presenting in April and May.

I thought that there was little chance of me getting a part with so little experience, but I decided that I would read for it anyway, if only to get some idea of what the audition process is all about.  I was thrilled when I received a callback from the director later that same evening offering me the lead role. 

Today I went to the theatre to pick up a copy of the script and meet a few more members of the production company, and to go over the reading and rehearsal plan. The schedule is quite intense; three nights of rehearsal every week starting the week after next and continuing until the opening on April 20th, but I am really looking forward to the experience and to working with this group. Everyone I have met so far has been terriffic.  The two young ladies who were selected for the other two main characters in the play are tremendously talented, and I am sure I will learn much from working with them.

I’ll keep you posted as this goes along.

In case you are ever curious about the sort of threats to our nation that the Department of Homeland Security is protecting us from, read this letter by a physician writing in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Sleep tight, America.

I just heard a wonderful quote on the radio, referring to the Good-Astronaut-Gone-Bad news of the past few days:

If NASA, with all their testing, can’t effectively screen out a crazy woman, what chance in Hell does the average Joe have?

Praise be to Jesus, Reverend Ted Haggard is completely heterosexual. 

If Jesus can turn water into wine,  he can just as easily turn a crisp and precocious Chardonnay into a manly bottle of Bud.  But in this case, Haggard didn’t even need the Magical Mojo of Jesus to straighten him out. He just came to realize that was completely heterosexual all along. It seems that whole “gay” thing was just a misunderstanding, some silly old ”acting-out” on his part and he didn’t mean a bit of it.

Rev. Tim Ralph, who has been overseeing Haggard’s de-homofication program, reports;

He is completely heterosexual. That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.

It remains unclear what exactly is meant by his activity not being “a constant thing,” but I assume it means that it was limited to those periods, however brief, in which at least one additional penis came into play. In fairness to Haggard, there were probably many, many times over the course of a week where that did not happen at all, so it could hardly be called constant.

Ware went on to say, without the slightest trace of irony;

It’s hard to heal in Colorado Springs right now. It’s like an open wound. He needs to get somewhere he can get the wound healed.

Once his wound closes up, the “oversight board” has suggested that Haggard go into some sort of secular (i.e; real) job and leave the ministry.  I believe that Haggard may find a great deal of fulfillment, and make the acquaintance of many other completely heterosexual men, by considering a career as a flight attendant or by becoming involved with the musical theatre. There, he can express his love for Jesus through song and interpretive dance while reminding us all, again and again, that he is completely heterosexual.  Completely.