1. I cook. I make messes. Every day I clean the kitchen to get it ready to make more messes. It's a good thing. Today, as I spiffed things up, I listened to the Thanksgiving episode of the podcast Special Sauce, hosted by food writer and founder of Serious Eats, Ed Levine, and regularly featuring Kenji Lopez-Alt, author of Food Lab.
Things get away from me. I'm not sure I've listened to Special Sauce since moving to Kellogg three years ago. This podcast was one of my favorites when I'd fly from Baltimore to Spokane and I will always be indebted to Ed Levine for introducing me to Murray's Cheese through his interview with Rob Kaufelt, the former, long-time owner of Murray's Cheese. It was on this podcast that I learned Murray's Cheese counters were popping up across the nation at Kroger's stores, including, I soon learned, the Fred Meyer store on Kathleen Ave. in Coeur d'Alene.
Today I listened to the recent Thanksgiving episode of Special Sauce and enjoyed Ed Levine's conversations about Thanksgiving traditions and the pandemic with Marcia Chatelin, Jessica B. Harris, Laura Lippman (She'd gotten away from -- today I moved her from my fuzzy mental reading list to my written down one), Jamelle Bouie, Kenji Lopez-Alt, Frances Lam, and Nik Sharma. I've added Marcia Chatelin and Jessica B. Harris to my hopelessly growing reading list.
After the Thanksgiving episode, I listened to Ed Levine's fascinating interview with Maggie Cheney of Rock Steady Farm of Millerton, NY about food, social justice, CSAs, and the challenges farmers face (and have faced) during the pandemic.
2. It suddenly struck me today. I have a lot of quart containers of crab stock in the basement freezer and I've never tried using the stock to make clam chowder. Today, I happened to have a quart thawed in the icebox upstairs. So, I poured some olive oil in a saucepan and heated it up. I dumped a bunch of chopped up raw bacon into the oil and let it sizzle. In the meantime, I chopped up a few stalks of celery and half of a big white onion and added it to the saucepan. I seasoned this mixture with Old Bay seasoning and some black pepper and cooked it until the onions were translucent. I peeled two russet potatoes, chopped them up, and added the pieces to the pan and covered it all with crab stock. I opened two cans of clams and poured the clam juice in with the crab stock. I brought all of this to a slow boil, cooked the potatoes until tender, added a chunk of butter, and then poured the clams and about 12 ounces of half and half into the pot.
It worked.
As a bonus, I have nearly a quart left over. I might just combine the container of leftover fish soup/chowder I made Sunday with the clam chowder I made today and just see what it tastes like mixing them all together. I think it'll taste pretty good.
3. Since I used to live about fifteen minutes from the Univ. of Maryland, I like to think of them as my former home team. Well, Maryland's men's basketball team hosted Rutgers this afternoon. The ascendant Scarlet Knights of Rutgers are building on their success from a year ago and have a stable, athletic, seasoned team. Very tough. Maryland, on the other hand, lost their two leading players from last year, Anthony Cowen, Jr. and Jalen Smith and, at this early point in the season, are in search of who will be this team's leader and where their scoring will come from. I wouldn't say the Terps are a mess, but they are suffering growing pains and it showed as they lost to Rutgers, 74-60.
In Omaha, the Marquette Golden Eagles demonstrated that they have a very solid team, despite the loss of Markus Howard, their sharpshooting guard from the last few years, who graduated in 2020. This year's Marquette team looked strong tonight, just as they did when they defeated Wisconsin. Marquette scored well from inside, led by freshman Dawson Garcia, and from the outside, thanks to D. J. Carton, Koby McEwen, and Greg Eliot. Marquette looked especially strong on defense, especially in the second half. They limited standout Creighton guard Marcus Zegarowski to eight points and often frustrated Creighton's explosive offensive attack.
So, here's the puzzler: Creighton is an elite offensive team with great scorers up and down their lineup. But, tonight -- and the same thing happened in their loss to Kansas -- they were abysmal from the free throw line. They missed eleven of their twenty-five charity tosses, making barely half of them. This failure contributed significantly to Creighton's loss.
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