1. Debbie and I hosted family dinner this evening and I was eager to spend time this afternoon preparing the main dish. You see, on Christmas Day, Christy gave me a recipe book of cocktails mixed and served at Cure, a watering hole in New Orleans. Christy also gave me the ingredients to use to make three different drinks from this book.
So, I decided we'd start our family dinner by having everyone choose one (or two, as it turned out!) of these three cocktails and then I'd serve a New Orleans entree.
I'll get to the cocktails later.
Around 1:30 or so, I got going making the New Orleans dish called Yakamein (New Orleans' Ol' Sober). It's akin to ramen or Pho and the recipe for this dish persuaded me it would be fun to make and a delicious (and unique) focus for tonight's meal.
I started by making a Creole seasoning mix by mixing paprika, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, basil, thyme, and black pepper. (If I'd wanted it to have more heat, I could have also added white pepper and cayenne pepper.)
I had taken a chuck roast weighing about a pound and a half out of the refrigerator before I put together the Creole seasoning. Now the meat was close to room temperature and I cut it up into small pieces and marinated it for about half an hour in a mixture of Creole seasoning and soy sauce.
Once marinated, the beef was ready to be seared. Once seared, I poured two quarts of beef broth over the meat and added Creole seasoning, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, thyme, and basil. I laid off adding any more pepper, figuring if any of us wanted more heat, we could add it at the table.
This beef and broth bubbled away for an hour and a half or so. The goal is to cook the chuck roast until it's as tender as possible. While the broth simmered, I marinated shrimp in soy sauce and Creole seasoning and heated up a Dutch oven of water and, in addition, a smaller pot of water.
Once the meat was tender, I added in the shrimp. As the Yakamein continued to bubble away, the shrimp cooked and the beef continued to become more tender.
I added six eggs to the pot of boiling water, turned the heat to medium, and cooked the eggs for ten minutes. I removed the eggs, gave them an ice bath, peeled off the shells and cut each egg in half. I was very happy that the eggs turned out just the way I wanted them, harder than soft-boiled but not completely hard-boiled.
In the Dutch oven of boiling water, I cooked a pound of spaghetti.
I also chopped up a bunch of green onions.
When the time came to serve, I put spaghetti in the bottom of each person's bowl, used a slotted spoon to take pieces of beef and shrimp out of the soup pot, ladled broth over the meat/fish and noodles and garnished each bowl with two egg halves and some green onion.
Earlier in the day, I whizzed over to Beach Bum Bakery, Kellogg's fairly new organic bakery, serving pastries, coffee, bread, tea, and other delights out of a tiny trailer on Bunker Ave, behind the Furniture Exchange.
Beach Bum Bakery sells what I would call half baguettes and I bought two of them and served them with tonight's Yakamein (New Orleans' Ol' Sober [reputed to be superb meal if one is hung over -- we didn't test this particular virtue of Yakamein tonight!]).
Christy contributed two bottles of wine to our dinner, a red blend and a Chardonnay.
2. About those cocktails. Christy gave me the stuff I needed to make three different cocktails:
*Union Jack Rose (Ro-zay): a blending of gin, apple brandy, Grenadine, fresh lime juice, orange bitters, and fresh mint.
*Pequot Fizz: a blending of fresh lime juice, an egg white, gin, superfine sugar, soda water, and fresh mint.
*Cure martini: gin, Noilly Prat dry vermouth, orange bitters, and olives or lemon peel.
Carol brought a tray of cut vegetables to enjoy with our cocktails and, as best I could tell, the New Orleans drinks went over really well.
3. Debbie went out to Pinehurst Elementary and did more preparation work for the resumption of classes on Jan 3 and while I cooked, I listened to more of Leah Sottile's podcast Wild Burn. Much of the content I listened to today focused on how the Whiteaker neighborhood of Eugene developed into the residential and philosophical center of the anarchist movement.
I lived about five or six blocks south of the southern most edge of the Whiteaker neighborhood and enjoyed going there to hear music or for a few beers at Sam Bond's Garage, to grab a bite to eat, usually breakfast, at the New Day Bakery, or to buy some groceries on occasion at the Red Barn.
For no good reason (that I remember), I didn't go to the places I now know were gathering spots for activists/anarchists in the Whiteaker. I never visited Icky's Tea House, don't remember ever having a cup of coffee at Out of the Fog, and, to me, Tiny Tavern had lost the charm I enjoyed when I first moved to Eugene and I only went there a couple of times.
When I hung out in the Whitaker in the late 1990s and on into the early 2000s, I didn't think of it nor experience it as a "hotbed of anarchy". I enjoyed being in this neighborhood. It was countercultural, unique, welcoming, and, for me, relaxing. While acts of arson, protest, property damage, and confrontations of the police might have been discussed and planned in the Whitaker, these things were happening underground and for a guy like me, a community college instructor who enjoyed having a cup of coffee or a beer or buying bulk foods in a neighborhood different from anywhere else in Eugene, it was a relaxing and enjoyable place.
I write this not to in any way downplay the destructive actions these people carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But, I wonder if people I knew who lived elsewhere and read about how several of these arsonists, saboteurs, and window smashers resided in and organized their actions in Eugene might have wondered if I was in some kind of danger.
It never felt dangerous to me to hang out in the Whitaker neighborhood. Yes, there were violent clashes between anarchists and people carrying out direct actions in Eugene, but even though these marches, actions, and clashes both downtown and at Washington-Jefferson Park occurred just blocks away from our house, we never felt threatened.
It's fascinating to be learning more about what was happening in Eugene during this time period by listening to Burn Wild and reading other pieces I'm finding online.
It's expanding my knowledge and triggering a lot of memories.
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