Death:Expound.

This New York Times article on the examination system at All Soul's college, Oxford cheered me up rather a lot by reminding of some very happy times back at St. Andrews. My Scottish alma mater is not nearly as august as All Soul's, but the emphasis there was similarly on rooting out a students with a certain fluidity and originality of thought and writing rather than more American forms of academic rigor. Thus, the questions I see on the examinations mentioned in the article are quite familiar.

I spend some time thinking about whether my undergraduate education served me well. On one, overwhelming hand, the answer is "yes". Practically, I was able to get into the graduate and law schools I hoped to study at. More broadly, I feel like a well-educated person with a life-long interest in my undergraduate subject - history. Like many college graduate, some of my oldest and dearest friends are from the funny little town on the scottish coastline. And I love whiskey.

What's funny is that St. Andrew's failures are similar to my own. Am I as detail oriented as I ought to be, given where I work and what I do? Nope. Should I have been driven harder in college, rather than allowed to discover the wonders of discussing varieties of gingerbread with my friends? Probably so. But then I wouldn't have liked the experience so much.

Minor setback

I had a bit of a disaster with Jim Lahey's no-knead pizza dough recipe last night. The issue, I think, is that if you're going to "not knead", then you must commit to a full 12-24 hours of rising to let the glutens knit together. In the end, I simply kneaded post-rising, and that worked out fine.

What didn't work out fine is when I decided that I was too lazy to fetch the pizza stone from the oven, and tried a baking sheet instead. I owe my wife for the resulting white, flabby, pizza - except, having settled for a husband of similar coloring and rigidity, it's possible she didn't mind.

Femivores

I hadn't seen this article concerning so-called "femivores" when it came out in March, but it describes a number of women who have eschewed more traditional careers for raising chickens and other hobby farming. I'll leave actual feminists to explain how it is that this activity "has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament" (I do not think earlier generations of women would see it as such, but again, this isn't my bailiwick). As for this sentence: "After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?", let's just say that the answer is not what the author implies it is.

Am I sympathetic to the idea of working the land, of wresting from its embrace my daily sustenance? Of course. I have all kinds of goofy fantasies of a hobby vineyard, goats from which to make cheese, an olive grove, the dry air of a vinous region playing over my then-leathery skin. But it turns out that in a market economy, what actually makes sense is to ply my trade, which God or nature or genetic accident or whatever has given me some small talent, and then hand over my earnings to people whose talent it is to raise goats and age cheeses and make wines for the fruits of their labor. This is the most obvious insight of traditional economics. By choosing appropriate recipients of my money, I can encourage those who do this work properly, with respect for the land and the earth. Perhaps I might still do some of those activities for fun, to connect myself with the land. But all that is nothing more than fun - a choice I make that invariably costs more than an equally good product from a real artisan.

Crisped Rice Cakes

At a recent lunch at Momofuku SSam bar, I finally was able to try crisped rice cakes, a sort of cylindrical rice pasta(?) first boiled and then pan fried until crunchy outside and soft inside. Why had I never heard of these things before? They're utterly fantastic, especially in David Chang's oily, spicy, Korean style bolognese.

EDIT: Someone else's picture of the dish I mean is here. Just absurdly good - to my mind, the kind of dish that makes a career.