Spring is here. Bah humbug March 2, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.2 comments
Sping is undoubtedly here, and what a pleasure it is to hear the sound of birdsong once more. How lovely to hear our feathered friends trilling their little hearts out as they advertise their prowess with their delightful repertoire of songs.
Except that you’re in the tree outside my bedroom window and IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT BLOODY NIGHT.
Go to sleep already. Everyone else is trying to.
The awesome responsibility of the blogger February 18, 2009
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Some readers are never satisfied.
I offer my apologies as follows:
- To Frank, who spent the entire weekend watching episodes of “The Prisoner”. Buck up, Frank, they only made seventeen, so you’re over halfway there.
- To David, who has now uploaded all his wine into CellarTracker (or at least Patti has), only to discover that he owns a substantial number of bottles that should have been drunk in 2003. Sounds like a Caymus party to me.
King William’s Quiz 2008 – answers! February 17, 2009
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The Guardian has now put King William’s College quiz fans out of their misery by publishing the answers to this year’s brain squeezer.
If you’re interested, the answer to 17.6 (In which town did la Baronne de la Chalonnière encounter Alexander Duggan at the Hôtel du Cerf?) is Gap. This is allegedly a reference to Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal, a book which I have read – retaining, it would seem, absolutely nothing.
Watch “The Prisoner” online – legally February 12, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in Britain, pop culture.1 comment so far
Neil Gaiman is delighted to find that the whole of “The Prisoner” is online at the American Movie Channel’s website here.
So am I.
I just watched the first couple of minutes of Episode 1, the bit where John Drake (or at least, someone we assume to be John Drake) decides to turn in his badge, with rather serious consequences.
I remember wanting that Lotus Seven so badly…
Superthunderstingcar is GO February 12, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in Britain, pop culture.add a comment
As Raymond Chen says, you’ll either find this totally hysterical, or it will make no sense whatever. The requirement would seem to be that that you watched TV as a child in early Sixties Britain.
So, this being so, I don’t propose to explain it. Let’s just leave it at this – if you remember Thunderbirds and you know who Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are, watch this now.
Thanks to Raymond for the tip
Synchronicity and Jack Bruce February 10, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in laguna beach, music.add a comment
Last night, I happened to drop by my favourite local bar, the Marine Room, on my way home from the gym. There’s an excellent magazine stand next door, and I’d picked up a copy of Downbeat magazine to flip through while sipping a cold Sierra Nevada. I had an pleasant conversation with the guy running the stand, who’d spotted the picture of Wes Montgomery on the cover of the magazine. Turned out he was a guitar player who’d seen Wes play live, back in New Jersey in the sixties. We chatted for a while about Wes, Joe Pass and other guitar geniuses.
So I moved next door, grabbed a bar stool, ordered my beer, and started nibbling at Downbeat. There was satellite radio classic rock playing over the speaker system – Pretenders, very tasty, Eagles, less so. I turned to the Downbeat interview with Jack Bruce, and, as if by magic, Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” started up.
Weird. I’ll have to try this again. Maybe it only works with Sierra Nevada.
The sound of one drum drumming February 10, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in laguna beach, local, music.add a comment
After a few days of welcome rain had blown through Orange County (even though we weren’t in Orange County to see it), last night was pretty cold and crisp. OK, it wasn’t cold by any standards other than those of Southern California. The tenperature was probably in the high forties (8C or thereabouts for the transatlantic contingent), and there was a smart breeze.
Last night was also full moon, and full moon means Full Moon Drum Circle. Or rather, it normally does. Not last night. Lorraine and I donned the arctic gear (woolly cap in my case), packed the djembe and the tambourine, two chairs and two flasks of tea, and headed down to Aliso Beach to join the groove.
Nobody there.
To be strictly accurate, there was one friendly guy, toasting himself in front of a firepit full of furiously blazing wood. It seemed like a shame to just pack up and go, so we set up and started drumming. Our new friend professed no ownership of the fire. He said that it had been started by another guy, who’d set it going and left.
After a while another small group showed up, with a large buffalo drum (like a very big bass bodhran), another djembe and a shaker. So we had ourselves a small drum circle for an hour or so until the fire started dying down.
It was a really lovely evening – blazing fire on the beach, the sound of drums, and the surf just beyond the circle of firelight – and we’re glad we made the effort. But I’d certainly like to know where everyone else was.
Update: Turns out that the drum circle had been cancelled, and the cancellation had sneaked its sneaky way to my spam folder without me noticing.
Next stop Wednesday, March 11.
Keeping a cellar, and keeping track of it February 2, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in food&wine.2 comments
Suppose your wine habit has progressed to the point that you”re buying bottles with a drinking horizon somewhat beyond tonight’s dinner. Once you start buying wine with the expectation that it might be a while before you drink it, you’re a collector, and you’re faced with two problems – how to keep the wine in good condition, and how to keep track of it.
Depending on how long a drinking horizon you’re talking about, the first of these might not be a problem at all. If you can find a cool location with no major temperature extremes, preferably fairly moist, you’ll be OK for wines which you expect to drink inside a year or so. If your cellaring is longer term than that, you do have some work to do, but it’s a problem which can be readily solved by the application of money, like we did last year. You decide on how much “archival” wine you think you’ll need to store, and for how long, and you buy a wine cabinet with, preferably, lots of capacity to spare. Like everything else, there are options – large or small, under-the-kitchen-counter or in-the-garage, expensive and last-for-ever or less expensive (there’s very little “cheap” here) and replace-the-compressor-in-five-years. But, in reality, it’s a problem with a solution. And, if you’re interested, our solution came from Vintage Cellars in San Marcos, CA, whom we recommend unreservedly.
The problem of keeping track of the wine you buy is less easy to solve. Depending on your level of geekiness, your solution might be a database, a spreadsheet or, heaven forbid, pen and paper. Whatever approach you take, the rewards of doing it are mostly outweighed by the pain factor and the human capacity for indolence. I know that my “Fine Wine” spreadsheet bears only a marginal resemblance to what I actually own.
However, I believe that there’s a solution which finally makes it worthwhile to invest some time in keeping a current wine inventory. The solution is a website called CellarTracker. CellarTracker takes a rather different approach to wine inventory than other solutions I’ve seen. The key point is that, rather than maintaining your inventory in isolation, the site is driven off a single huge wine database (nearly 12,000,000 bottles stored by over 70,000 users), and your stock list simply refers to that – you tell it that you have six bottles of Charles Shaw Vintners Reserve, and you immediately get to share the information maintained by the site on that wine, including drinking windows, tasting notes (the site has almost 800,000 tasting notes online), links to sites with pricing information – a whole slew of fascinating stuff.
Entering data is easy, because you don’t have to describe your own wine. Nearly every wine you can buy is represented in their database. You just need to make the link between what you own and what CellarTracker knows about, and the interface you use to do that is just beautifully intuitive. A few weeks ago, I took the plunge and entered my hundred or so bottles. The whole process took less than an hour. There were only two bottles which CellarTracker didn’t know about already, and that was only because I had vintages which no-one had referred to previously. CellarTracker does offer bulk import capabilities, but unless you’re sitting on a huge collection – many hundreds of bottles – I really don’t think it’s worth it.
Once your import is done, CellarTracker’s huge – and growing – feature list becomes available to you.
- You can see tasting notes created by other users for the wines you own. This can even be turned into a custom RSS feed so you can see updates in your newsreader. It is really interesting (and useful!) to see tasting notes written in the last week for the wine you’re thinking you might drink with dinner on Saturday.
- You can sort your wines by drinking window (what should I be drinking now, what should I leave for another five years, what should I have drunk sometime last century)
- You can track the value of your collection
- You can print custom cellar labels on Avery 5160 stock
- and much more…
There’s even an iPhone/iPod Touch application (cor.kz) which allows you to keep track of it all while you’re in the middle of the desert with only your cellphone!
CellarTracker is a “shareware” site. You can sign up for free, load your wine and start browsing. However, the site’s presiding genius, Eric LeVine (and I’m not sure what to make of that name!) suggests that small donations would help, and there are ways you can do that too.
Highly recommended. Now for that 1990 Caymus which CellarTracker tells me I should have drunk last year! It’s a tough life.
A private lesson with Pascal January 27, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in food&wine, local.add a comment
Pascal Olhats has been one of Orange County’s top chefs and restaurateurs for decades. He’s originally from Normandy, trained in France and Belgium and worked under the legendary Paul Bocuse in Lyon. His flagship restaurant, originally called simply Pascal, and relaunched three years ago as Tradition by Pascal, is always right at the top of the list when the region’s best classic French restaurants are talked of, despite its unlikely location in a strip mall near John Wayne airport.
So, it was birthday week. Mine was last Monday and our friend Stuart celebrated his on Tuesday. We’ve often enjoyed combined birthday dinners, but this was something different. Stuart had won a 6-seat private cooking class with Pascal in a silent auction at a fundraising event, and he’d been kind enough to extend an invitation to Lorraine and me to be part of the evening.
So, six of us, Lorraine and I, Stuart, his husband Jeff, and two mutual friends, John and Chris, met up at around six in Pascal’s lovely little gourmet deli, a little nervous about the extent to which our cooking chops would be put to the test. We needn’t have worried. Pascal arrived, introduced himself and immediately put us at our ease. We dressed in kitchen aprons and were led through into the kitchen we were going to use. Pascal popped a bottle of white Bordeaux, pointed us at a tray of nibbles, and distributed the evening’s menu.
As it turned out, the cooking lesson mainly involved the six of us watching closely, glass in hand, as Pascal prepared the food. Lorraine stripped some thyme stalks, and I peeled some tomatoes, but that was pretty much the extent of our hands-on involvement.
Pascal started off with a pasta dish – egg fettucine with Rocquefort sauce. It seemed pretty simple, and ended up unbelievably rich and tasty. A couple of mouthfuls was all we had, and all we needed.
Next up was Pascal’s signature dish – sea bass in a thyme crust with a fruits de mer sauce. The sauce was magnificent, mussels, scallops and shrimp shells cooked in white wine, the liquid reduced, cream added, more reduction and concentration and butter stirred in at the end. The shellfish were just there for flavouring, but they were so good that we ate them all anyway. The seabass was layered with a thyme-breadcrumb coating, poached in white wine and then finished off in the oven. The dish came together remarkably quickly, and was delicious. Lorraine was shaking her head as this delicate fish simmered in white wine and then sat in a 425 oven for what seemed like ages. I suppose that’s why Pascal is paid the big bucks – the fish came out of the oven perfectly cooked.
The final dish was a rack of lamb with a Dijon mustard and breadcrumb crust. This recipe turned out to be very similar to the rack of lamb that Lorraine and I do, but Pascal’s lamb was a class above ours. I suppose home cooks can get hold of meat of this quality, but I’m not sure how you’d go about finding it and how much it would cost.
Pascal was a lovely host. There was no sign of celebrity attitude, even though he’s been a nationally and internationally known chef for over twenty years. The conversation, and the wine, flowed freely, and Pascal was happy to answer questions about his ingredients and techniques, and talk candidly about sharing in the downturn which has affected everyone in the last few months.
I did some research when I got home, and found that Pascal offers a Sunday evening three course prix fixe dinner for $40, which includes one waived corkage fee per couple. That’s a seriously good deal, and we’ll be back there soon.
And, of course, we thank Stuart for his generosity in inviting us along to an evening we won’t quickly forget.
Lynn Harrell in Laguna Beach January 26, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in laguna beach, local, music.add a comment
Our friends Erich and Viviane called earlier in the week, and wondered if we’d like to take up a couple of spare tickets for the final concert in this year’s Laguna Beach Music Festival. Sure, we said, sounds like fun. Really, it was more than fun – it was totally revelatory.
The Festival is in its seventh year, and they take the approach of building each year’s festival around a single world-class musician. I suppose that the goal must be to allow audiences to both hear wonderful music from the guest of honour and, at the same time, watch the interplay between the guest and the younger musicians who form the supporting cast, so to speak.
This year’s guest was the internationally renowned cellist Lynn Harrell, and yesterday’s final concert in the series featured Harrell in a program titled “The Captivating Cello and Friends”. The first two pieces, Bach’s Sonata for Viola da Gamba in D major, BWV 1028, and Brahms’ Cello Sonata No 1 in E minor, Op. 38, involved Harrell and a riveting young pianist, Victor Asuncion, originally from the Philippines and now blending an exciting concert career with a teaching gig at the University of Memphis. Asuncion showed a huge range in this concert. He was beautifully crisp and precise in the Bach and dynamic and involved in the Brahms. After the break, he played the Piano Sonata No 1 by Alban Berg, which could hardly have been more different. At times gentle and melodic, at time powerful, dissonant and angry, the piece sounded like a total minefield and he navigated it triumphantly.
The collaborative piece which followed was Schubert’s gorgeous String Quintet in C Major, D 956, which brought together Harrell and an engaging quartet of young musicians from the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, the Colburn Conservatory String Quartet. There’s nothing quite like watching a chamber ensemble up close. They’re always watching each other, looking out for body language, making eye contact. It’s a most intimate yet dynamic style of music and often the most fun to watch. It was clear that Harrell was the leader. He was seated in the centre of the semi-circle with the second cello and viola to his left and the two violins to his right. At the start of the piece, it seemed as though things weren’t quite to his satisfaction – there were some frowns, and at one point he pointed to the second cellist’s score with his bow. But the piece settled down quickly and turned into a really lovely chamber performance.
And then Harrell came on stage alone, illuminated by a single stark spotlight, and blew us all away with a stunning performance of Bach’s Cello Suite No 3 in G major, BWV 1009. This is just naked Bach, twenty minutes of unaccompanied cello, with no hiding place. The ceaseless stream of Bach’s musical genius flowed from Harrell’s cello and you simply couldn’t look away. When he was done, the audience went crazy – we knew we’d seen and heard something very special.
All in all, I felt very privileged to have been able to see world-class music in my home town, and, what’s more, in the local high school auditorium. The room is pretty small, probably no more than 400 seats, and we were lucky enough to be pretty much front and centre. We’ve noticed before that when you’re this close, you experience artistic performances in a way that you miss in a larger room – you hear dancers breathing and feel their feet slap the floor. Here, we could watch Victor Asuncion mouthing his phrasings to himself, and, in the last piece, we could hear Harrell’s physical involvement in the music, as he breathed, as his fingers hit the fingerboard, as he bowed the chordal passages.
So that was it, yet another remarkable chapter in the artistic story of our endlessly fascinating small town. We loved it.
