Beans – Kimchi Sundubu-jjigae

JWise Food

Kimchi Sundubu

In our ongoing travels while at home, we are visiting Korea tonight via our kitchen. About a month ago I made our very first sundubu after following a recipe to make a batch of sundubu paste. I wasn’t sure we’d like it so I didn’t bother to photograph our boiling cauldron of Korean tofu stew. Turns out we loved that first attempt with mushrooms and clams and so I researched other recipes. While the paste came from the Youtube couple known as Future Neighbor, it was Maangchi (also on Youtube) that helped us turn up the skills and flavors tonight. If you are wondering why this blog entry is listed under the bean category, well you have to remember that tofu is made from soybeans!

We already had our supply of sundubu paste in the freezer and ready to go but from Maangchi (4.8 million subscribers, the woman is popular) I learned that we could enhance our Korean cooking skills by using myeolchi dasima yuksu instead of water. What that translates to is anchovy kelp stock. A visit a few weeks ago to our local Korean store called Seoul Market over on 43rd Avenue allowed us to pick up the ingredients we’d never find at Safeway. We needed dried anchovies, Korean radish, and dasima which is dried sea kelp. Getting across to the Korean owner what I was looking for regarding the dasima was a bit of an effort but he finally realized what I was trying to say and took us to its secret location on the bottom of a shelf. The stock is straightforward to make after removing the heads and guts of the dried fish and adding sliced radish and a large piece of kelp. Thirty minutes later I had a pale yellow fishy stock and was ready to make our stew.

A half-cup of stock, a couple of tablespoons of sundubu paste, half a cup of chopped kimchi, and some silken tofu came to a boil before I cracked an egg on top, and in no time we were seriously enjoying an amazing bowl of kimchi sundubu-jjigae.

Neither Caroline nor I grew up eating these kinds of foods and typically we’ve relied on Korean restaurants in Los Angeles or on rare occasions the only reasonable one here in the Phoenix area [Hodori in Mesa – Caroline]. With the great fortune of having people from around the world sharing skills via Youtube and the Internet in general, we are able to bring the cuisine of other cultures right into our home. I’d like to make the distinction that I’m looking for authenticity, not Americanized versions inspired by the idea of what another culture eats. It’s been rare for us to find real Italian food in America, Chinese cooking is only available rarely in cities like San Francisco, Burmese might be featured in five restaurants across our country but they need not cater its flavors for us as Americans typically don’t search it out. Caroline being German and I having an appreciation for the food have never found a great German restaurant in America as we sampled places from Maine to Oregon. The irony is that most of the ingredients to make ethnic foods close to how they are experienced in the countries of origin are available here in the United States. The trouble is that our palates are not very sophisticated on the whole and many people recoil at the foods they are unfamiliar with, so we get pasta with marinara sauce, orange chicken, and burritos with rice and a safe meat instead of tongue or udder.

Adaptability and the desire to stretch out regarding our expectations should be nurtured as there is treasure to be found in new experiences.

Noodling

JWise Photo of the Day

ER-301 Eurorack Sound Computer from Orthogonal Devices

This blog entry isn’t a noodling to make a patch or explore some sound it is a reflection of a brief conversation I was having on a Eurorack forum on Facebook earlier today. One of the members posted a photo of what he thought was a lot of patch cables, turned out there were 179 of them. This got me wondering about how many patch cables I have and before I knew it, one thing led to another and I had to count everything.

I currently own 181 modules or individual synthesizer components that are mounted in multiple cases and can work with each other. In order for that to happen, the case supplies the electricity, and using patch cables I make connections between the modules, allowing them to communicate. I counted 473 of these cables of varying lengths and colors. In noting online how many cables I have, I didn’t mention the number of modules but I did tell the poster that so many were needed for the 1,645 jacks my system had.

Having gone through the tedium of trying to count these accurately, it triggered my OCD to know the rest of the numbers. This system now features 822 knobs, 156 switches, 89 sliders, 8 SD cards, 35 displays, and 463 buttons. If you were to think about this synthesizer as a matrix the grid would have 1,530 knobs, buttons, sliders, and switches for influencing what enters and leaves the 1,645 jacks over patch cables that could be in the hundreds.

To this day my exercise in playing with these types of electronics remains daunting. For example, the thin module with the pink and green patch cables is the WhimsicalRaps W/ and recently it received a firmware update that radically alters the way it works. It was cryptic and difficult before and the upgrade goes far in backing off that difficulty but it also means I have to learn how to use it all over again. Similarly, the module to the right of the ER-301 Sound Computer underwent a rewrite of its firmware which alters the way it works too. I only found out about this change yesterday and to some small degree feel like I’m relearning how to work with Just Friends. Then, while I’m still writing this blog entry, Trent from WhimsicalRaps releases v4.0 and I have even more new functionality to consider. At the center of the photos is the ER-301 which has been under a constant state of evolution since the day I got it, as it’s been on a journey to Version 1.0 of its firmware trajectory; we are currently at v0.5.03.

Come to think about it, this is a strange week when it comes to firmware updates, as Industrial Music Electronics released fixes for the Piston Honda MK3 and Hertz Donut MK3. ALM updated Pamela’s New Workout and Abstract Data released the long-awaited version 2.0 for the ADE-32 Octocontroller. Also quite recently, Moog put out its first update in 5 years for Mother 32 while Expert Sleepers released yet another in its long list of updates of the Disting MK4. Last but not least, the ongoing improvements of Ansible from Monome saw a new beta become available just a week ago and more recent updates for Teletype have been coming out. One of the contributors on the Teletype firmware needs to commit his changes after he forks a fresh copy so I’m waiting on that.

So is there any real point or relevance to this post I hope anyone can relate to? This is my version of following baseball or building a custom car. It is my Game of Thrones where I’m watching the unfolding drama except it features a cast made of a spectrum of sounds. The big difference is that I’m not dependent on others supplying me with new content or gear as even if I were to stop upgrading and adding to this synth, it would still give me a near infinity of options to make noise. In other words, I don’t need people to offer me canned drama, I can create my own.

We choose to evolve, grow, and patch ourselves anew or we wither and become stale. Without challenges, our own firmware appears dated and mostly dysfunctional on today’s platform. I’ll admit that learning this synth, philosophy, sociology, history, or trying to advance my sculpting in 3D skills are all less than satisfying at times, but the alternative is to practice redundancy or death. Sure, this is an old theme here, but just as we’ll watch 100 episodes of a favorite TV show or 100 games of a team we love, I’m practicing sharing iterations of a theme a hundred times as I try to get the messaging just right just as I’ve practiced hundreds of times connecting those synth modules to other modules as I venture into discovering something new.

Beans – Black-Eyed and Other Stuff

JWise Food

Black Eyed Beans

A last-minute change in bean-plan was needed when an emergency use case scenario came up regarding a package of bacon taken from the freezer. Sadly this bean entry cannot just be about beans as extenuating circumstances have intruded into our fantasy travels.

On Thursday, while out shopping at Whole Foods for those scotch bonnet peppers I could not find, I decided I needed something from Costco so I visited our local store. I noticed something strange in that there were no canned veggies available. While that wasn’t out of the ordinary two months ago, things had really started normalizing. Limits on buying meat and eggs had been lifted, toilet paper is always available now, frozen pizza is again on hand, things seemed okay. At first, I didn’t think much of it but then even later in the day, I headed over to another popular grocery store called Fry’s, part of the Kroger chain. Uh oh, the canned veggies and pasta sauce aisles have been ransacked again. I asked a couple of clerks about it and they were curious about what’s triggering hoarding again with one of them wondering out loud why all the Gatorade had been cleaned out.

The best I can tell is that people are talking about another lock-down (not that Caroline and I have left ours yet); I guess others are anticipating food shortages again. This sucks as we were starting to make serious headway into clearing out foodstuffs and making space in our over-packed cabinets. Not anymore, as Thursday into Friday were spent prowling our various suppliers to replenish particular items, starting with our freezer. I removed a hunk of beef to make pot roast, some filets for raclette, and a package of bacon. The bacon by Saturday morning was fully thawed and once it’s opened I want it all used within a week as I feel the flavor starts to weaken at about that time. So instead of our Cuban dish planned for tomorrow, I started a crockpot of black-eyed beans because my recipe calls for bacon.

Back to hoarding. In February and March, I stocked us up well, really well. By the time food runs were happening here in Arizona I was able to act as an observer instead of a competitor. This time I feel I was almost caught off guard so I needed to move fast. At Costco a second time this week, I now picked up a bunch of meat that I could stuff into our very organized freezer. Between two different Fry’s I was able to snag the last 7 bottles of Rao’s Arrabbiata Sauce, some canned corn, and more quinoa and lentil pasta that we just tried for the first time this week and really enjoyed. Silk Soy Milk with the long shelf-life has been gone from our local stores for a couple of months now but I can order it by the case from Walmart. That’s just what I did last night when I ordered another 3 cases for delivery which will bring our stash to a total of 46 quarts, 11.5 gallons, or 44 liters and that should last nearly a year. Through Amazon, I bought more oat groats, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp hearts, and flaxseed to make sure I have enough of those ingredients to compliment the 20 pounds of oatmeal I have atop our cabinets. This is of course for making granola that is eaten for breakfast 5 days a week. I’ll also need to place an order for Walnuts again as we are down to our last four pounds of them, we’re good on almonds with 11 pounds in stock. Good thing I recently bought another 12 pounds of our favorite eucalyptus honey.

Guesstimating to some degree and calculating based on our very accurate inventory of 438 line items I’d say we have a solid 120-day supply of food here at home. When I look into our cabinets there is an element of groaning as it feels like it’ll take forever to go through everything and I dread the idea that any of it should spoil before we use it.

Why am I worried about food scarcity? Our country is failing on a grand scale in managing the COVID-19 pandemic with our very own Governor Doug Ducey indirectly and directly responsible for the death of over 2,000 people in Arizona through his negligence, influenced on some level by being a sycophant of our troubled President. We were the last state to shut down and one of the first to reopen. With 3,000 to 4,000 new cases per day now in Arizona where many survivors will have lifelong breathing and/or mental problems along with the 50-90 a day who are dying combined with the potential social unrest from continuing police killings, a rush to kill teachers and parents by forcing children back to school, and an economy that will at some point have to reckon with the massive unserviceable debts, I become nervous about the chances for violent upheaval. Should we start to see 10,000 new cases a day or more, we could be in a situation where fully half the population of Arizona in the next year will have been infected and at the current mortality rates, we’d see between 73,000 to 140,000 dead just in Arizona. To put this in perspective that’s nearly the equivalent of a 9/11 type event almost every week right here in the state we call home. At that point, I’ll not want to go out for anything at all.

So, the beans. In our ongoing effort to not throw away any of the food we’ve purchased, we pay attention to “use-by” dates and consider the freshness of perishables. To the extent it’s possible, we move around the menu plan and try to see a few weeks out what we’ll be eating. Rice and beans are a simple dish that can be pushed out a few days but the bacon needed to find dishes and so six slices went into the crockpot and three slices became part of lunch as a side to our tomato and avocado salad. Tomorrow morning hopefully the rest of it will be part of our scrambled eggs.

Beans – Oloyin

JWise Food

Honey Beans also known as Oloyin Beans

Today’s bean safari takes us into Nigeria for a dish called Ewa Oloyin or Nigerian Bean Porridge. The beans are known as honey beans or oloyin. These alien-toe-looking beans were started soaking last night and took up a lot of water as they rehydrated. This morning, after rinsing them, I couldn’t help but see what looked like silvery metallic toenails on these digit-looking legumes. The recipe for this porridge is incredibly simple except the scotch bonnet peppers it calls for were not found and so I’m substituting habanero for them. Other than that I have the palm oil, Roma tomatoes, red onion, bell pepper, and the god-awful-smelling ground dried shrimp; oh yeah, the shrimp bullion too.

Verdict: I decided to err on the side of caution and only used one of the habaneros. Good thing, as the dish is spicy with only one of them. I also scaled back the amount of dried shrimp to one tablespoon from the two-and-a-half the recipe called for. This worked out well for Caroline and me as we both feel that with the full amount of the above ingredients this would have been a potently spicy and fishy soup. Yes, I called this a soup as it’s not like the consistency of a porridge. If I was supposed to mash the beans prior to serving, the recipe didn’t call for it. The flavor is a kind of spicy bean chowder with a pronounced umami character that probably comes from the dried shrimp and palm oil. I’ll certainly be looking for other recipes that use the oloyin bean but I’d consider making this again. This is not recommended for people who do not like a fishy flavor. I’d like to say that I’m thrilled with our Nigerian lunch and feel fortunate for having this opportunity to try something new. The next stop on our journey will take us to Cuba.

Somewhere Else

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts, Travels

Catholic Church in Miami, Arizona

After more than 60 days, I needed to venture out more than 10 miles away from home. I headed east, where I was taking a break in front of a catholic church called Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. I’m in Miami, Arizona, with the hope of stopping in at Guayo’s El Rey Mexican Restaurant for their amazing carne asada, but should they still be closed, there’s Guayo’s on the Trail just 10 miles down the road in Globe.

I’d like to say I didn’t come out here just for something to eat, but with the desert baking in 100+ degrees temperatures and nothing much open due to COVID-19, I suppose that my stomach is dictating the plan. I brought my notebook so I could write if I found a cozy (safe) place to pull up to, maybe have a coffee and chill, but instead, I’m in the car with the A/C on under the shade of a few Mediterranean cypress trees as Guayo’s doesn’t open until 11:00 and I’m a bit early. When Caroline and I were last out this way on my birthday on April 4th, the Miami location was closed. As my early lunchtime rolled around I continued up the street to find the place locked up, not because of the pandemic but because Wednesday happens to be their day off. This turned out well, as the other location had four empty picnic tables. On the other hand, things weren’t all great as the carne asada is off the menu until the dining room reopens.

Guayo's on the Trail in Globe, Arizona

Really, what I wanted more than a bite to eat was to find something to spark my imagination and drag me into a story that might unfold as I put myself somewhere other than home. What becomes humorous about this is not that I should admit boredom as I’m certainly not bored, but I have come to a realization about how lucky I am that I enjoy reading and various digital hobbies. My awareness focuses on the fact that I’m recognizing that those who are likely bored during this extended period of self-isolation typically use restaurants, gyms, and coffee shops to help them step off their paths of routine. Their lives are boring at other times, too, but they distract themselves with moments that absolve them from being responsible for their mind’s entertainment and edification.

Not to say that going to a gym is not being responsible as it certainly is, but it also fills the gap where they might otherwise need to face a period of free time in which they’d have to choose something to do. With those amenities mostly forbidden right now, they find themselves at home too much and run out of stuff they can fix or family they want to have a Zoom chat with. What they are seeing is their life stripped bare, and they are shown just how boring they are to those of us who have interests aside from sports, restaurants, bars, gyms, and shopping.

I suppose to that end, I, too, am trying to escape my own routine, and I’d like to make the excuse that I’m trying to spur my brain to cooperate with finding some novelty that will inspire my words to move beyond relating events of the day. You see, last year, while in Germany, I started to work on an idea that seemed to have legs and hinted at the possibility that the words I was putting down could become something along the lines of a novel. In the intervening 12 months, I’ve not been able to return to that thread. I’ve wondered if it was the setting on the streets of Frankfurt, after spending two weeks in various other German cities, that was my inspiration? Maybe that writing session can only be warmed up by putting myself back over there, though that is not happening any time soon.

In Europe, I’m surrounded by people needing to move around between museums, operas, concerts, and a vibrant club scene, stop for coffee to chat with friends, and watch others coming and going. Meanwhile, in America, I feel that people keep to themselves even in the best of times as they are afraid of others. They are afraid of potential violence, robbery, begging, a conversation they won’t relate to or understand, being picked up on, being scammed, or simply interrupted from their jaunt to get to the important things that will reassure them that those tasks completed make them whole.

Roosevelt Lake in Gila County, Arizona

Almost two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and was the first person to accurately describe America’s character; then, in the mid-’80s, Jean Baudrillard came along and took a snapshot of who we’d become. Today I cannot find a flattering image or discover what kind of dream the American people are sharing. I don’t believe it is only the virus that has shut us down; this is the nature of decay.

This entropic state could inspire me to use it as a basis for my writing, but this is the dystopian potentiality I want to avoid. Life has been about becoming, going forward, learning, and discovering; to give in to accepting the rot is hopelessness I cannot normalize. The absurdity of having our incredible wealth of opportunity with tools no other generation could have ever imagined but allowing them to lay fallow as we grasp at a past that nostalgia holds fast to is a tragedy with real consequence.

The incongruous nature of hearing a people clamor for greatness while basking in despair and lamenting much of where the world is today is disheartening at best and devastating at worst. Maybe the only thing to take from this is that we are at a generational divide where the chasm is so large that it cannot be bridged. So, has the older generation become lemmings? Have they molded many of their children in their own broken image? Are the days of seeing all things possible from a dynamic and vibrant America dried up?

I moved back to America in 1995 as I came to understand a unique characteristic of the American ideal, and that was that no matter the strata you emerge from, you can ascend terrific heights in this country. Conversely, if you are outside of the target demographic, your ascension will be fraught with the same roadblocks one would find in any other corner of the world by those outside the controlling class, but perseverance really made an incredible difference for many people who would have never found that opportunity anywhere else. While remnants of opportunity still exist, it is being consumed by the megalithic wealth of a tiny minority represented by both individuals and large corporations.

Then, when I think it can get no worse, there’s new insanity that hopes to catapult America fully into the abyss. Not content to scream into the unknown, we apparently want to inhabit the place of monsters in a kind of schizophrenic self-mutilation of our higher ambitions, all in the act of becoming our better selves. Well, this seems to be our current delusional state. Knowledge and wisdom used to be our driving forces, now they’ve been replaced with blind faith and saviors acting against vague conspiracies.

What is in the water that is bringing us into madness? How has our poisoning of the intellectual and cultural environment come to sap our insight? How long before the contagion of self-destruction infects the people of other countries?

1,127,159

JWise Thoughts

Blog Stats

Over the past 12 months, I’ve posted 166 blog entries totaling 208,897 words for an average of 1,251 words per post. While this is factually accurate, it doesn’t take into account that I posted the book I wrote a decade ago about the Grand Canyon, and over those 19 days, there are 85,401 words belonging to it. So, of all my other 147 exercises in writing, those missives were a mere 840 words each on average. If you pick up an air of mild disappointment, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the fact that I wrote nearly every other day is nothing to be sad about.

Last year, for 37 days, from early May to nearly mid-June, I walked the streets from Berlin to Zagreb, and during that time, I wrote every day without fail. I was prolific and was able to pen 77,458 words in order to capture a thousand details that would have been lost in time had the effort not been spent organizing electrons on digital paper. That was 2,093 words per day, which, as far as I’m concerned, proves to me that I should travel a lot more.

Since January 1st, 2019, there have been 550 days; of those, I’ve made 278 blog posts totaling 328,205 words. Why do I know this and the above numbers? I’ve started a spreadsheet where each line entry is the title, date, and word count that will ultimately detail each of the 2,333 blog posts I’ve made public here at www.johnwise.com. Maybe this is a silly exercise, but I’m curious how many words I’ve written since started blogging back on January 1, 2005, when I was 41 years old. At this moment, I’m calculating that it will be somewhere near 2.2 million words, but maybe it’s closer to 2.7 million, which means I only need to write about another 280 blog entries to reach 3,000,000 words. That raises the question: what value will it have been to have written 3 million words? You know, I don’t have a really good answer, but when I reach that point, I can assure you that I’ll lament that I’ve not reached 5 million.

Trends that start to emerge that should have been obvious is that I like writing a lot more when we are traveling. In November 2019 we visited Oregon, and I found 20,089 words with which to write about our vacation, which is extraordinary when you consider how many times we’ve been up there. One year prior, we were again in Oregon at the same time of year, and all I could muster was 15,334 words for an equivalent amount of time. We had a 21-day vacation in Europe in 2018 that took us to Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary. I had 47,457 words that needed recording so our memories could be enhanced as time passed. Then, there was a trip to Alaska back in the summer of 2017 that started less than two weeks after I fired my entire company. As emotionally distraught as I was, I was still able to draw 18,057 words out of me, but this was one of the most difficult trips I’d been on due to the baggage I was carrying.

Back in 2014, I started a new company, and even before that, I was deeply immersed in all things virtual reality. To a degree, I thought I was a bit burned out on blogging as I’d lost sight of it being an exercise in writing and advancing those skills. To have written only six entries on my own site during 2014 and then another three that were posted on the VR site was certainly a low point. The year before, we were in Germany for the first time in 18 years, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to document every minute, so with 40,338 words and somewhere between 200 to 300 photos, we have some terrific memories to reflect on. At this point in counting words, I’m back on April 3, 2013, with 543 blog entries consisting of 539,616 words. I’m 25% of the way through, and my average word count has dropped to 994 words per entry.

While cataloging my word count from 2012, I just learned that from the two trips we’ve made to Alaska to raft the Alsek River, we’ve spent a total of 26 days in this remote corner of North America, and I’ve shared 41,000 words exactly about our experiences. But then I crawl further back into 2011 and the writing is on the wall. It seems like I could barely be bothered to blog very much, and when I did, it wasn’t as verbose as I appreciate now that I’m older. I’m happy that there is a loose record of things, and on many of our trips, there are extensive musings, but I certainly considered my photography as the more important aspect of what I was documenting.

This brings me to a point I believe I’ve made before somewhere here on this blog: writing should be an activity that is a matter of habit for everyone. Even if it were just once a week, though I’d insist that daily writing while traveling should be obligatory, I believe people would have a better perspective on how amazing their lives are and how important it is to fill their days with moments and activities that are worth remembering. I just relearned that Caroline finished her first big weaving project, where she made yellow and purple towels back on June 18, 2011. By July 10, 2013, I was immersed in playing with graphics software that was about to lead me to the Oculus Rift and virtual reality. On August 15, 2016, Caroline and I saw King Sunny Adé perform at the MIM. I still have 1,696 blog entries, of which I need to record the title, date, and word count; I’m sure I’ll be finding other surprises and also wishing that I’d filled in the gaps.

Midway through 2010, Caroline must be tired of my obsessive-compulsive disorder as she asks with only minor indignance, “Are you really going to go through all 2,339 blog entries to figure out how many words you’ve written?” My answer was something like, “Hey, I’m already through 701 of them, so yeah, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Ten minutes later, she’s installed WP Word Count and shows me that I’ve published 1,127,519 words over the years or about half of what I thought I’d find. I immediately saw that my shortest blog entry was just two words, and the longest one, excluding my book, was about my journey into synthesizers, which is 5,298 words. My average blog entry is 474 words long. When I started blogging in 2005, I kept up a great pace until the spring of 2008, when I published my 1,000th entry. It was originally my intent to publish a “Photo Of The Day” with a blurb about the image for one year. After more than three years, I slowed down as I needed a break.

I’ve got to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that between 2008 and 2020 I’ve only added about 1,300 more blog entries. On the bright side, during 2005, my first year blogging, I was averaging 235 words per entry, while in 2019, I averaged 916 words per entry. Not that more words are better, but I think over the 15 years of writing here at johnwise.com, the craft has become easier, and at times, there are levels of details I could have never captured back then. Since January 1st, 2005, there have been 5,664 days between now and then, which means, on average, I’ve written 199 words per day. Ernest Hemingway recommended writing 500 a day and Jack London hammered out 1,500 a day, but I never aspired to be a writer. My inspiration was to compel myself to take more photos and have some intention behind them while practicing describing what I was seeing. So I shouldn’t be disappointed at all as I certainly progressed in the task I gave myself at the end of 2004.

Finally, I was looking at Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” which rings in as the Guinness World Record holder as the longest novel at 1,250,000 words well, I’m almost there, but if I want to reach 2,500,000 lifetime words in the next ten years, I’ll need to pen 376 words on average per day. That would allow my internet writing to compare to a book of over 6,000 pages. I can get this. As for the earlier note of maybe seeing 5 million words, well, that would require me to write more than 1,000 words every day between now and my 67th year. That sounds tough.