I'm not used to maple fretboards on acoustics

But it's a "Himalayan maple" that works great.

Fried chicken biscuits (recipe and pictures)

Sometimes, you really need fried chicken biscuits for breakfast.

Fried chicken can be found in India (there's even several KFC's), but "biscuits" in the American sense are pretty much unknown, so I have to make them if I want them. I experimented with the washes for the chicken, and came up with something pretty awesome I thought I would share.

(Note: in both cases you can replace the milk + white vinegar with buttermilk if you can get good buttermilk; the vinegar is just to clabber the milk anyways.)

The chicken:
4 skinless boneless chicken thighs
1 pint milk
1 tablespoon white vinegar
2 tablespoons pickle juice
1 cup white flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Secret blend of herbs and spices (see below*)
4 eggs
1 cup half and half or evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed)
Oil for deep frying

Add the vinegar and pickle juice to the milk; wait 10 minutes to allow it to clabber; place the chicken in the milk. Let it marinate in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

In one large bowl, mix flour, baking soda, and herbs and spices. In different bowl, beat eggs with half & half.

Heat oil to about 350F (a small square of bread should take about 30 seconds to brown at that temperature). For each chicken thigh,
1. Remove from the milk
2. Dredge in the flour mixture
3. Dunk in the egg mixture
4. Dredge again in the flour mixture
5. Drop into the oil

Should take about 15 minutes or so to cook them thoroughly. Remove, drain/pat dry, and let cool.

* In terms of the spices, salt and black pepper are pretty much mandatory; everything else is up to you. This time I did Old Bay and smoked paprika, which worked really well.

The biscuits:
2 cups white flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick butter, very cold
1 cup milk
1 Tablespoon white vinegar
additional flour for handling dough

(This is my great-grandmother's recipe I learned years and years ago and is mostly muscle memory, so apologies if I leave out something that's obvious to me.)

Preheat oven to 450F.

Pour the vinegar into the milk and wait 10 minutes for it to clabber.

Mix the dry ingredients (sift, if you're anal -- I never bother). Grate / finely chop / food process the cold butter into the flour mixture. The resulting mix should clump into balls roughly the size of green peas. Gradually pour in the clabbered milk and quickly mix with a fork.

Once this has formed a dough, flour the work surface (you'll need more flour than you think) and your hands, and gently pat out the dough until it is very flat and wide. If you're new to biscuits, let me stress that you are not kneading. That's the last thing you want to do. You are very gently patting the dough out to flatten it. Under no circumstances use a rolling pin!!!

Once you have patted the dough out, fold it in half lengthwise and again the other-wise, so that it's 1 quarter of its original size. Pat out again. Repeat this 7 times (this is what gives your biscuit layers).

After the 7th patting-out, take a biscuit cutter and cut out biscuits -- I can usually get 8 from this quanitity. It is possible to re-combine and pat out again the scrap dough that's left over, but the biscuits are never as good from that. I usually save it for dumplings, or fry it up and give it to the dog.

Place the biscuit disks on a cookie sheet and bake for 10 minutes (or until they're the color you like).

Combining these two into chicken biscuits:
Additionally required ingredients:
Pickle slices
2 Tablespoons or so of pickle juice
8 pieces of cheese of your choice (or not, if you don't like cheese on your chicken biscuits)

After the biscuits have cooled somewhat, open them (you shouldn't need a knife) and lay them out flat. Cut the fried chicken thighs in half. Put a half-thigh on one side of each biscuit. Garnish with pickle slices and optionally cheese. Pour about a half-teaspoon of pickle juice onto the empty half of each biscuit. Close the sandwiches up, and serve immediately.

Pre-assemblage:



Assembled:

Swarney of the Green party was on the ballot in Arkansas for Senate

Can anyone tell me how he did?

He must have won, right, facing as a true progressive two apparently indistinguishable candidates, as he did?

What was the extent of his victory?

We ended up getting a Lhasa Apso puppy (pics)

We were going to to market to get a pet rabbit but we got stuck in the crowd by one of the puppy breeders. He asked "would you like to hold one?" and, well, you know what happens then...

He's a very handsome dog:

Another great example

I hope nobody thinks my list was trying to be exhaustive...

Big Hummus wants the government to regulate your hummus

There is a scourge of hummus impostors making their way into American grocery store shelves — a problem that a major hummus manufacturer thinks requires the heavy hand of government regulation.

Sabra Hummus has petitioned the federal government to create a standard definition of what actually counts as "hummus." The Food and Drug Administration already does this with some other products like cream cheese (which must be 33 percent milk fat for manufacturers to market it as cream cheese). Sabra argues the hummus market has run amok; its time for Uncle Sam to step in.

...

As a traditional Middle Eastern dip, hummus has two crucial ingredients: chickpeas and tahini (the latter being a paste made from ground sesame seeds). Sabra has surveyed the market and, in documents submitted to the FDA, finds these two ingredients decidedly lacking in many purported hummus products today. Here's a bit of their list of the worst violators (the full list is here).

...

"The marketing of a 'hummus' product made from legumes other than chickpeas is akin to the marketing of guacamole made with fruit other than avocados," Sabra argues.

Food porn: Wasabi by Morimoto in Mumbai

Yeah, that was good.

My mother-in-law is in town, and for a belated wedding present she took us to ("Iron Chef&quot Morimoto's Wasabi at the Taj in south Mumbai.



The sign, for all you doubters...



The decor is really cool.



With a nice view of the Gateway of India from the window.



A potato and wasabi mayo amuse bouche.



Seared foie gras.



Rock shrimp tempura.



A sushi plate: spicy salmon, fatty tuna, and softshell crab.



Chicken and crab fried rice.



Grilled stuffed panko/truffle lobster (that black spot is a stack of truffle slices).



Lamb shanks.



Miso black cod.



Chocolate mango tart.



Strawberry/cherry blossom shortcake.

Sorry I didn't bring enough to share with the whole lounge, but hopefully you can enjoy this vicariously a bit...

"However, the monkeys still control the cabana" -- voicemails from my landlord today

(Linguistic note: Hindi and Marathi are written in Italics, as are my comments once the messages start. the symbol "~" in a Hindi or Marathi section simply represents a nasalized vowel; say it like you were from Boston.)

So, my building has this gee-whiz intercom/PA system that lets the management leave voicemails for us tenants, either individually or en masse. It also lets us hear the mass announcements in real time, though we rarely leave that on (security has an annoying tendency to leave the button pressed).

The building is a mix of foreigners (like me), Gujuratis, Marathis, and Bengalis, so the default medium of communication is Indian Business English (a fascinating dialect/register). (Interesting side point: if you count all levels of fluency, India has more English speakers than the US.)

I was home working on my book today and enjoyed the following series of messages (and later real-time announcements when I could not resist listening in). Time listed is in military format, Indian Standard Time (GMT +5.5):

0847: "Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize. A troop of monkeys has taken residence around the pool. Please avoid the pool until further notice."

0852: "Ladies and gentlemen, in response to a question, these are bandar, nuhi~ langur I repeat nuhi~ langur"

("bandar" generically means "monkey", but also specifically means a macaque, as opposed to "langur", which specifically means the larger langur family, and has religious significance for many Hindus as representing the deity Hanuman. "nuhi~" means "not" -- strictly, the proper word order is "langur nuhi~", but most of the staff speak a very Anglicized Hindi/Marathi). -- Recursion

0901: "Ladies and gentlemen, the monkeys have driven away the dogs from the grounds."

0903: (a different voice from the normal announcer): "Kutte tik hai~. Kutte tik hai~. Danyavad"

(Marathi or Hindi: "The dogs are ok. The dogs are ok. Thank you." The grounds had been home to a pack of street dogs that many of the building kids have befriended; apparently the dogs -- having more sense than the humans -- just went to the abandoned mill next door.)

0912: "Ladies and gentlemen, we appreciate the patience you are showing and your many calls of concern. I stress we are doing the needful. We have called the langurwallah and he will be coming today."

(You already know "langur", "wallah" means roughly "vendor". A langurwallah carries one of the larger monkeys around to scare away the macaques. That's a job here.)

0937: "Ladies and gentlemen, while it is too early to speculate, in response to your many questions I offer the hypothesis that these monkeys have come from the national park. However, there have been reports of a troop in Breachcandy, so this cannot be discounted as a possibility".

(Breachcandy is a beach neighborhood nearby, which to my knowledge hasn't seen a monkey troop in years. Monkeys in general are not that common in central Mumbai, but the train tracks we live between include a lot of trees and go straight up to the Gandhi National Park where several thousand monkeys live and, occasionally, decide to go see the sights of Maximum City.)

(long period of no messages.)

1211: "Ladies and gentlemen, I assure you we have cordoned the pool area only for your safety. Need I remind you the diseases monkeys carry? Thank you."

1302: "Ladies and gentlemen, the langurwallah has arrived! He should be clearing the pool area shortly."

1320: "Ladies and gentlemen, the pool is clear. I say again the pool is clear of monkeys. (slight pause) However the monkeys still control the cabana. Please avoid the area until further notice."

("Cabana" is the word they insist on using for the two picnic tables with umbrellas between the pool and the cricket pitch. Also, at this point I could not resist turning my monitor back on to hear these announcements as they happen...)

1357: "Ladies and gentlemen, the langurwallah has reported the monkeys are fouling the cabana, and throwing filth at him. Inconvenience is regretted, and we wish to resolve this as quickly as possible."

1442: "Ladies and gentlemen, the inconvenience has been highly regretted. Jai ho! The entire grounds are now certified as free of monkeys. Please go about your day."

("Jai ho"; "let there be victory", roughly. A sanskritized phrase that is often used in sporting events.)

1502: "Ladies and gentlemen, please avoid the cricket pitch until we can remove the extent to which the monkeys have befouled it. Thank you."

Ah, India...

I made cornbread today

But I can't find collards in India; mustards will have to do.

I'm thinking of making hopping jenny this weekend, but I may add some Indian chilies because, well, that doesn't really need a reason...