Watching The Wire Part III: End Season One

I've been slacking on keeping up with my Wire-watching thoughts and impressions, but suffice to say that Season One is in the books, and I am really looking forward to watching Season Two.

I can tell that one of the tactics that David Simon seems to enjoy is getting you to like a character, and then having bad things happen to that character.  He's a bit of a bastard that way, to be honest, although he at least gives you the courtesy of telegraphing it ahead of time so that you can prepare yourself.

Case in point - did any of you not see Wallace's death coming a mile away?  That was an upsetting one for me - I liked that kid...  You also had to know that the newly-promoted Stinkum was going to get it before long too.  No shocker there.

Kima getting shot though... that one surprised me.  That whole sequence where her undercover situation just keeps getting worse and worse (music's too loud to hear anything, street signs are spun around, no backup) is really well done, and yet, despite all signals to the contrary, I still found myself thinking "well, she's got a gun taped under the seat, she'll be ok... I mean there's no way that they would - OMG SHE GOT SHOT!!!"

All those years in which I wasn't watching The Wire, many of you kept telling me how awesome it was, but couldn't really articulate why.  After noting my own reactions to Wallace getting killed and Kima getting shot, I understand now.  These are all obviously fictional characters, and yet the show is so well assembled that they all feel astonishingly real. 

Except for Omar - nobody's that bad@$$ in real-life...

Gluten Free Livin' - Buckwheat Pancakes

About 3 and a half years ago, after a long, and arduous diagnostic process, Liz found out that she was gluten-intolerant / celiac / whatever other term you want.  After an initial process of "ZOMG!!! NO PIZZA!!! NO BEER!!! WTFBBQ!!!" we went about eliminating gluten from her lifestyle (which coincidentally meant eliminating gluten from many aspects of my lifestyle too).  It's kinda like how Samuel L Jackson puts it in Pulp Fiction:

 "My wife is a vegetarian, which pretty much makes me a vegetarian." (just sub "gluten free" for vegetarian)

But after doing some research, we found that being Gluten-Free wasn't nearly as onerous as we thought it might be.  There are certainly compromises that need to be made, but by and large, Liz has made the transition pretty well.

A big part of going gluten-free involves finding ways to keep your carby comfort foods in the rotation in a gluten-free form.  And when it comes to breakfast, that means Gluten-Free Pancakes!

Here's the mise-en-place:

1 Cup - Buckwheat flour
1/2 Cup - Milk (plus a little extra as required)
1/2 Tsp - Baking Powder
3 Eggs

Buckwheat flour has no gluten in it, and has a great flavour to it.  It's classically used in a number of French crepe recipes (usually from Brittany), but the goal here is not for a thin, rolled-up crepe - We're going for a thick, fluffy pancake, something that can be difficult to achieve without a gluteny flour. 

The Key to a thick, fluffy, gluten-free pancake, as it turns out, is something that I pulled from a Jamie Oliver episode many years ago: Separate your eggs, and whip the whites.  Here's the drill:

Step 1:
Separate your eggs.

Step 2: Deal with the yolks
Yolks go into a bowl with the flour, milk and baking powder.  Mix them thoroughly.  You can add as much as another 1/4 cup of milk if your batter is thicker than you like it.  Any more than that, and you're getting into crepe batter territory

Step 3: Whip It
Whip the whites until stiff peaks form.  What the hell does "stiff peaks" mean?  Good question.  Here's a picture:

Stiff Peaks - Got it?  Good.

Step 4: Combine
Fold the whites into the batter.  Don't try to get everything 100% uniform, you'll just wind up breaking down the air bubbles you're trying to introduce into the mixture.  Just get the egg whites incorporated to the point where there aren't big white chunks of foam floating around, and then stop.

Photo courtesy of Liz - And yes, I always wear a Metallica T-shirt when I make rockin' food

Step 5: Prep your pan
Put a skillet on medium or medium-low heat depending on how nuclear your stove is.  Melt a tablespoon or two of butter and WAIT for the butter to melt and get hot.  The #1 reason (Number ONE) for subpar pancakes at this stage is a pan that isn't hot enough.  Test your pan by making a miniature pancake, about the size of a quarter.  If you don't hear an immediate sizzle, then your pan is not hot enough.

Step 6: Make Pancakes - Part I
Spoon dollops of batter onto your pan.  If you've done it right, the batter should stand up a bit on its own, and you may need to shake your pan to get the pancakes to flatten out. 

Step 6a: Garnishment
Optionally, if you wanted to add berries, or banana slices, or chocolate chips, this is where to do it.  Just press your chosen accoutrement into the top of each pancake as it's cooking.

Step 7: Make Pancakes - Part II
When you see bubbles come up to the top surface of the pancakes, it's almost time to flip.  When you see the bubbles around the edges pop and they don't close back over, it's time to flip your pancakes.  Again, if you got your egg whites nice and stiff, you may need to pat your pancakes down with a spatula to flatten them out properly.  They should only need a minute or two to get brown on the flipped side before they are ready.

Step 8: Eat Pancakes

You'll note that the buckwheat flour yields a darker colour than conventional pancakes.  That is totally normal.  You may also have some contrasting bits of egg white on the interior of some of your pancakes.  That is also normal.  If you stirred the mixture enough to get the egg whites 100% uniformly distributed, you would lose a lot of the fluffiness.

Tasting Notes:

Going with 100% buckwheat flour does result in some inherent differences with respect to taste and feel.  I have seen buckwheat flour described as tasting nutty, earthy, grassy... I don't think earthy is accurate (mushrooms are earthy - buckwheat not so much), but somewhere between nutty and grassy sounds about right.  I like it a lot, but it is distinct, and quite different in flavour than wheat flour pancakes.  The important thing is that it goes great with Maple Syrup!

Texturally, buckwheat flour is pretty much always sold as a whole-grain flour.  That means it is high in fibre and very good for you.  It also means that it is going to be less luxurious from a mouth feel standpoint than refined wheat flour.

I'm sure that I can improve on this recipe by subbing in some chickpea, rice or tapioca flour to lend a little more smoothness to the mouth feel, but by and large, these pancakes are delicious as they are, and simple to prepare.  That egg white trick works great with regular pancakes too, btw.

Jeremy Lin, AZN solidarity, and Learning to cheer for a team from NY

Eight years ago, William Hung went on American Idol, and single-handedly set the cause of the Asian dude back 10 years.

Eight days ago, Jeremy Lin became the starting point guard for the New York Knicks and got those 10 years back, and then some.

It's a bit of a funny thing being a North American of Asian descent.  The stereotypes that precede you are ubiquitous, often unflattering, but by-and-large tolerated for reasons that I will leave a sociologist to cover.  It's no big thing though, and no Asian person I know would ever acknowledge those stereotypes as representing any kind of real adversity - just a social annoyance for which you learn a compendium of sharp retorts to use when necessary at an early age.  Reality is too nuanced to get caught up in uncreative rhetorical exchanges with morons, right?  Right.  Society has moved on, and is all post-racial now, right?  Right.  After all, Asians are a prosperous demographic, and model minority, right? Right.

So... why is it that every North American of Asian descent has jumped on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon with the kind of zeal usually reserved for... well, no-one?

The kind of Asian-Solidarity that has emerged in the wake of #Linsanity is fascinating to me, precisely because it's the kind of thing that I thought I should be immune to.  I identify more as being Canadian than as being Asian.  I'm a hockey guy, and Paul Kariya broke through as a sports star of Asian descent long ago.  I dislike NBA basketball.  I hate every New York sports team.

And yet, I am 100% down with #Linsanity.

This past weekend, I was out in San Diego for a friend's wedding.  At the reception, I happened to be seated at a table with two other North Americans of Asian descent.  As often happens when dudes are first introduced and playing the small-talk game, the conversation soon drifted sports-ward.  I can't remember which one of us first broached the subject, but at some point the question "did you watch the Knicks/Lakers game last night?" was asked, and instantly the bonds of AZN brotherhood were formed.  We couldn't help ourselves.  None of us were Knicks fans.  If you had asked us the previous week, I doubt that we could have named more than 3 players on the Knicks between the 3 of us.  And yet, there we were, raving about Jeremy Lin's 38 point demolition of the Lakers as if we were stereotypical Asian parents talking about a son who had gotten into Harvard.

I would have been disgusted with myself if I hadn't been so happy about it.

How did I get here?  Where did this compulsion to throw my unquestioning support behind an obscure benchwarmer solely because he is Asian come from (and make no mistake, I would not have spared this story 10 minutes of attention if Jeremy Lin had been, say... Maltese)?

I'm not going to try to speak in generalities here.  All I can give you is my own assessment of myself - and here's what it comes down to for me: I am a huge Jeremy Lin fan, because he has given the public's concept of "The Asian Dude" just enough of a jolt to question the old stereotypes, and to have people looking for new ones.

Yes, Jeremy Lin went to Harvard.  Yes, Jeremy Lin has supportive (but undoubtedly demanding) parents.  Yes, Jeremy Lin has a brother who is a dentist who let him sleep on his couch.  Yes, Jeremy Lin is a nice guy, and a hard worker.  All a standard part of the standard Asian dude package.

But being able to throw out a ridiculous spin move on Derek Fisher is not a part of that package.  Going shot for shot with Kobe Bryant in the 4th quarter is not a part of that package.  Blowing by John Wall and throwing down a one handed dunk is most assuredly not a part of that package.

When I look at my Twitter feed, and see it blowing up with puns and nicknames and barely-understandable ebonics phrases that border on being a little on the racist side, I love it, because all of a sudden, the old stereotypes don't apply the way they used to.  The Twitterverse has had to get a little bit creative with incorporating racial elements to their Asian dude humour.  Some attempts have been less successful than others (that means you, Jason Whitlock), but by and large, I'm kind of enjoying it.  I mean, let's be honest here, "Yellow Mamba" has a pretty bad@$$ ring to it, doesn't it?  And when I see myriad African-American commentators use the phrase "my yellow n*gga", I gotta be honest - it feels kinda validating in a Dave-Chappelle-Skit kind of way.

It just feels refreshingly different.  And a million miles away from American Idol.