The Blork Blog

Yes, I hate the term “new classic” too, but what the heck. This pizza is destined to become a classic, chez nous.

It is composed of (in order, from bottom to top):

• Standard Blork San Marzano pizza sauce
• A dusting of dried oregano
• A respectable portion of conventional grated full-fat mozzarella cheese
• Baby spinach sautéed with a clove of garlic
• Crimini mushrooms, sautéed.
• Proscuitto
• A sprinkle of grated aged asiago cheese — applied after the pizza came out of the oven.

The result:

Kaapow!

The only thing missing is a name. Any suggestions as to what I should call this glorious pie?

Quick quiz: what is a “Samaritan?”

If you answered “a person who selflessly does a good deed,” you are wrong. A Samaritan is simply a person from Samaria, a mountainous region of the Holy Land between Judea and Galilee — more or less what we now call the West Bank of Israel. The ancient Samaritans had a lot in common with the ancient Jews, but they weren’t on the same team, so to speak. Or perhaps it’s better to say they were on the same team (the Abrahams) but were on different shifts.

Put it this way; when the Parable of the Good Samaritan was written in the first century A.D. the idea of a Samaritan doing a good deed for a non-Samaritan (in this case a Jew) was a bit unusual. Those were very politically, culturally, and religiously loaded days in the Holy Land (not unlike today), so there was not a lot of trust between people of different tribes. So one of the key points of the parable is that one should do good deeds for everyone, even those who are “others.”

In that case, the Samaritan was an “other,” and he did a good deed for a Jew. Jesus, himself a Jew, told this parable as a way of illustrating that even those questionable “others” can do good deeds. But the Samaritan was not a “Samaritan” because he was good. It was because he was from Samaria. The fact that he was good made him a good Samaritan, which does not exclude the possibility of there being loads of bad Samaritans.

It’s as if I wrote a parable about a New Yorker doing a good deed for a Quebecer. It would be the Parable of the Good New Yorker. Naturally, that parable would not imply that every New Yorker is good. More importantly, it would not imply that any good person should be referred to as a “New Yorker!”

And yet I see and hear, on a regular basis, people referring to someone who does a good deed as a “Samaritan.” I hear things like “I had a flat tire and a Samaritan came along and helped me fix it,” or “If it wasn’t for that Samaritan I’d still be down that well!” Really? A Samaritan — a person from the Levant, a old biblical guy in a robe and sandals — came along and fixed your tire?

I think not. However, if you said “I had a flat tire and a Good Samaritan came along and helped me fix it,” or “If it wasn’t for that Good Samaritan I’d still be down that well!” then you would not be making an error. People would understand that by “Good Samaritan” you mean someone like the man in the parable of the Good Samaritan. But when you just say “Samaritan,” all you mean is some dude from Samaria!

As is my annual tradition since 2004, I present to you the list of books I read in the previous year (in this case, 2009). They are listed by author, in decending alphabetical order. The ones that really stuck with me are highlighted.

• House of Meetings, by Martin Amis
• The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam
• Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin
• Let it Come Down, by Paul Bowles
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
• That Summer in Paris, by Morely Callaghan
• The Loved and the Lost, by Morley Callaghan
• A Month in the Country, by J. L. Carr
• The Favorite Game, by Leonard Cohen
• Coffee with Hemingway, by Kirk Curnutt
• Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle
• Shenzhen, by Guy Delisle
• Ministry of Fear, by Graham Greene
• The Tenth Man, by Graham Greene
• A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill
• Crow Lake, by Mary Lawson
• Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
• The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
• Breakable You, by Brian Morton
• Coming Up for Air, by George Orwell
• Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
• Lush Life, by Richard Price
• Paul in the Country, by Michel Rabagliati
• Everyman, by Philip Roth
• Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano (translated by Virginia Jewiss)
• My Dinner with Andre (screenplay), by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
• Chef, by Jaspreet Singh
• Night Train to Turkistan, by Stuart Stevens
• Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
• Young Hearts Crying, by Richard Yates

That’s 32 books, 23 of which are categorized as fiction, three memoirs, three “other” non-fiction, and three “graphic” novels (all of which are fiction/memoir hybrids). The alarming thing is that only one of these was written by a woman.

I don’t plan my reading with any particular agenda in mind, but I do like to keep things varied; to read authors I haven’t read before, to mix up fiction and non-fiction, and to get different perspectives. But this is my worst male to female ratio yet. I’m not alone in this; it’s been a bad decade for women writers, according to this recent editorial in the Washington Post and this follow-up analysis on Maisonneuve.org.

Another notable thing about my reading list — and this was not intentional — is the number of older books. It was something of a 20th century retrospective:

• Three books from the 1920s.*
• Four books from the 1930s.**
• Three books from the 1940s.
• Three books from the 1950s.
• One book from the 1960s.*
• Four books from the 1980s.
• One book from the 1990s.**
• 13 books from the 2000s.

* Morely Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris was published in 1963, but it’s a memoir of the 1920s and is entirely “of” the 1920s. The same can be said of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which was published posthumously in 1964. Interestingly, both books cover the same basic ground, with Callaghan’s memoir being, essentially, a memoir of knowing Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s.

** Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War was published in 1998 but the stories were written in the 1930s and possibly the 1940s. Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man was written in 1942 and then forgotten about. It was found, and published, in 1985.

If you think that’s a lot of reading and you wish you could keep up, consider Julien Smith of In Over Your Head; he read more than a book a week in 2009, and managed to co-write and publish one too! He has thoughtfully written this blog post that explains how you too can read a book a week in 2010 (but he left out the part about writing one).

No, this is not a review of commercial, over-the-counter, factory-made salad dressings. Rather, it is a chance for me to get something off my chest, to prove something, and perhaps even exorcise an old demon.

It has to do with Kraft salad dressings. When I was a kid, we didn’t eat a lot of salad at home, but when we did it was dressed with Kraft dressings. The idea of making your own salad dressing was, in the Cape Breton of the 1970s, as obscure and weird as building your own car or making home-made rubber boots. After all, why mix together some homemade slop like some kind of poor person when you can so easily buy a tasty factory-made and standardized product that is even endorsed on television?

My preference at the time was for Catalina, the reddish-colored thick goop that I have since learned is essentially just second-rate oil, fructose, and ketchup. I also liked “Italian” but only the “creamy” one because the oil and vinegar didn’t separate.

There was Kraft Thousand Islands salad dressing, which I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Thousand Islands dressing was pale and creamy (ewww!) and had some weird lumps in it. Those lumps, it turns out, are just chopped up pickles. Had I known that as a kid I might have tried it (I loved pickles!). However, it still would have been hard to get over that creamy texture and color. Remember, this was a household where mayonnaise was considered only slightly more dangerous than Agent Orange.

There’s a reason why, decades later, I am still haunted by these concoctions even though I haven’t touched a Kraft dressing in at least 15 years (actually, that’s not true: Mr. Steer, an old-time downtown Montreal restaurant has dispensers of Kraft — or at least Kraft-like — dressing on every table, and I did try it for old-time’s sake). The reason I have trouble letting go is the following double helix of entwined memory fog:

• Many people seem to think that Thousand Islands dressing is reddish or reddish-orange
• Hardly anyone seems to remember Catalina dressing, even though it is still available
• Here’s the connecty part: when people see or think of reddish-orange Kraft dressings, they always invoke Thousand Islands instead of Catalina

I want to express how much that drives me crazy, but I don’t want to get carried off to the nut house (where, I expect, Catalina is the house dressing on their side salads). So I’ll try to be restrained and civilized:

That drives me crazy.

There. Done.

Part of the reason it drives me crazy (OK, here comes the pathological part) is that, as the youngest of four children (some of the other three having been heartless and cruel towards their baby bro when we were kids), I have for my entire life suffered the phenomenon of feeling like I am never believed, and am never able to convince people that I am right, even when I am absolutely and unequivocally right.

For example, when I was a kid, it would be a bright and sunny day in June and I would say “Wow, look how blue the sky is” and my brother would say “No it’s not. The sky is green and it’s raining.” Nothing I could say would make him accept that it was blue-skied and sunny. He would taunt me with his green sky theory and if my cursed cousins where there they’d always side with him. My frustration would build and I’d finally go running into the house, crying. My Dad would say “Ask your mother” and my Mom would just tell me to stop crying and go outside — which she would not have said if it were, indeed, actually raining.

I’d like to get even more Freudian, but I’ll spare you all that torture and fast-forward over the next 40 years or so by saying that I still get a bit neurotic in situations where I know I’m right but nobody will listen. This manifests itself in many ways, and in many venues, and one of them is when, every couple of years or so, there’s a reference to reddish colored factory-made salad dressing, and people blurt out “Thousand Islands!” I say “No, it’s Catalina!” and people look at me like I have two heads and claim to have never heard of Catalina dressing. Then they continue to guffaw at length about Thousand Islands dressing. (No! The sky is blue and it’s sunny!!!)

This is not an endorsement.

So today, at the grocery store, I spotted a bottle of Catalina dressing. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen it in a decade. My most recent “Catalina/Thousand Islands” (sunny/rainy) episode still fresh in my mind, I was compelled to line up a bottle of Catalina next to a bottle of Thousand Islands and take a photo as evidence (see above).

So there it is, people. Catalina: nice and red. Thousand Islands: pale and lumpy. CASE CLOSED!

The Blork Blog is nine years old today. That’s older than some people I know!

Loyal readers have probably noticed that I haven’t been posting very frequently lately. That’s partly due to my having many other distractions (e.g., From the Hip — Montreal, Monday Morning Photo Blog, and the Montreal Burger Report) but it’s also because I’m sort of rolling with the evolution of the medium. In other words, in a time of Facebook and Twitter, the role of the personal blog has diminished significantly, and that makes me less enthusiastic about putting in the time and effort.

Face it; fewer people are reading this kind of blog, and I count myself among them. I’m more inclined to read topical and more narrowly focused blogs like my current number-one “go to” favorite, The Online Photographer.

The Blork Blog would like to thank Rob Marshall for this most excellent tribute.

Therefore, I am once again questioning the continuation of the Blork Blog. Part of me wants to go for another year just so I can call it an even decade, but that’s not really reason enough. After all, if I don’t have anything to say (or more likely, I don’t have the ambition to put what I have to say into words), then what’s the point of just plugging along for the sake of a number?

Thus, I turn to you, my faithful readers. Please take three seconds to vote in the following anonymous poll regarding the future of the Blork Blog. I will say right off the bat that I am not beholden to whatever the results of the poll reveal. Also, I know this is my blog and I can do whatever I want with it (see previous item). However, I want to know what you think. Thus:

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Of all the things I did in 2009 (OK, so it wasn’t all that much), the thing I got most noticed for was eating hamburgers. (Well, there was that whole “Badge of Shame” thing back in the spring, but that was notoriety for something I did in 2008.) Specifically, I got noticed this year for eating burgers and talking about them on the radio, in podcasts, and on the Montreal Burger Report, along with fellow burger lover Chris Hand.

We started the research for the Montreal Burger Report about a year ago, and went live with the first report in April. People started to notice, and in November Sarah Musgrave wrote an article about the Report for the Montreal Gazette, featuring photos by yours truly (the paper edition used two photos, online used one).

More recently, Robyn Lee of Serious Eats “grilled” Chris and I for that Web site’s “A Hamburger Today” section, filed under “Grilled.”

So it looks like I’ve found my calling. I always new I’d be famous but I didn’t think it would be for stuffing my face.

Incidentally, not everyone’s a fan. We got an email from a guy called “DocChuck” in North Carolina wanting to know if we were “queer.” Specifically, he said:

I stumbled across your website today, and I am just wondering:  are you guys queer?

Because I do NOT read pervert’s crap, EVEN if I like to read about burgers.

DocChuck

You can learn more about the delightful DocChuck by visiting his Myspace page, which includes a blog. (Wait a sec… he has a blog on Myspace and he want’s to know if we’re queer?) <- I retract that jab because it’s unfair to queer people.

Back in 2003 I blogged a little screed against Bratz dolls, titled “Ho for the holidays.” A year later I brought you “Ho for the holidays, (part 2),” in which I linked to someone else’s “Ho for the Holidays” post where he complains about the tartenization (my term) of Tinkerbell.

Well, it’s 2009 and the holidays are a ho-ey as ever. This CBC report (from 2006) sayst those ho-like Bratz dolls are made in China (hey, these days what isn’t?) by workers toiling up to 94 hours a week. They are (or at least were) paid about 17¢ per doll, which retail for about $16 US.

So there you go. Not only can you buy your kids a whore for Christmas, you can buy them a cheap whore!