the best damn chili anyone ever did make. and it's f'in vegan.

ok here's what i just did, you should do it too:

1. Saute one big, roughly diced onion over medium heat in a decent amount of olive oil, maybe 3 tablespoons.
2. While sauteeing, add 2 tablespoons of whole cumin and as much New Mexico red chili powder as you can manage. I probably used 5 tablespoons, but I like things really hot.
3. Keep stirring — as the onions caramelize, they'll stick slightly, so keep em from burning
4. When onions are decently browned, add one can black beans, with their water, 2 bay leaves, a teaspoon of turmeric, and 1 teaspoon of salt.
5. Simmer over medium-low heat, while it amalgamates. About 10 minutes.
6. Add half of a *drained* can of tomatoes (save the tomato juice in case you have to add liquid later). Let this simmer & amalgamate. If you like you can also add a diced zucchini now.
7. After well-amalgamated, and when the zucchini is barely done, add 1/2 pound finely chopped greens of your choice to the top, but DON'T stir them in. We want them to steam. I used mustard, collard, and kale mixed — anything that doesn't turn to mush when cooked. (I.e. maybe not spinach or chard.)
8. When the greens are perfectly cooked — not tough, but not mushy — stir them in, add salt and lemon if necessary, and eat it with bread while it's piping hot!

Dabravine

Hi everyone...

Week one of my & Behida's Bosnia travels winds down with us on an overnight bus to Sarajevo with Elvira (no not the Mistress of the Dark, the other one, whose family fed B almost every day after B's parents died). We'll be there probably about a week, before heading back north here to Dabravine/Velika Kladusa/Polje (the latter of which may ring a bell if you've seen the actually-really-good Richard Gere movie, The Hunting Party -- it's where Gere dropped off war criminal Karadzic, leaving him to the mob of survivors of his crimes).

First off, I have an announcement: Turkish coffee has no right to be called that. Turks drink tea, constantly. Nor can Greeks, obsessed with Nestle's abomination, whipped no less, justly claim the boiled bean in the tiny cup. I can truly hereby proclaim that it is country Bosnians who craft all social situations around the centerpiece of the half liter long handled froth crowned pot. Most days I've had no less than 8 cups of the stuff. Ok, they *are* tiny, but they're equally strong & plentiful. So be it known: It's flippin Bosnian coffee.

So. Every day here has had a caffeinated common thread. And I'm always glad to be back in a land where you hear god's greatness proclaimed in five different makams (musical modes) over the course of a day, presuming you're awake at 4am for the early one. Other than those things, the only daily similarities have been a heckload of chitchat, and dangit everyone's talkin Bosanski all the damn time. I'm finally starting to understand a little, and I'm learning a very specialized vocabulary, specific to this particular place. Word number one:

Sjedi: sit! For four days I was forbidden to do anything whatsoever useful. My sole provenance was to drink coffee, try to understand Bosnian gossip, and eat (a *lot* of meat, nice to not be vegetarian for once, so I'm not dizzy from lack of protein, but damn that's a lot of meat, which brings me to the next pair of words:

Jagnje & ovdca: lamb & sheep. Notice that I know the words for both the young & mature animal. That's because professional shepherding is still alive & well here, and because when someone who got out to America comes back after 12 years, she better buy a sheep to roast up for all her friends & family (and the strangers who smell the roasted sheep). And if she comes in April, all the adult sheep *may* be pregnant, or may not, but they all get a reprieve until it's known. The lambs, however, do not, poor little morsels. I must say, there's no way to forget the facts of what you're eating when you've watched its glazed eyes rotate on a spit for three hours. Out of respect, I ate a few bites, but was grateful for more gentle fare, like tomatoes ("paradajs", pronounces like heaven, which they are around here; I wish americans could grow tomatoes like these), & more abstract fare, like sausages.

Word three: sram, ashamed or embarrassed. A big thing around here. See reference to gossip above. It's a tiny town, and everyone knows your business, and has an opinion about it. And Behida's family -- mostly related in convoluted ways, such as being children of people adopted by the same other family, there being a long tradition of orphans round here -- tends towards the outcast end of the scale.

For example, her beloved uncle (accounting for two intermediary adoptions) Nurko would, I suspect, be considered a holy sadu in India, but here he's a crazy, mythologically-scary-to-kids wildhaired old poor man who lives in the abandoned Dolic house with all the broken windows & all the junk. Except now:

1. Behida got all the windows fixed
2. He cut his hair, first time in years, for the lamb roast
3. Seven of us cleaned out his entire house today, over the course of six hours of dragging, hauling, breaking, and unfortunately, burning. Behida couldn't bear her childhood house being in such a state, and while she didn't want to tear Nurko's life apart, this paricular collection of stuff was (kindly put) not particularly useful, nor doing him any good.

Next word(s): sjecam se, I remember. Bluntly put, so many people have died -- the war was literally just up the hill -- & continue to die -- murders, cancer; and unused landmines lurk in the woods -- here, so many more have left, and now even the houses are torn down & rebuilt. There are tiny graveyards everywhere; Behida's parents are buried 100 meters downhill from Nurko's house. And while folks are less poor, and have more creature comforts (when Behida left, they didn't have electricity; now everyone's addicted to Facebook), the resulting optimisim is not so deep. I think it's only the classic Muslim fatalism -- if that's what God wants, what can we say? -- that allows folks to carry on without giant stones around their necks. (Compared, for example, to El Salvador, where the despair was ever present.) (Also NB: I'm not implying that folks here are particularly religious; in fact I'd say less so here than San Francisco, even. I just have noticed this "acceptance of fate" as a strong undercurrent in several culturally Muslim areas -- Turkey, Egypt, and Java so far. Palestine was a more mixed bag, as you may have heard.)

Next word: lingespir, ferris wheel. (Sorry, can't type the right "s," but say "lingashpeer." Anyone: is that German? My innerlinguist wants to know.) Straight outta Kusturica, Behida's neighbor Dano is not only a bootlegger with a sideline making honey out of sugar; he's also suddenly fulfilling a childhood dream, erecting a ferris wheel in his backyard (aka Nurko's front yard, aka Zejna & Zlatka & Sedija's side yard, aka halfway up a hill in the middle of nowhere) hoping to attract paying riders (perhaps also hoping to sell his sugar honey and sugar brandy to his sugar suckers). So Sunday he had a friend with a bulldozer level said yard, just in time for the rain which turned it promptly into a mudpit. We'll see how long it takes to get the concession running, and how long before Zejna tears it down in frustration with the throng of patrons parking on her potatoes.

(Krompir, next word, potato. We were supposed to help plant before heading to Sarajevo, but I guess we got overwhelmed with all the coffee we had to drink.)

So there's your linguistic introduction to Behida's hometown. Thanks for reading this far, now you know how to say,
"sit down & drink your coffee, little lamb, on the ferris wheel. I remember potatoes." in broken Bosnian. I'm so proud of you!

Next report will come from the place the Great War started (yet failed to end all wars).

Love p

Peter Jaques, clarinetist & trumpeter ~ www.huzzam.com
Director, Brass Menazeri ~ www.brassmenazeri.com

more props: pro tools plugins

Prop #1 goes to McDSP, which makes some great Pro Tools plugins, and specifically their Project Studio bundle. This bundle consists of limited versions of their most useful plugins (including compressors, EQ, reverb, limiter, saturation, amp simulation, and a seems-to-me-useless synth), but the limitations are not at all crippling. Best $229 I ever spent. Plus you can upgrade any of the plugins to full versions for $69 each; I recommend upgrading at least Analog Channel so you can get the console emulation. With this bundle, and nothing more (aside from Pro Tools LE) you can actually make professional mixes. Unfortunately, they're all ugly. Oh well.

Prop #2 goes to 112 db's Redline Reverb, which is the best in-the-box reverb I've used. Pretty light on your CPU cycles too...

a few props

there are two things i want to tell everyone about, because they rock outright.

1. Bicycle Tutor: bicycletutor.com has free videos on how to fix almost everything on your bike. Which makes you realize it's not that hard. Which gives you the power & confidence to be self-sufficient with your transportation. Which rocks outright.

2. Open source software: I always feel like a schmuck when a friend drops $200 on Microsoft Office, or $900 on Adobe Creative Suite. Because, you know what? Microsoft Office has a nearly perfect, free drop in replacement: Open Office (if you're on a Mac, I recommend the NeoOffice branch). There's a word processor which has almost every Word feature, including file compatibility. There's a spreadsheet which equals Excel, a presentation program like Powerpoint, drawing like whatever MS's drawing program is... Really. Just try it. It's basically 99% compatible, & I bet you won't need Microsoft at all. Really!

And as for Adobe: while it's not as powerful or amazing as Photoshop, the Gimp (yep, really) is a pretty good image editor. I'd guess, unless you're a professional photographer, that it does what you need. As for Illustrator, you might wanna try out Inkscape, which I now actually prefer.

Now I know, you can probably find ways of getting all this stuff for free. Me, I prefer to use stuff that is SUPPOSED to be free, meaning it won't eat my computer if it finds out how I got it, I'll be able to update it to the latest version anytime, and it's developed by people who want to make the best software they can, rather than selling you more unnecessary features.

The Story of Stuff

I hope everyone will watch this video: The Story of Stuff