We are living in the new house now. It's been about a week. I am happy about this, and the girls are as well. I have yet to cook a real meal here yet, however, as many of our things are in flux, or not set up yet. Like, we didn't have any oil for a few days. Cooking without olive oil is like having your plumbing shut off, and if I sound like kind of an asshole for saying that, then that is because I am actually a tremendous asshole, and I only toned it down because I knew you would be reading this.

I need a lawnmower. A gas one. I spent a summer in horror watching the neighbor kid mow our rental with an electric one. That orange extension cord is like a leash from the mouth of hell.

Rick, his little brother Bruce, and I went out for golf today. The sage minds of Glendoveer grafted a sharp Jamaican chap named Nigel into our threesome, and he shared my cart. Aside from Nigel we were all a bit rusty and awful. To his credit, Nigel, who had a great swing and fine touch around the green, played badly.

At this point I feel like this is turning into a Cornelius blog entry, and I do have a glass of wine going, so I'm going to switch this over to the actual Achewood auspices.

G., my baker friend who taught me how to fist a bowl of focaccia batter without fear, left for "bella Eetaly" this week. She's gone for three months. I have sole ownership of her pickup truck, Patches. It's approximately a 1989 Nissan stock base model, off-white with a black hood (held down with cargo lashing). The interior is somewhere between scab and feces. Windshield: cracked in three places. She growls like a Harley but handles like cream. Starts on the first turn. You have to roll down the window and open the door from the outside, but that's just all part of a proper pickem-up deal. I am from Twain Harte, and I like a crappy truck. I'd rather drive this around than a CL600. It's a big middle finger traversing the city. A CL600 is nothing more than a middle finger magnet. Do I like to piss people off with my car? Yes.

The hood, god knows where it came from, is hopefully going to get double-muralized by Tony Millionaire and I when he comes up for our dual signings in OR/WA in Sept. If I play my cards right, Patches just might qualify as an "art car" when G returns around Thanksgiving.

We move out of the southeast of Portland this week, headed directly northeast. I am going to miss the southeast. Rick has become the kind of friend I would have ridden bikes with, as an adolescent. We have projects together, play video game golf together. If one of us looks at the other and puts forth the idea of going to get hot dogs at Zach's Shack at 1am—Rolling Rock tallboys in our pockets—there is only the yes word, and never the no. On the half-mile walk back home, he picks a front garden bouquet for his wife. I hold his beer. I have bad night vision, and would pick only ugly things, or things with incapacitating thorns.

It was nice, after nearly eight years of focusing solely on Achewood—at the expense of friends, family, and self—to have a friend across the street. I felt that I deserved it. I hadn't had "friend fun" much in my later twenties and early thirties. If you noticed that I lately corrected the course of my life a bit, in terms of lessened creative output, that is the reason. In my drive to make Achewood tremendous and flawless, I did forget many times to enjoy these trips around the sun. I forgot almost always. Consider the present of Achewood not the dull old cliche of death and rebirth, but rather the Auger and Grinding Screen of Chance. It's not phoenix and ashes, but rather the same old game of chess, overlaid with the same old game of Whac-A-Mole. Less often, but for the best. I give because I want to give; I do not give less because I want to steal. This is just how it is, now. Change is healthy, change is good, said the worshipers of Aten.

There's a bus that stops one block from my new house, and drops me one block from Rick's house. It's two dollars and takes twenty minutes. It runs all night. It is a resource.

After a bit of research, we added 12 ozs of sugar (a sugar syrup, really) to our strawberry wine. This whole winemaking gambit grows more exciting each day, when one considers the myriad varieties of fruits, nuts, leaves and bark which can be used to ferment. Tonight we looked over recipes for apricot wines which involved crushed almonds, for example. Almonds are an unconventional wine ingredient, to be sure, but think about the flavor they provide to such liqueurs as Amaretto. Not bad, eh? Nothing like your weekly smoked-n-salted tin of Blue Diamond. It's what an almond tastes like when you just let an almond be a girl.

In other news, we tested some interior paints at the new house today (failures, all three), and spent nearly two hours at IKEA waiting for each other to do annoying things. If Joey Chestnut could eat annoying, he would have beaten Kobayashi today. (In this scenario, they are both seated at the table of my family's annoying, and he wins, because Kobayashi, being Japanese, can't stomach our bad manners.)

I include myself in the bad manners, of course. I approach IKEA like the beach at Normandy: anxious and furious and just wanting it to be over. My girls like to dawdle and consider various arrangements of things. I go to IKEA one cesium pulse shy of waving a piece of Klippan loveseat fabric under a German Shepherd's nose and yelling, "Macht schnell, Fitzi! Finden sie das 'Klippan' Liebensofa! Vee haf tree meenooten!"

Not to mix axes and alliances, or anything. Goodnight, and see if you can find a rhyme for "hypokinesis" today.

A Friend of the Library is the baker at Nostrana, turning out daily scratch-made focaccia, ciabatta, and pizza crusts, as well as the odd breadstick or roll. She agreed that it would not be too much of an imposition to let me "shadow" her for a day, and perhaps get my hands dirty. The only catch: she starts work at 4am. I told her I'd be there at 9, but ended up doing that thing where I can't sleep all night because I think I'll sleep through it, so I wound up there at 7:40. I could still feel one too many Space Bowls sloshing around inside me (zero is enough), so she made me a little espresso on their sixty-five thousand dollar machine (my estimate).

The doughs for these fancy breads get made at 4am so they can do their first rise and get their gluten game going. By the time I got there it was time to flop them out of their big tubs and start portioning, so I watched as she did just that. First up was pizza dough, one of the less-scary doughs (this one is not terribly sticky). She cut a few portions and then, magically, right before my eyes, worked one in each hand against the cutting board, in an ambidextrous mirror image, effortlessly folding and kneading a few times before shaping into perfect little baseballs. She tossed me a portion to play with; twenty minutes later I was happily squeezing it around between my hands and making noses on it and such, staying out of her way. She ended up using it, so if you get a terrible leaden pizza tonight at Nostrana, that was me!

Well, I actually did try to emulate that fine italian hand, but I could tell it was going to take more than one try, so I just watched. It happens so fast.

At that point the head chef asked me if I had good handwriting, which I do, if I may be so bold, so she had me write a note to tape on the walk-in cooler asking that people using it shut the door and turn out the light (her logic was that unfamiliar handwriting would cause more of her staff to follow the directions, which is an extremely interesting bit of kitchen psychology, as the handwriting isn't tied to someone you might be predisposed to disobey). I drew a threatening-looking Ray and Roast Beef on it, for good measure, and she recognized them from the comic taped above my friend's baking station. For a moment, I was made to feel more important than an ape-like grunt who can't tell his sponge from his starter. 

The focaccia was a slimy, sexy, forearm-deep experience, and after my diddle with the pizza dough, I started to find my bench legs. I worked into it with the whole upper body, boldly going after the bottom of the huge mixing bowl and folding with the sort of confidence you need when you're working a beast that big (this batch made three full-sheet-pan size focaccia). It was a "clicky" sort of moment, recognizing the sort of strength yet lightness of touch dough needs. It was, perhaps, a spark of addiction.

Nostrana has a wood-burning brick oven the size of a small camper-trailer, and these loaves are baked at 550F. I estimate she loaded the floor of it with fifteen loaves at a time, and they rose to a gorgeous golden brown stature, nearly charred here and there, right to the edge of color. She let me slip the very last raw one off the peel, into a tiny spot that made me feel the way I feel when I have to parallel park in San Francisco. I flubbed it a bit, and the thing ended up shaped like a cashew by the time she rescued it. She assured me it would be used for bruschetta. I think they were just going to chuckle over it after I left and call me "Maladroit Mitch the Idiot Angel."

As it got to be time for me to go, I could sense that no one was going to come out with my name embroidered on a chef's coat and hand me a complimentary basket of salumi and boules, so I tossed my sweaty apron in the linen bin and bid the staff adieu. I have more to recount, but this has gone to length and should be mercifully truncated here.

Next Time: The Myth of the Pizzaiolo: The Higher the Toss, the Smaller the Cock? Also, What Do You Really Know About Boar Taint? And, Does Every Kitchen Staff Refer to Meat Tenderizers as Butt Plugs?

It's Rick's "big important wedding anniversary" today, so we can't play Wii Golf, even though I finally figured out how to get my Mii data onto my handset so I could bring it to his house. Well, I hope they're having fun, because I'm not.

Wait...I am! I am having a strange kind of fun. Listen.

So, I wrote on Facebook, "Chris Onstad has Zapruder footage of Barack Obama being born in North Korea. Call or text. The Truth must be Known."

Some people got the yuk that I was putting a thin one across the "birther" idea, but some did not. Oh, some did not. Some grade school acquaintances "liked" the comment. I clicked on their profiles. They had recently joined things like IMPEACH OBAMA A LOT STRONG, etc. One of the Ayn Rand quoting people was there, incorrectly liking what I said.

It was fun, in a way, to be misconstrued by the walking insane. It was helpful to be reminded that the walking insane grew up alongside us. It was the kind of fun you have when you outgrow the Wet Banana and are 34. Oh, how fun changes, my children. Oh, how fun becomes less about splashing people and more about morbid curiosity regarding their pathologically seeded, unchecked intellectual vectors.

Rick and I tasted the cherry and strawberry wines last night, and I am pleased to report that the original character of each respective fruit survived the fermentation process. There was even a slight burn of alcohol from the sip, which was the big Eureka moment. My notes on the initial tasting say, simply, "GOOD." There was some sourness, a dry character, and the sugar was anything but cloying.

We got to talking about how if we had the means, it would be great to open a pizza and beer place. You know, your favorite childhood pizza parlor. That strength game in the mini-arcade, where you pretend to do a handshake on Uncle Sam or whatever and it rates you from "Pansy" to "He-man." Red venetian glass candles. Gingham. Complimentary giardiniera tray. We could sell our wine there. We talked about this over Husker Du and Wii golf.

Today Rick showed up with a 55-gallon maltodextrin syrup drum (99% empty) that he'd picked up for $10 at a brewing supply shop. We can make some hideously large batches of wine once we get another. He also got a proper siphon pump, which means that future batches of our fermented and distilled products will no longer have trace amounts of our mouth chemicals in them.

Three people started this party, based on an event trailer that still had two good kegs left in it. Flagging down Portland cyclists with a cry of "FREE BEER" resulted in a 90% conversion rate. I estimate it would have been more like 5% in Silicon Valley.

The long-awaited follow up to the Achewood Cookbook is here!

http://www.achewoodshop.com/books-print-only-material.html

Also new in the shop:

Vinyl sticker sets:
http://www.achewoodshop.com/gifts-and-accessories-stickers.html

Framed art:
http://www.achewoodshop.com/fr5x7pr.html

Three more posters:
http://www.achewoodshop.com/posters-and-strips-posters.html

Go ahead, treat yourself to a little high-quality merchandise. All of your orders are now handled by our world-class fulfillment center in Austin, TX -- no waiting, great communication, and automated confirmations.

Thanks from mine to yours!
/C

Rick and I racked the cherry wine. I think we need to buy one of those little bulb-priming siphons, because I worry that sucking on the transfer tube is getting germs in the wine. The must tasted rather like a non-alcoholic cherry cider, but it would have been hard to gauge the effects of any early alcohol in the liquid because it was 11 and we had already had some other wine (plus, Rick had already done something else, as well). Rick spilled a decent amount of the juice onto my right shoe, so the lace is now lavender. Do not think that I wear shoes made of lace; no indeed. I merely mean the shoelace itself. It is (was) white, in a black Puma funster shoe.

Thought: would hipsters seem less irritating if we called them funsters? I vote that we try that. You and me, as a worldwide nation. From Italy to the deep blue sea, let's rid the world of hipsters one funster at a time.

Secret fact: had I been born in 1990, I would not be a hipster today. Back when I was into myself, I tried very hard to dress like The Housemartins/Yeats. I guess these days they'd call something like that "tweemo," for tweed and emo.