Lamb, by Christopher Moore.

This book bills itself as “The Gospel according to Christ’s Childhood Friend, Biff.” With a subtitle like that, my first thought was, “this is either going to be really hilarious or really, really bad.” The good news: it was not really bad. In fact, it was pretty entertaining, suggesting that Christ may have delighted in bacon (who doesn’t, really- why should the savior be any different?), traveled to the Far East, and even had an compulsive obsession with how sex feels (as described to him by above childhood friend. Moore’s Christ may be a bit of a voyeur, but he’s still an abstainer)… If this sounds hugely sacrilegious, then this probably won’t be the book for you. But if you are somewhat of a heathen like me, love funny books, and aren’t immediately turned off, you’ll be surprised to see how respectfully Moore does his mocking. He mocks in the nicest possible way, just like Jesus would. Joshua (as Jesus is called in the book) is as devout as he is portrayed elsewhere, but here is allowed to have a sense of humor, a sense of irony. He has an edge, which seems a pretty realistic conjecture given the life and death he was in for.

Moore has a track record of taking sacred cows and giving them the treatment through his twisted viewfinder. If you haven’t read Fluke, or, I know Why the Winged Whale Sings, and consider yourself a defender of the environment, then you definitely should pick that one up too. In both books, his satire is of the best kind- gently skewering its subjects while retaining an essential respect for the foundations upon which they were created. What makes Lamb fun is that here, those foundations aren’t necessarily the ones you thought Christianity was based upon.

Read it if: you like the gospels according to Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams or Vonnegut

Don’t if: your idea of a good time does not involve theorizing about the Lord as smart mouth with punky pals.

Someone just got an A in his first segment at culinary school… hmmm, who might that me? Hint: ME!

In other news, four local schools competed in a culinary cook-off competition at a trade show down at the convention center, including Art Institute, Saint Paul Tech, Le Cordon Bleu, and my alma mater, MCTC. Who won for the second year in a row? MCTC baby. Those scrappy folks at Art Institue came pretty close though… To be fair, our team (I wasn’t presonally involved this year) had a slight edge based on their knife cuts. I can believe it though, when they displayed the knife cuts (basically little bowls of of veggies cut into verious dices, tournets, and juliennes), some of the other teams offered cuts that would have been sub-standard even in my first year class.

It was nice seeing that, because I had looked hard at Cordon Bleu and AI. Le Cordon Bleu didn’t do much for me, but that AI program looked pretty awesome. Unfortanatly, at 20K a year, I just couldn’t do it. I had not attended any kind of schooling in the past 15 years of my life (aside from a brief but incomplete stint at Brainco), and it ended up being a hard sell– Investing that kinda FAFSA credit is a lot to swallow.

It was at that point, literally one phone call away of pulling the trigger at AI, that I decided I owed it to myself to look into the program at MCTC. I emailed all of the local chefs I could think of to ask if it mattered at all, and revieved exactly one respose– from Hells Kitchen.

Mitch Omer, the proprietor of Hells Kitchen, basically told me that the culinary shool is a great idea, community or private. Badgering chefs for a job also happens to be a perfectly acceptable course of action. From a guy that has probably the only breakfast in town worth waiting in line for (well, him and Victor from Victor’s 1959 Cafe), this was great advice.

Speaking of Hell’s Kitchen… we all know about how good it is. But, does everyone happen to be aware of the that that the place sports one of the most unsung and absolutely unique beer selections in the twin cities? Not bad for a joint that is not even open nights.

-shogunmoon

Hey Y’all,

Been a while since I have been able to post regularly. That is why I have some guest posters going, like our fantastic Duluth correspondent Woodland Rock. I trust the quality is up there with mine? HAH! Yea, that is pretty funny. I have another guest poster in mind as well… we shall see.

What has been going on around the Casa De La Shogun? Well, in the case of Christie, she is maintaining her average of 2-3 books a week… hopefully those if you who are literate out there dig her posts.

Me? Well, first off, until this week I had been working part time at the illustrious Bad Waitress. Why have I not mentioned this? Just seems like bad ju ju to bad-mouth or good-mouth some place that I am getting paid to work at. I have some great stories I can and will relate to you about hilarious misdeeds and chaos in a new restaurant, but I am going to wait a while and make sure everyone who had a part in these adventures has quit. I never needed the job, but most of the people there still do. So. It is amusing to read about the various reviews and amateur write ups regarding the Bad Waitress. My take will come all in good time, once perspective has been gained.

In other news, I have been attending culinary school. Full time. 8 freaking am, my ass is up, making classic French sauces, calling then by their classic French titles, and frantically trying to keep my damned uniforms washed! Woo hoo. Maybe I will post a photo of me in my sweet-assed whites. Ladies… I warn you in advance, this may cause you to, er, well, probably laugh. heh. For what it is worth though, I am doing pretty good so far. I can make the FRAK out of a hollandaise. Folks, hollandaise is super easy… but not as easy understanding of the basic Mother Sauce-Child Sauce concept. Brown Stock –> Espagnole –> Demi-Glace. That one is free.

In addition to that, we are studying “healthful” cooking and alternate diets, which is cool. They are forcing us to know how to accommodate the culinary equivalent of a battalion of frothing young Spaniards heading out on their first crusade, the vegans. All I have to say is this: when I start my cafe and go through the hassle of developing great food for them, they better tip my waitstaff well, and not give them any bullshit. Believe me, it ain’t gonna be portabello sandwiches and boca burgers from me… these dishes will be as good as any cro-magnon dead animal entrees. Most vegetarians are pretty reasonable tippers, and appreciate a good meal… I don’t get why vegans can’t follow suit. Is there something in the cheese that pacifies normal veggies? Message to the Vegans… Some day, when you start acting like civilized citizens, and give up on the militant dogma bit, you may get some proper treatment. Trying to put the established culinary community to the torch does not endear you to chefs. No one likes a zealot. Chefs work their asses off, and generally have enough bullshit to deal with to spend time worrying about ungrateful cranks with special diets. Now, a GRATEFUL crank with a special diet that likes to tip… something different entirely.

That said, I have had time to eat out a little, and will soon be revealing to you the best Pho in town west of the Mississippi. Hint? It ain’t even in the Minneapolis city limits.

Stay tuned!

-shogunmoon

Now you can be even more dazzling at cocktail parties (because of course you’re already fascinating and savvy folk), impressing all with your deep cultural suavity and worldly experiences! If you’re interested in what’s going on in the local arts scene and would like to dig deeper than what the A-List offers, go sign up for access+ENGAGE, the self proclaimed definitive alternative arts journal. In this, the first issue, they cover everything from 3d Animation to collage art to music, as well as a ton of other things, including many interviews with artists and the all-important listings.

It’s a great little newsletter, delivered to your inbox twice monthly for the low, low price of free. Plus, it’s edited by former the Ruminator Review editor and a close personal friend of G&P, and with an intro like that, how can you resist?

Ted and I went duck hunting on a Friday morning in October, rose in the pitch black at a quarter to six and strode quietly across our backyard and down to the lake where the canoe awaited us. A thick fog surrounded our house and the lake in our backyard, and everything was silent. I carried the life jackets and Teddy his shotgun. We were bound for a lake near our place that Ted had heard about from the folks down the road at a place called Chalstrom’s General Store. He’d bought his hunting license there a week prior, from a man wearing head to tow blaze orange, in a room filled with gigantic stuffed heads mounted on brown paneled walls.
Admittedly I doubted Ted’s ability even after watching him shoot beer cans off an upturned log in the front yard. But we’d just moved to the country and I’d decided that part of living in rural Northern Minnesota meant doing rural Minnesotan things. Like getting up well before sunrise and paddling around in the dark while wearing two pairs of long underwear under my jeans.
Out on the lake the fog was so thick we could hardly see where we were going. Once we’d paddled 100 feet from our dock our house was no longer visible, our little craft lost in a swirl of black night and silver water particles. We stopped moving, let ourselves float in the dark and the silence, let the possibility of nothing else take us in.
“The thing about fog that’s so crazy,” I said, “is that if you’re actually out doors and in it you can see it, all those tiny water droplets just dancing in mid air.” Until then I hadn’t thought of fog as a tangible thing.
“I know,” Ted agreed. “Also, I kind of wish we were stoned.”
A brief discussion of whether or not to go back to the house and take on that endeavor followed. We soon decided, “best if we don’t” and headed north instead, to find the tiny stream which left our lake and led to a pond a mile or so away. This took a few tries because Ted had only a vague idea of where it was, of which houses and which plots of land it was located in between. We found it eventually, had to jack the canoe over some fallen logs and portage it across a gravel road, and viola, into the pond. From the pond we took another stream, wound our way through tall water grasses and trees, passed houses and RV’s and at least one private landfill. The fog lifted a little with the daylight, but still kept the visibility at a minimum and the clouds in the sky stayed thick. I sat in back and paddled and Ted sat up front, wielding his shotgun. He was half standing, his skinny body crouched and the rifle pointed, ready to explode it with each new bend in the stream.
The fog made the air and the water gray and the grasses brown with a somewhat purple-ish hue. It filled the air between us, seemed to hang low from the sky and rise off the water simultaneously, and at times was so thick we actually misjudged our turns. There were all of these tiny tall-grass islands that the stream would split around unexpectedly, only to then join up with itself a few feet later.
It was a little like being explorers, charting unknown waters, following random streams. We had a map, or at least Ted had looked at one before we’d left the house, and we hoped that when we took the left fork in the stream it lead to tiny Jacob’s lake and not to monestrous Island Lake.
“I feel like Lewis and Clark,” I said. I didn’t think Lewis and Clark actually navigated Northern Minnesota in their canoe, but I wasn’t sure.
“Seriously,” Ted replied. “Can you imagine?”
For a moment I mourned the fact that I would probably never know, that most of us will probably never know what it could have been like to be somewhere and not know anything about where it was you were going. And I’m not talking a spur-of-the-moment-road-trip, when you and your friends take off in your car with a full tank of gas and just drive until you can’t drive no more. I’m talking about literally having no idea what is around the next bend in the stream - ducks or more water or a settlement of people or a bunch of elephants. I mean, obviously not in Northern Minnesota - but it wouldn’t have been obvious to Lewis and Clark back then, would it have? No, it wouldn’t. And that’s exactly what I mean.
After navigating this same stream for nearly an hour and passing over a small dam, about a foot tall, we landed in what we hoped to be Jacob’s lake. The fog was too thick to know for sure because we couldn’t see the shore on the other side, just a small island in the middle covered with birch trees.
Ted instructed me to stay close to the shore. Within minutes he spotted, shot, and hit a mallard - color me impressed. Unfortunately the job was not complete and our feathered friend swam to shore, made it up on land, and waddled away before we could go after him. By the time we reached land, which also happened to be someone’s yard, and Ted hopped out of the canoe to capture his kill, the duck was no where to be found. Ted walked around the property for about five minutes, carrying his shot gun and checking under overturned boats and scouting out the trees nearest to the yard. I stayed in the beached canoe, ready to shove of, waiting for the owner of the property to bust through the screen door wearing a wife beater and tighty-whitey’s, screaming at Teddy and waving a gun of his own. Although a native Minnesotan myself, I wasn’t yet convinced that our somewhat backwoods, Northern neighbors were not stereotypes of themselves.
But no such scene occurred and we continued along the shoreline. Teddy shot a couple more times and missed, and also managed to nearly mow down a decoy floating near a rock. I was beginning to think we would fail miserably and return home with out bounty, and that Ted would bitch about it for subsequent weeks to come. But then up ahead to our left, out on open waters, sat a cluster of ducks enjoying some communal fishing time. Maybe they were busy chatting, or maybe it was the fog, or perhaps Ted and I really are stealth killing machines, but the ducks didn’t move. Ted looked at me like, “Should I?” I shrugged and nodded, as if to say, “What the heck are we out here for?” and he opened fire. And as the living took flight, two poor souls rested on the water.
“Go, go, go!!!!!” Ted started yelling, “Come on hurry up!!”
I was thinking, “What is this, ‘hurry up and go, go, go?’ Is there a motor somewhere that I haven’t seen?” But I hauled ass anyway, shrieking from the frenzy of the moment, and Ted picked up the Other Oar, a florescent orange plastic paddle that looked like it was meant for a kayak. We paddled as fast as possible and the whole time I was wondering how we would get there fast enough, how we could reach those duckies before they were water logged and sank to the bottom, why we didn’t bring some sort of dog along?
I learned an important thing about ducks and duck hunting that day folks. Those ducks float, yes they do.
Ted picked them up out of the water and put them in the canoe between us, and there they lay, all limp and soaking, and I tried not to look at them too much.
We got another one the same way but I guess that one wasn’t quite dead because Ted picked it up out of the water, put one hand around its head and the other just below its neck, and told me I might not want to watch. I turned my head away, looked down at the water instead, and out of no where began to belt out that Elton John song from the Lion King, The Circle of Life. I didn’t know I knew the lyrics, and by the time I’d sang the chorus once through it was over. And then there were three, two mallards and a lady bird, lying in between Ted and I.
Ted thought that three was his the limit and I had to get to work, so we decided to make for home. We’d been heading in one direction around the lake so we kept going, and while we paddled the sun rose higher, burning off the fog and revealing the scenery before us. We’d been in Jacob’s Lake after all, it was so small we could see the whole place from our canoe, save for what was on the other side of the island. The trees were in full color all over the lake, their red, yellow and orange leaves like a paisley scarf against the light blue sky, and big white clouds cruised slowly over their crowns. The water was clear next to the canoe and blue across the lake, and the prairie grasses and cattails and wild flowers grew thick along the banks. W found our opening with out trouble, and with frozen hands and soaking feet we paddled home, me and Teddy and the three ducks between us, sacrificial lambs on the silver canoe bottom.

Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire
Read this memoir of pre 1959 life in Havana if you want to get really, really sad and/or angry about Castro and what he’s done to that island. It’s amazing how similar the middle class in Havana was to what we understand the middle class in the US to have been in the 50s. Eire was the child of a judge, living the wonderful, oblivious life that every kid should be allowed to live- playing with firecrackers, chasing lizards, riding his bicycle. If it wasn’t for the fact that the neighbors had monkeys and his father believed himself to be Henry XVI, you’d never know he wasn’t growing up in your neighborhood. Depending on where you live, that is.

Eire’s writing is shot through with his mixed feelings about his country and his family- extreme love and happy memories as well as disgust and heartbreak over what happened and continues to happen there. Even if you aren’t interested in the political stuff, you will still find much to enjoy about this book. In fact, I think as a childhood memoir it’s more affecting because of the way that young Carlos is aware of the changing times on some level, but still essentially a child, unconcerned with the world beyond his own garden. Eire’s technicolor descriptions of the transcendent joy of car-surfing a flooded seaside road with his father (on purpose!) or hurtling breadfruit at his friends (or enemies, depending on whose hedge they were behind) until the street is a sloppy, bread-fruity mess, offer a glimpse not only into pre-Revolution Cuba, but also into a childhood lovingly recalled.

The salads and sandwiches and Suzi’s have always been huge and tasty, allowing one to select from a list of ingredients as varied as their jukebox and as long as the wait for a deep dish pizza on a Friday night. Choice is great, and we’ve often gone there just for the salads when craving something fresh and green, made exactly as we like it. Just the other night, in fact, the urge hit and we found ourselves admiring the tiki statuary before we knew it.

I was pleased to discover, however, that the menu now has four salads with pre-determined ingredients. I ordered the Blackened Chicken Caesar, a steal at only 7.25. It had a classic Caesar dressing - anchovies and all (mixed in, not on top). The only complaint: no fresh parmesan. Why go for the gold with the anchovies and then use cheese powder, Suzi’s? Even so, it definitely hit the “fresh and green” spot, a spot that can be hard to satisfy at a bar in meat-and-fried-itemscentric Northeast.

Anyway, there are three others, all of which look good, and some new sandwiches on the menu as well. You can read about them on their highly entertaining website, www.psychosuzis.com. Pretty standard fare, but I think perfect for those times when choosing your own salad toppings is way less interesting than the choice between Rum and Tequila and whether to keep the tiki mug or not.