In which we're in the soup now

bviously, after an extended absence, The Cornet Player should bring you up to date on what's happened in the last year or so. I've got a new laptop, Ulco Bedd is playing guitar in a background tab (He plays there, to make us happy here). So the story of what's been happening:

Or, how about not? Or at least, not yet? Instead, I will tell you how I unlocked the Secret Cabalistic Secret of Onion Soup. 

Preparatory exercise: Mutter to yourself, several times, "It should be harder than this." 

The first problem with onion soup is, that it's soup. Eating soup involves the ability to manipulate a spoon, with subtle, graceful movements of one's thumb. If The Cornet Player could still do stuff like that with his thumb, he would still be The Saxophone Player, so that's off the table, in more ways than one. But! Onion soup solves this problem with the additions of "croutons" which transform the soup partway down the spectrum from substance (basically unmanageable) to object (basically manageable.) 

Let me reassure the reader, that we will not use the artificially flavoured objects usually sold under that name.

Why not? The diligent reader will remember, of course, The Puckle Gun.

It was designed to shoot round bullets at Christians, and square bullets at Turks, for reasons which were so obvious at the time, that nobody bothered to record the least hint of what they were. But to struggle onwards in ignorance was always the lot of man, so "Forward!" is the cry. The reason that this is relevant is that nobody has recorded what was done with all the unused square bullets. 

Also, nobody knows where those odd, square-ish objects sold under the name of "croutons" come from. I'm not saying there's any connection between the two mysterious, square objects. I'm just given to wondering, in the late hours of the evening, when all is dark and quiet, and one's thoughts go wandering into strange, frightening place... 

But I digress. Because we're not using them. We're using some of the infinite possible choices that are better. 

So, having dismissed this intrusive digression, let us consider the main problem: Caramelized onions. How to caramelize onions. Do we use low heat? Medium low heat? Slightly higher than low medium, with an addition of baking soda? Do we stir constantly, or 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off? 

Dear reader, you will be overjoyed to know that the answer to all of the above is: "No." 

The secret to caramelizing onions, as many other things, is "Less Effort." Peel and slice and chop a load of onions (I like to do about six pounds. I would give that to you in metric, but my knife refuses to cut in decapascals per hectare, and I'm too tired to argue.) Put them in a slow cooker on low. Stir them about every two hours, if you're feeling manic, and just have to do something. Six or twelve hours later, they will be about 75% smaller, and dark brown, and very pungent, and if that's not caramelized, it will do until the real thing comes along. 

Now, bung them all in the fridge. Put them in a container first, unless you like cleaning your fridge a little more than anyone should. Use a container with a tight lid, unless you like everything to taste like fried onions, not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Go to a butcher's shop. Not a supermarket. Not a cutesy corner of the local megastore, with a designer sign that says "Butchery Shoppe." I'm talking about a place that does nothing else, and has multiple members of the same family behind the counter, and cuts stuff to order. Ask them for some soup bones. I get three 1" slices, with some meat on it. You may develop other preferences. It's cool. 

Just don't use this stuff.

Or this stuff.

Please? Every time someone uses that stuff, Ajit Pai eats a kitten. 

Ajit Pai, FCC Chairman, and opponent of net neutrality.

 

Put your soup  bone in the slow cooker. Put in an onion. Cut it in half. Peel it, if you're feeling all Martha-Stewart. Wash off a stalk of celery, and throw it in. Add a couple of bay leaves. Put in a carrot, if you're feeling ambitious. Fill the slow cooker with water. Finally, and this is important, turn it on. Put it on high until it boils. Put it on low if you're leaving the house. Add water if it gets low. Let it go for a day or so. 

Then, using whatever method suits your temperament and MMPI classification, remove the stock (the watery brown stuff) from the slow cooker, and leave the bones and vegetables behind. Now, TASTE THE STOCK. It will need salt. If you don't add salt, you will make a lot of weird onion soup. DAMHIKT.* Just add salt until it tastes right.

Then, mix up the caramelized onions, and the stock. You have soup. You can refrigerate it, freeze it, reheat it, all that good stuff, and there's no worries. 

BUT! about the croutons: Get yourself a half-price stale baguette. Slice it up thinnish. Put it in a bag, and keep it handy. When you want soup, put some in a bowl, cover the top with the slices of  baguette, and  nuke it. My bowls take about two minutes to two and a half, but your bowls may be different.

Still doesn't look like the stuff at the restaurant, though, right? You need cheese. You can use old cheddar, mild cheddar, smoked cheddar, gouda, gruyere (if you're rich) even mozzarella and parmesan. Just grate it first, and let it sit on the hot soup for a bit. It will melt down and be perfect. the croutons will soak up the soup, and make it less able to fall out of the spoon. All will be well in the world. 

(If you're in a hurry, you can melt the cheese with another 30 seconds in the microwave, or under a broiler, or use a creme brulee torch, or a plumber's torch, or the gas axe,

or a war surplus flame thrower. (Some of these options are more prudent than others.) 

And that's it, folks. Scale-able, cheap, dead easy, and relatively quick. Enjoy. 

Oh yes, one other thing: In the meantime, The Cornet Player is getting good at cooking stuff that doesn't need chewing. A very bright young fellow in The Little Smoke is trying to save the implant which constitutes half of the last working pair of molars left to y'r ob'd't s'rv'nt. He is likely to succeed, BTW, but that's the kind of year it's been.  

More soon, I hope, as more doin's transpire. Stay warm, y'all.


*DAMHIKT: don't ask me how I know this.

In which is a sort of Montage...

ell, it's time to get this year the hell out of the way, in the (probably delusional) hope that next year cannot be worse. Now where were we? 

When last we saw our hero, he was playing an E flat tenor horn (or alto. It's a bit complicated, really.) He had bought the thing in October, and was rapidly discovering its abilities, and limitations, not to mention his own.

One thing the Cornet Player has been jonesing for since he hit The Eastern Province (besides the chance to play more cornet) is the chance to do some small-group singing. Early this year, he saw a tiny opportunity (excuse?) to assemble a small ensemble, and led them in performing a choral evensong. (First one in The Wee Town in a generation.) 

There was a Mag and Nunc by a guy named John Smith (yeah, sure!) which had the virtues of being homophonic, and tonal, fairly easy to learn, and... well, that about exhausts its catalogue of virtues. We did that, and introduced four of the six singers to the concept of Anglican  Chant. (Stick with me, kid, you see a lot of things you never imagined.) It... worked. And we're going to do another two or three next year, see if we don't.

 In June, the Cornet Player found out that there was a Brass Band School operating in The Eastern Province, and thought, "I bet that would be a cool thing to do next year. I could find out how good real players are, I could see some of the actual repertoire that this horn is meant to play, I would do a whole lot of playing in a short time, and Get Better!" 

And then he thought, "Actually, I want to do all of those things Right Now!" and enrolled this year, at the last minute. What could possibly go wrong?

Um, yeah. About that... 

The highest note that the Cornet Player had so far played in public was a (written) F sharp. Remember that bit. It comes into the story later. 

It turns out that the "Brass Band Summer School" does three rehearsals and eight performances over the course of two weeks, in a Very Large Military Show. That's besides the rehearsals and concerts that the band does on its own. "...a whole lot of playing in a short time." Yup. Got that base covered. 

Downloaded the music... It printed in landscape format. Almost as if we were going to play it from marching band lyres. (The lyre is a device that promises to hold the music where the player can see it. At least I think it's spelled that way.) How strange. I've seen brass bands on Youtube, and they play sitting down, off real music stands....  

Put the music on the stand... Turn to the first number... first note... Remember that F sharp? (I told you to remember it!) Yeah, that's where it starts. That couldn't be a sign, could it? 

So, the Cornet Player gets a ride to the Little Smoke from the Local Anglican Cleric, gets registered, and has a great time, gets a whole lot better, it's an absolutely perfect two weeks. Okay, there was a moment or two when he was inclined to bounce the horn off a concrete wall, and quit music forever...  But the Local Anglican Cleric never got a call from TCP saying, "Get me out of here, it's driving me crazy!" (or, worse, from the director of the school, saying, "Get HIM out of here, he's driving me crazy!" so we're chalking that up as a win. 

The summer continued with many travels and adventures, and a couple of gigs in different churches, but more about that later...

In which a long hidden truth is revealed.

ack in the late winter, I started this post. Before I got it published, it was far too hot for meatloaf, or anything involving an oven. Then I blinked, and the cycle of the seasons had turned from Still Winter, through Road Construction, to Really Pretty Much Winter Again Already. So here it is.

Before we go any further, it must be understood that meatloaf has a bad rap. Not the "Karl Rove and friends try to perform hip-hop for a Republican banquet" kind of bad rap. The other kind. The kind where people say bad stuff about you without a basis in reality, like "He's not much of a guitarist. He just sounds like a young Eric Clapton."

So, here is What A Meatloaf Should Be. This is the Platonic Meatloaf, which defines all other meatloaf by the resemblance to this concept. It's not dry, it's not tasteless, it's not difficult. Forget whatever you've seen or experienced. This. Is. Meatloaf.

Start with meat. Ground meat. Probably beef, but veal, pork, or chicken would work. You could probably do it with moose, cape buffalo or caribou. How much? About, oh, that much. Somewhere between two and four pounds, depending on how many loaf pans you have, and how many people you want to feed. You're going to use one of those plastic wrapped packages from the supermarket, so use whatever's cheap today, or whatever's at the bottom of the freezer and just has to be used up now. (If it's in the freezer, you'll have to thaw it out. Making meatloaf with frozen meat is pointlessly difficult and unrewarding. Also somewhat painful. DAMHIKT*)

You're going to need meat, oats, onions, cumin, oregano, salt, pepper, ground aniseed, green pepper or celery or celery salt, eggs and a Tomato Based Sauce-Related Thing. 

Start by cranking the oven up to your favourite baking temperature. Do it now. Not later. For the sake of the argument, we'll say 350 Fahrenheit. (I'm an old guy. I never learned to eat in Centigrade, we never had that in school in my day, we just weren't that posh.) 

Get out your loaf pans. There are many ways to prepare loaf pans, and everybody will tell you a different one. I like doing weird stuff, so I'll tell you the one that actually works. Get Parchment Paper. It's in the grocery store, rolled up in a skinny box beside the waxed paper. There was a time when to get parchment you had to start by skinning a goat, or burgling a scriptorium if you were agile and stealthy enough, but now they just sell it in stores. What a time to be alive! But I digress.

Cut a strip of parchment paper long enough to just barely cover the INSIDE BOTTOM of the loaf pan from end to end. It will be a lot wider than it is long, but let the extra bits hang over the sides of the pan if you're cool with that, or cut them off at the top of the pan, if you're fussy.

Oh yeah, put the parchment paper in the pans... but you already figured that out, right?

Look at the meat you're going to use. Fix the volume in your mind. Now divide that volume by three. That's how much oats you use. What kind of oats? Almost any kind of oats. Steel-cut oats. Rolled oats. Quick oats. Instant oats with artificial cinnamon flavour. (Okay, you CAN use the last one, but it's not recommended.).

You now have the meat in one container, and the oats in another. What kind of container? It's up to you. Plastic hard hats, surplus oil pans, lovingly hand-crafted hickory urns, it's your call. My personal favourite is steel or aluminum bowls of useful size, but I'm not trying to cramp your creativity here. Next step is to soak the oats. You can use water, milk, soy sauce, red wine, white wine or any beer  you have in the house that is not Budweiser. (Because nobody should have Budweiser in their house.) My best results are from soy sauce or red wine, but, hey, use yak's milk if you want, as long as the oats get nice and soggy. Use just enough to get the oats a little soggy. Any more, and your meatloaf will take a long time to cook.

To the oats, add, per pound of meat: 

• cumin and oregano, a teaspoon or two; 
• salt and pepper, as much as you'd like; 
• either a bit of very finely chopped celery or green pepper or some celery seed; 
• a teaspoon or two of ground aniseed THIS IS IMPORTANT, DO NOT FORGET IT, IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD! Find somebody who sells it, and you will have a new friend -- one with aniseed.
• About a quarter of an onion, chopped as finely as you have patience for;
• and an egg. 

Once the oats are nicely soggy, mush the oats-and-stuff up with your hands until it's homogeneous, or homogeneous-ish. Then add the meat, and repeat the whole mushing-up exercise, for at least as long as you think reasonable. 

Now that you have raw-meat-soggy-oats-raw-egg gunk all over your hands, aren't you glad you started by turning on the oven and getting out the pans? Otherwise, you would have to wash your hands, and turn on the oven, etc, and then stick your hands back into the raw-meat-soggy-oats-raw-egg gunk, which would be less fun than it sounds.

Now, if you used fresh, never-frozen meat, you must make The Decision: Do you really want meatloaf? Because if you split this up into four ounce disks, you will have the best hamburgers ever. You can freeze them (if you used fresh ground meat) or pan fry them, or flour them and brown them and braise them in red wine, which will not only taste amazing, but are likely to turn purple, which will make you the Coolest Dad Ever... 

Um, where was I? Oh yeah.

Put the meat stuff in the pan or pans. Divide it as evenly as you can be bothered to. Push it down flat on top. 

Cover the top of the meat with the Tomato Based Thing. Traditionally, it should be non-chunky Salsa, but it can be spaghetti sauce, ketchup, or crushed tomatoes, if you're stuck. Its purpose is mostly to keep the meat from drying out, so the flavour is not critical. You could use slices of tomato, which would not be wrong, just really, really weird.

Sling those pans into the oven, and prepare for the Smell of Incredible Coolness to develop. Leave it in there until it reaches the Safe Temperature. How long will depend on what you (or your S.O.) considers to be the Safe Temperature and what your oven considers to be 350 degrees F. Opinions on both subjects vary hilariously, but it takes some serious effort to over-cook this meatloaf. 

When it reaches the mystical temperature of safety, pull it out of the pans and put it on a plate to slice. If you left the ends of the parchment paper intact, you even have something to lift it out by. 

Leftovers will refrigerate safely for a couple of days, but usually somebody eats it before then.


That's it for now. Watch this space to see What the Cornet Player Did Next.


*Don't ask me how I know this

In which is a mighty screw-up.

fter the demise of the Mutant Garage from Hell, there was a pressing need for a garden shed. Getting a garden shed involves a crucial decision: build from scratch (slow, frustrating and expensive) or buy a kit (also slow, frustrating and expensive.)

The choice is obvious. The kit includes the chance to cuss at the stupidity of the designer and builder. This is a refreshing break from cussing at your own stupidity, and well worth the money.

So, seats were removed from a van, in preparation for the pickup. This is a job for two large men, or one cornet player who played football without a helmet. Removal of the seats was accomplished without actual loss of digits, and deemed therefore to be a success. A journey was made to the nearest branch of the BORG (Big Orange Retail Giant) which had the relevant shed in stock.

The journey was not short. It had the quality common to Wagnerian operas and all other journeys in the Eastern province  of being much longer than you would imagine possible, and happening fairly late at night, while you wish you could just go home about halfway through.

(May I pause to mention how admirably the Eastern Province has risen above the traps of materialism? In some places, a man seeking a shed would be overwhelmed with the importunate offers of a crowd of shed-merchants pestering him with multiple redundant sheds. Not here. Here, the purchase of anything from a slow-cooker to an ordinary Northumbrian Spoke-shaver's Coracle involves something like a pilgrimage, and many hours of slow contemplation behind the wheel. Sometimes a sort of lectio divina of the provincial road maps as well... but I digress.)

Having acquired the shed, I assembled it with much help from Number 1 Son. There's a interesting "blame the victim" approach to the instructions that come with shed kits. The instructions are written with an assumption that shed parts are made by the factory, and mistakes are made by the customer. This assumption is poorly supported by reality. (Naughty, naughty reality!)

The assembly is actually fairly straightforward, rather on a level with teaching a rhinoceros to play scrabble: First, a foundation was assembled, and shimmed until we were too bored to shim it any more.

Dude, did we use enough shims?

Then, bits were screwed together, in an order as rigid as the court protocol of the Kingdom of Absurdly Rigid Protocol.

World's tallest midget for scale.

Then more bits are screwed together.

Something something house begins to close upon the growing something...

Until it looks like this:

Not Shown: Assembly of Floor Kit. Because madness.

The kit contains about 400 parts, of which approximately 370 are screws of different sizes. The customer also needs a number of things not supplied with the kit, or mentioned in the quadralingual (English, French, Spanish, and possibly Klingon) instructions: Unearthly patience. Meticulous organization. Fair weather (strangely, unavailable from the manufacturer, even as an optional extra). A complete lack of wind, (unavailable even as a third party aftermarket add-on.) And most of all, multiple drill bits of a size to re-drill the 47 mis-aligned pilot holes in the parts provided.

It does not matter how meticulously you level and square everything, some of those holes are determined to stick it to the man, and will never fall in line. Don't sweat it, don't stress, and never try to negotiate with them. Just drill more holes.

Eventually, the shed was up.

As Plumbun Major put it: "Dadats 'ome."

Tune in next time for the greatest hits of the 15th century, I kid you not.

In which A-WAY

When last we saw our hero, he had gained the upper hand on the the Mutant Garage from Hell, and had wrestled it to the ground, without injury or damage.

Almost. 

He now had to induce it to leave the premises Vigorous persuasion was required, so the demonic contract with the Saw of Reciprocity was extended. It's called the Saw of  Reciprocity, because the damage it does to the target is balanced by the damage it does to the hands of the user.)

We begin with the Dumpster of Unusual Size, seen here in the background.  (Visiting Anglican Cleric for scale.) There is no larger in the Valley of Apples and Wine. Notice that it sits crosswise in the driveway. This was the best the delivery guy could do without accidentally putting his rig into the creek across the street. It is 30 cubic yards. (The cubic yard is the equivalent of the metric measurement "kindofalot." That would make this dumpster the equivalent of the metric 1.5 helluvalots.)

And so the long week wore on. As the days slowly disappeared in a welter of sweat, frustration and trashed saw blades, so did the garage,

bit

How do you eat an elephant?

by bit

 by bit

One bite at a time.

 by bit.

And now for shovel and broom...

It did not go without a fight. As the battle progressed, it resisted by slowly turning, in places, into something like topsoil. Kind of hard to pick up and drag to the dumpster. Here we catch it part way through the transformation.

30 seconds later, you could plant daisies in it.

Eventually, the last of it was here:

That's right. The Dumpster of Unsurpassed Largeness was not large enough. We filled another 10 yard dumpster.

In the process, it destroyed one circular saw demolition blade, dozens of recip. saw blades, and a pair of brand-new leather work gloves.

It didn't do the cornet player a lot of good either.

Cornet player. Portions of warranty no longer valid.

But, Plumbun Major perhaps summed it up best:

"Dadats. Saaaw. Uh-oh. A-gain. BOOM! A- Way."

Watch this space for a quick one in which there is an almighty screwing up.

In which it all goes sideways.

hen last we saw our hero, he had completed Phase the First of the Project That Lurks in My Nightmares, and was on his way to the second part of the project, which was removal of the garage. 

A bit of history: The garage in question started life as a happy little garage, with an ordinary peaked roof, on an ordinary concrete pad, in a totally normal residential neighborhood in This Eastern Province. Then, one of the previous owners decided to turn it into a body and fender shop. It was too small for the purpose, which might have prompted a more reflective man to open a body OR fender shop, but not him. "Go big or go home!" he cried. "In both bodies and fenders I shall deal, 'though hell should bar the way!"

And he proceeded to double the size of the garage, by adding a couple of flat-roofed sections. Now, there are ways to build truss roofs which have multiple different slopes. He, apparently, did not know any of them. Agriculture Canada (among many, many other knowledgeable outfits) has published a number of free and authoritative pamphlets, brochures, short courses and webpages on building such trusses. The information is clear, consistent, and expressed at the technical level of a music major. He bravely disregarded them all. He had his vision. He had his courage. He had no damn clue what he was doing. 

And so, a cornet player appeared on the scene with a reciprocating saw and a grim sense of being in the unfeeling grasp of cruel fate...

Now the roof, as previously established, was unsafe to walk on. Or under. Or to investigate from too short a distance. Hell, you should probably be wearing Green Patch boots and a hard hat while you read about it. So, the cornet player evolved a strategy. 

First, remove all the sheathing that's removable, leaving something like this:

 New Reality Show: The Naked Garage.

(more sheathing got cut off after that picture). Along the way, cut out this

temporary support, while there's still enough walls up that it won't kill you (you hope.)


Then, cut out about two thirds of the studs, and all the studs on the front wall, leaving this:

You're goin' down!

Recruit the resident Visiting Anglican Cleric, and begin pushing on the two back corners. It rocks, and comes back. It rocks a little farther and comes back. Continue until it lands on Canada, about seven feet west of where it started:

Yeah, you.

Strikes dramatic Big-Game-Hunter pose just like Ernest Hemingway.

Notice weapon of choice. Notice Official Smug Look. Notice the damn garage is now lying on the ground!

Come back soon to hear What The Cornet Player Did Next.

In which we take a fence...

This is the situation so far:

marks the spot where Plumbun Major lives with Number One Son And DIL, (recently joined by Plumbun Minor.) Y marks a flowing body of water which is MUCH bigger than it looks on the map. And so, there is to be a fence. And there is learning.

     The first thing to be learned is that the makers of post-hole diggers are sunny, happy optimists, who live in a different world than the rest of us - a better one. And apparently, a world populated by astonishingly large people. Do a google on John Grimek, or Magnus Samuelsson, you'll get the idea.

     There is a thing called a "One Man Post Hole Digger." It can, ideally, be used by one man. If he's a very big man. Preferably with a very large friend who just wants to hang around and help. Similarly, there is a machine called the "Two Man Post Hole Digger." It has four handles, which should tell you what you need to know.

     The next thing to learn is that This Eastern Province is a place of deep roots. Large roots. Many roots. Also rocks, some of them the size of Kanye West's ego. So, when you start the project with the placement of perfect, round holes, exactly vertical, in a perfect straight line... yeah. That's not going to happen. You also learn that, while the makers of post-hole diggers have a cheerful, indomitable outlook on life, they do not pass this attitude on to their creations. The holes are supposed to go down below the frost line. In reality, they go down to where the machine gives up, sometimes because of rocks, sometimes because of roots, and sometimes, apparently, just because of a deep, existential despair.

     So, you have your holes. You insert your fence posts. You insert the concrete mix, and the water, and hold the the post vertical, as it starts to set. There's a nifty device that shows that the post is vertical. It's called a level, which is kind of a bizarre name, if you think about it too long. Fortunately, by this time you're tired enough that you're not really thinking too deeply.

     The next day, you go looking for a fence stretcher, which, it turns out, unlike the fabled board stretcher and rail stretcher, is a thing. It's just a thing you can't find for love or money. So, you go to plan be. You insert a tension bar into the chain link, and enlist a holidaying cleric to attach the nuts and bolts, while an ordinary Presbyterian Flugelhorn Player reefs on the fence. You lose the mechanical advantage of the fence stretcher, but you gain the moral advantage over the materials, and they gradually cease to give you trouble.

     Then, there's a few trivialities of attaching gates, and negotiating corner posts, and dealing with the manufacturers assumption of a perfectly flat earth (they're hilarious, those guys) and then you have this!

Not quite as straight as it looks here.

Anyway, that's part one of the project done, after delays for rain and organization... and part two comes soon.