Its the tone dummy

 Note:  I am being a bit silly in this post.  I had an idea and the idea was backed up with reality but I wrote it quickly. It is not my best one.  Dont take me totally serious on this one.  I love my daughter and whatever she wants to do with her life (pretty much) is fine with me. 

I went into my local butcher shop to get a pound of ground beef to make my good spaghetti sauce.  I like to support them rather than go to the big chain and also because I think they are either Arabian or Jewish and prepare the meat in a good manner.   

However I was quite put off because this was the second time that the Russian lady was quite nasty about the whole thing and the specifics.  I guess I might avoid these national terms because it could have been any nationality behind the counter who was "yelling" at me.  But, no, that isnt quite true.  The further east you go, the further the niceties of retail people deteriorates.  And that happens even if they replant themselves in the US or some other country.   

One thing the communists had no clue on was how to train a polite society of

retail people.  I mean, if you are put off because there is only some teen ager behind the counter who is just messing around on his smart phone and doesnt give a donkeys ass about doing a good job, the communist retailers had this "I dont give a fˇˇˇ about you" long before the punks took it as their own slogan.  

So here is this Russian lady yelling at me because I am worried there is not enough ground beef for me to take, and she has me over a barrel because there isnt another good kosher butcher in any neighborhood that is close to me.  So... pride be swallowed. 

But.. you may ask, what does this have to do with the price of spaghetti and being a good father?  

Well, it quite surprised me when my ten year old daughter said that she was interested in becoming a lawyer.  Maybe a patent lawyer.  I was surprised not because I dont think she can become a lawyer, but because she lacks, the voile, the patois, how does one say, the TONE to become a lawyer.  

Every job calls for the right qualifications and I think my daughter has the right TONE to become a lawyer just as this Russian lady for surely had the long history and heritage to be a friendly retail lady butcher......... NOT.  

So how does a good father nudge his daughter into the right job, say Mafia leader or coffee tester for instance?  

I am being facetious of course, its just that I dont want my daughter to spend 15 years on special expensive schooling to become a lawyer just to be barred right at the beginning from practicing because she called the judge an idiot.   

Then again, there is no success like failure or if this Russian lady can pretend to serve me ground beef with a smile (more like a smile when she cut my throat), I guess my daughter can be a lawyer.  God willing.  God willing.  Who knows, maybe God is willing.  

I listened to a Glenn Branca CD selections of his symphonies. I have big respect for Glen Branca, but his music is not totally up my alley, my cup of coffee.  But as an artist, I highly recommend you at least listen to some of his stuff.  This album is a good place to start discovering his works although only for those who can handle "noise".   Please sit and re orient your hearing organs.  Open mind too. 

Daughter destroys my Life meaning in 5 minutes

 

As was dictated to me by my wife and Marie Kondo, I had to do a deep, deep cleaning of all my things in my apartment.  It was a birthday present for my wife, she asked for it.  I didnt.  But, I had to do it.  I have plans to start a "Marie Kondo sucks" blog soon, but I am getting way off topic even before I start MY topic.  

I got to my CD collection. I had to make a huge investigation of all my CDs and see which ones I REALLY wanted to keep.  I did my whole electro/dance collection with no problems.  I didnt have to listen to much and I had a given space to sort them by style and have them in view to play and look at every day.  This is important for me. 

But then it came to rock.  I had to listen to a lot of stuff because I received so many promo cds in the 90s. Some, or even more than some, I really didnt have any connection to either by taste, label, or even business, but I had to make sure I knew what they sounded like (or remember) for the final test.   I mean I have to either like the cd, or it has to have some special connection like when and where or why I received it, or has to be on a label I really like/d or maybe I sold a lot of them and I have to keep one in rememberance. Or, they were an important band in the evolution and history of the genre and I have to keep it.  Suffice to say I had to look each over carefully.  I had a stack of about 100 cds I had to listen to.... all the way through.  

So I am listening to a lot of music at home and my daughter comes into the living room where I am working and says, "Are you still listening to that EMO music?"  

Now I have to explain.  

I realized a couple weeks ago that the important growth years of my life (say 15 to 28) were dominated by the style of "Indie rock".  I dont want to explain this time period, because I dont want to date myself.  (I will eventually though.)  The term EMO I first heard in about 1993 for the band Sensefield who played "Emotional Hardcore".  The singer was very emotional.  Everything else about the band and label was HARDCORE. But they knew how to use dynamics to make a hard/soft masterpiece.  But they didnt get to the mainstream.  EMO as a style and term didnt enter the mainstream until the new century perhaps associated the most with the band My Chemical Romance which started in 2001.  EMO became a term in the mainstream music from about that time.  

EMO and My Chemical Romance were very much poo pooed by the purists and put down as hipster music for wanna be cool girls who were probably fake.  Namely by the last generations of punks and indie rockers. Namely "my people".  (I say that tongue in cheek because indie rockers and punks dont have any people, they are individualists to the nth degree). (I say that last sentence tongue in cheek also). And the 2000s emo was so whiny fake too.  EMO became a joke for black clothed new goth girls who wanted to kill themselves.  Egads.   Not my thing, though I do have doubts about my life sometimes.  EMO was a hated, frowned upon term and music for us older folks. I cant say My Chemical Romance without thinking "oh THAT band".  Puleese. 

Now, today, 2022 my daughter comes into the room and says, "You re listening to that EMO music".  HUH?   EMO?  This is Jawbreaker.  They are respectable melodic hardcore from 1991.  They rock.  Fugazi: post punk or post rock, the epitomy of the underground in the 90s.  EMO according to my daughter.  AGH.  This isnt possible.  "Yeah dad, listen to them all.  Guitars and screaming and 'I wanna die, oh life is so terrible' EMO".  

I was destroyed in 5 minutes.  All that I had listened to and even based my life on from my formative years into the 90s reduced to a term I eschew, by my teenage daughter who wasnt even alive when EMO was coined the first or second time.   

I tried to listen to other stuff, but there seemed to be an awful lot of screaming and well, of course guitars.  Guitars are a staple to music since Elvis.  How can you escape them?  Yes, the singers often were very emotional, I mean... uh.. how can they not be emotional?  But no, this isnt EMO.  This is ... this is post punk, post rock, melodic hard core, noise rock, no wave, math rock, slow core, lo fi and about twenty other terms we had coined for the alternative scenes.  But not EMO, except for Sensefield.  My daughter demoted a lot of the music I listen to in one sentence.  Sometimes it sucks having kids. 

Ach, I might as well take all my guitar music CDs and throw them in the trash.  Marie Kondo (and my wife for sure too) would agree with folded arms.  

And yet.  As Lou Barlow of Sebadoh says (screams) "Just give me Indie rock."

More tales about food and buildings

 This isnt a food blog.  I am a dad parent trying to help bring up my two kids.  It is about me and the topics of modern dads with their kids.  However, I seem to be thinking more about food these days.  I dont know why it should be a continuing topic, but... here it is again. 

As I said in my last post here, I dont want to spend TOO much time in the kitchen.  There is a limit to it.  (But admittedly in the last couple weeks I have spent no time as I have had to work in the shop every day, but maybe that will swing back come next September. It can change again).  Three hours is the limit really. I like Mexican and Italian food and they are easier to prepare, and everyone likes them.  

My old specialty was Lasagne and now it is becoming homemade spaghetti sauce with spaghetti.  There is a degree of trial and error when you are making the meal for the first times. For instance I used grated pork meat one time for the spaghetti sauce and that did not taste the same. Grated beef it had to be.   My daughter didnt like the grated pork, but i had to agree with her. But as much as I would like to experiment with the recipe and add this or that or take away this, I just cant with my daughters. 

I have been making Lasagne now for about three years. I have it down so I can kind of make it in my sleep.  But, no I cant.  Because i have to be careful of everything along the way to make sure it is done correctly.  Listen now on the process and what can "go wrong".   

so many, but only one will work

A long time ago I learned I had to make it only one way. I couldnt experiment with spinach or other cheeses or other meats, they had to stay the same.  I used salami ham once and my wife complained and said dont use the cheap salami ham. You have to use the real ham.  Dont cheat on the ingredients just to make it cheaper.  (Boy, she would have been fired a long time ago if she worked at a food services company.  Making it more economical with lower priced ingredients is the name of the game).  

I did get away with buying a cheaper lasagne but my daughters found me out once and said, "dont use that cheap lasagne noodle. That one isnt good."  So what I did was get the expensive brand once and keep the box and put the bargain brand in the more expensive box.  They havent noticed.  The noodle which costs less is A LOT less. I just cant splurge all the time on the premium brand. It is twice as much money.  

And I have settled on a gouda cheese.  It is not too pricey but tastes good. I guess I would like to try a mozzarella some time, but that means extra pay and I am afraid by now that my daughters would complain and say, "what is that?".   So I get a chunk of gouda. 

Luckily the sauce and the yogurt are pretty steady and always the same and not difficult to make. I did once put my own spaghetti sauce into the lasagne sauce when I started my own spaghetti sauce making.  It was so so. It wasnt extra time because I just used extra sauce from my spaghetti, but it means a spaghetti meal and then a lasagne meal and that is too much back to back.  And the extra time and work wasnt worth it. The standard sauce was good.  

Once I get down to the making of the lasagne I have to have checks along the way. The biggest let down and problem I have is that the bottom layer lasagne noodle is always harder than the other layers. I have experimented with more oil, or none, different cooking configurations, soaking the noodles first and other things, but nothing works or just messes up the recipe.  And it isnt because of the brand of lasagne noodle as the more expensive one does just the same thing.  This is a continuing monkey wrench in my creation. 

What I do now is I let my younger daughter test the cheese and yogurt sauce before i put it on. I got into trouble a couple times with messing up that sauce.  Too much pepper,  too much salt, that is bad.  Not enough cheese. Unless I make it after the girls go to school, I have to let her taste it to make sure it wont not pass her test.  

I was getting bad comments from my younger daughter on the bad quality before that.  In the end she would always eat two pieces (her allotment) and take one of Mommys pieces.  Or else she saves two pieces for her lunch for the next day. After all the complaints she made, she always ate her shares AND the next days anyway. In other words, there was something wrong, but it was good enough.  

These days my older daughter is complaining about my lack of cooking time length.  "Cook it longer," she says.  "You have to cook it till the cheese is browner in more places."  "But I have been cooking it for an hour," I say. "It has to be cooked for an hour and ten minutes then. The cheese has to be brown on the top".   The last time I made it and just put it in the fridge for them to cook before dinner.  When I came home it was in fact cooked so that MOST of the cheese topping was brown, not burnt, but brown in more of the top.   All the same she was usually taking two pieces and eating them. She always eats it by layers.  She makes such a mess of it, it pains me to see my creation mutilated before it is downed. And some of it remains on the plate. The hard bottom layer is usually left on the plate.  

I guess there are still some problems with cooking it and I cant cook it in my sleep. Still, a simple thank you, "it was a good meal" would be nice. But it is usually a twenty minute meal and run back to see who wrote on the phone messages to them.    I guess it is too much to ask for a thank you.  Kids dont seem to see the need to pet the egos of their parents, UNLESS they know they are going to get a serious yelling at if they dont administer praise or sorrys.   But, I am not in that category. 

Oh well.  A lot of things parents have to do for their own joy and satisfaction.  And only they know they got it right.  

PS - I cooked it yesterday and my younger daughter said, "the ham was strange. But it was still tasty, but the ham was strange".   She had half the lasagne. 

Cook it yourself.    And listen to great music while you do.