Mock Turtle

This is actually a variation on a lamb braise — which I like somewhat better but it’s more difficult to get the appropriately cheap cut of lamb without a large quantity of extraneous bones. It’s a good dish to make the night before for a potluck, because it seems to improve by sitting overnight in the fridge.

Chop up and saute one medium onion in olive oil in a cover-able saute pan. Add approx 1-1.5 lbs  simmering steak cut up into cubes (e.g., a bottom blade steak) and brown. Add 1 cup red wine, 1 cup V8 juice, approx. 1 tsp Herbes de Provence, 2-3 cloves chopped garlic, and chopped grated rind of one orange. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer on low heat for approx. one hour.

Remove beef with slotted spoon and reduce simmering sauce by one half. Add beef to pan to warm and serve, or hold in refrigerator to serve next day. Serves 2-3.

I am still dithering about the onion btw. It adds depth and its presence means the beef browns more gently, but it may muddy the flavours a bit.

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Vintages devoted pride of place in their January 17 release to Argentina. We’ve always generally liked good Argentina Malbec so I decided to stock up on a few bottles of something — in the event, two bottles of Santa Ana’s “La Mascota” Malbec 2006, at 14% and $15.95 . (There were two wines that caught my attention — one was $17.95 and the other 15.95, and both were available for sampling at Summerhill. Turns out I liked the cheaper one better.) Some of you participated in the uncorking of the first bottle last Saturday.

We served the second bottle of the Santa Ana with dinner tonight. Just like last week, the first third of the bottle went into my pseudo-Provencal beef braise. We split the other 2/3 between us.

Downside first. However you cut it, 14% is a lot of alcohol by volume. Probably too much for a weeknight, even with 1/3 of it in the sauce.

That said, we really liked this wine. It has a sort of typical New World red appearance — deep ruby, fuschia rim, long legs. Nose gives a blackberry/dark berry fruit with subtle notes of the woods (clay, graphite) as well as spice and toast from the oak. The winemakers suggest a hint of licorice which I can kinda sorta see, and jamminess which fortunately I don’t see so much. It’s dry with med+ acid and body, mediumplus-ish tannin, good balance for a wine of its size, and avg+ finish. We did find the back palate “oddly insubstantial”. As J. puts it, it “holds its alcohol well.” It’s a well integrated spiciness, without any suggestions of cheap Hallmark candles (see a few posts earlier), and no odd bell pepper notes.

It would be interesting to compare this to a French Cahors — another Malbec or Malbec-dominated wine I like though one which is very different in style.

There are still quite a few bottles available throughout Toronto-Central (though not at Atrium) if people feel like picking up a bottle or three.

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From CBC News’ fun new quiz on the economic wisdom of Stephen Harper:

4. On Sept. 26, 2008, Harper said, ‘The only way there is going to be a recession is if they (the Liberals) are elected and that’s why they’re not going to be elected.’

o Myth
o Fact

Consistency is your friend when taking the quiz…

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On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

The entire letter to Virgin’s Richard Branson from a passenger on a recent Mumbai-London flight is well worth a read, especially if you ever had a pet hamster. Make sure to click along with the photos at the top of the article.

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I bought a bottle of wine for an experimental quasi-Provencal braised beef thing we made for dinner today. The braised beef absorbs a good third of the bottle in the braising sauce, making it possible to buy one of these 14% New World reds on a weekday without regretting it the day after.

The wine we bought was Tarapaca Gran Reserva Carmenere 2007, a Chilean Carmenere from the January 10 Vintages release that caught my attention. It had the unusual distinction of being a $15 (exactly $15 — not $14.95…) wine with 4 1/2 stars from Tony Aspler. I can see where he’s coming from — it has an interesting spiciness with plenty of fruit on the nose and good followthrough on the palate. It  reminded me a bit of a very different wine that also received very high scores from Aspler and also from Robert Parker — a spicy white blend from Australia that we bought early in our time in Ottawa and ended up regretting. Both wines with a complex, interesting, and reasonably intense nose and palate, obviously impressive to two highly respected critics, but which ended up leaving us cold.

Why? J. finds the oak on a number of modern reds — including this one — rather overwhelming. I sometimes agree with her, though it didn’t strike me as a problem with this particular wine. In the end (and we both agree on this one) it’s more about what these wines are missing — they have lots of ripe fruit, lots of spice, but nothing by way of organicity, minerality, earthiness, etc. — in short, terroir.  Unfortunately, spicy ripe fruit all by itself makes me think of that cheap scented candle smell you can’t avoid in Hallmark shops. (A slight green pepper note on the nose doesn’t help any either — I don’t always complain about bell pepper notes but they just seem weird in the context of a ripe, fruit-driven New World merlot/malbec/carmenere.)

On a more positive note, I think I am starting to get a handle on quasi-Provencal braised beef. Hint: orange peel is your friend.

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Somehow, the Canadian Association of Retired People — CARP — has moved from being, well, an association of retired people, to “50-plus”, to — wait for it — 45 and over.

45 and over? At a time when Freedom 55 is stretching to Freedom 65 and there is debate about moving out the qualifying age for the Canada Pension Plan to 70, what’s the rationale behind this? Being inclusive of dot-com millionaires? Do people really want to be considered seniors for a full half of their lives? With “youth” stretching into the thirties, this moving of the goal posts leaves a mere decade or so of pure, unprefaced adulthood.

If you’re really that eager to move into what will surely feel like an endless last phase of your life, good news! According to the CARP website, “you don’t need to be 45+ or retired to join CARP.” Wow — you mean I can start fretting about my golden years RIGHT NOW? Fantastic.

It’s all kind of explained by the fact that Moses Znaimer — who actually is 65+, I believe, though not retired — is now the executive director of CARP (new slogan: A New Way of Aging). He’s after readers for his magazine, Zoomer — free with your CARP membership! — and, it seems, has adjusted the CARP catchment to match the desired demographics of his magazine. I frankly think he runs the risk of turning off a lot of people in the process — retired people who feel like they’re being shoved aside in favour of courting younger, hotter-looking adults, and the younger, hotter-looking adults who are in the middle of raising elementary school-aged children and not really feeling they are in the same place as their parents. But maybe Moses knows something I don’t.

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Actual Facebook status:

Bob Rae
is listening to President Obama “the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose a job” and shouting “Rae Days”!8 hours ago

(H/t Beyond The Commons)

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For the sake of the tens of thousands of students who are the hostages in the York strike, let’s hope that the government-mandated vote on the university’s offer doesn’t go the way the executive of CUPE 3903 believe it will. It’s possible that there are enough strikers at this point who simply can’t afford to be out anymore and will be willing to go back to work and allow students to get what they, in the end, are paying for, leaving unresolved issues up to the binding arbitration already offered by the school.

But let’s talk, for a moment, about the insanity of putting teaching assistants and sessional instructors in the same local. TAs are graduate students, for the most part, who are paid for their work through operating grant funding earmarked for graduate students. This funding will go up and down depending on the government in question, and the amount is limited, to a large extent, by what the government funds per graduate space. TAs have not yet begun their careers, or perhaps had a career that they left to return to studies. Either way, their time as a TA is limited and will end with their degree, and they are working as a means to fund their education (aka a part-time job) and/or to gain experience in the classroom for future work (aka a paid internship).

Sessional instructors also fall into a number of groups. Best-known among them are PhDs who take on classes while applying for tenure-track positions elsewhere. But, of course, there are also sessionals who are fully employed elsewhere and teach a class or two in their field (particularly at the business school and at the law school). They’re part-time because they don’t want to teach full time. Now, given that universities rely heavily on sessional instructors, often hiring the same ones to teach the same classes year after year, I see the logic in there being a bargaining unit dedicated to these teachers, whose treatment by university administrations has just the degree of neglect that makes joining together a good, even necessary idea.

However, sessionals/adjuncts DO NOT BELONG in the same local as itinerant assistants. They don’t. I’d argue that the assistants don’t belong in any local, since their jobs are often a non-loan form of government or institutional financial aid. That aside, they certainly don’t belong in the same unit as people who are fully in the workforce. Their interests are simply not the same, and the interests of a smaller group can easily overwhelm the interests of a larger one. In this case, ironically, it’s part-time faculty (unit 2), for whom the new contract will have more lasting importance than the others, and whose issues loom large on the agenda, that is most likely to support the university deal: they can’t afford not to. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them to guarantee a yes.

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Home sick last week, I spent some time listening to the radio, where coverage alternated between Obama inauguration previews and the recession. Two days in a row, I tuned in midway to interviews with economists opposed to fiscal stimulus. Both interviewees were upbeat about the prospects of Canada, touting its stronger, more stable fiscal outlook and the ability of monetary policy to turn things around.

Both times, I waited to see who the cheerful contrarian was. Could this happy outlook be credible? Have we underestimated the robustness of the Canadian economy?

Unfortunately, it turned out both speakers were from the Fraser Institute.

So to return to reality: what effect can monetary policy possibly have at this point? The Bank of Canada will likely reduce prime rates to zero tomorrow, but businesses are still facing increased difficulty obtaining credit and consumer rates haven’t moved. If this means that the only way this boon to the banks benefits the economy as a whole is in increased, or more likely, maintained dividends on bank stocks down the road, is there any point in cutting rates at all?

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Or why letting your developed country slide into being a one-trick, resource-exporting copy of a developing one is a poor idea:

The November surplus of $1.3-billion is the smallest since October 1997, and analysts warn that Canada is quickly heading to the land of dual deficits – both for the current account and the fiscal situation.

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