MICK

Mango Pudding Blues is all geared up to watch an be amazed by the Mick Jagger documentary on teevee this evening. Our strictly academic obsession with the rock and roll musicians of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies is prepared to be fed. Mango Pudding Blues was originally gonna comment on how such a documentary could only be another terrible monument to a diseased ego, but then realized that the same could be said for Mango Pudding Blues, the blog, itself.

GEORGE

The quiet Beatle, Georgie Harrison, in other old rocker news, appears to be dying after all, according to the Globe and Mail this morning. What’s with the see-sawing on this issue, we wonder? First he was reported to be terminally sick, then he appeared everywhere to ensure the people that he was not dead, and now there are reports of a tearful deathbed reunion with Paul McCartney. Well, we aren’t great supporters of the mop tops here, frankly having always preferred the Rolling Stones. However, we do admit that we have bought both the original (a long time ago) and the newly re-imagined big fat CDs of All Things Must Pass, which in both cases we felt quite certainly the hand of some supreme being pushing us to the cash register. So to George we say, Godspeed, old boy.

JOHN

Oh, for goodness sake. While we’re commenting on the damn old english rock stars, we might as well share with you something we saw and rather liked at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland last summer. It was John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed, which was made of two old castoff church pews that were facing each other, with a couple of boards set down on the seats between them. Got that? So like the back of the pews, the part you lean up against, formed the headboard and the footboard. Dig? It was a very hippie bed, and we felt kind of happy that someone rather rich and famous was sleeping on an authentic hippie bed rather than something designed by Philippe Starck and manufactured in Germany from injection-molded titanium.

We were there for academic research of course. Cleveland, which does indeed rock, reminded MPB very much of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, the old home town.

PRIZES

To see what you might have won if you didn’t lose the Mango Pudding Blues ‘what’s that thing’ competition, take a look over at Cacomixl, where the winner resides.

C ON SPORTS

Mango Pudding Blues threatened to go see the ol’ hometown boys, the Stamps, crush some other team in the Grey Cup football match in Montreal. For a moment, gripped by a feverish fervour, Mango Pudding Blues announced to several friends that Calgary is going to go all the way in football, hockey and lacrosse this year. C was delighted that we had taken up sports, and asked if we wouldn’t be attending the Flames at the Ottawa Senators this evening. We averred that he was asking too much, and told him that lack of affordable Grey Cup tickets had caused us to downgrade our plans to watching the cup on teevee with a spread, promised by Killer, of Pilsner beer and cheese doodles.

C wrote back:

“Yes, I expect it was asking too much. I wager, in fact, that you will drink pil and eat doodles until Grey Cup halftime, at which time you will become bored and tend to your blog instead. I advise you that real sporting pleasure comes from N. Hornby like obsession. It comes, in fact, from remaining a fan during the dark eras, from refusing to stop caring. One must love one’s team with the same intensity you love P. Zucherman. If not, one must content oneself with the boutique pleasure of the absent-minded hobbyist.”

So there’s some advice from C. We would also include that portion of his letter wherein he says some potentially actionable things about Pulitzer-prize-winning author Michael Chabon, because it was very very funny, but we won’t. Not because we fear legal action if Chabon passes by to read this, but because we wouldn’t want to break his heart when he sees his number one fan gently mocking him. C idolizes Chabon, and we’re actually pretty fond of him ourselves.

POLENTA, AS PROMISED

This is the recipe with which Killer cut loose in the kitchen on Friday. It’s from a library copy of the Recipes 1, 2, 3 Menu Cookbook, the second of the three-ingredient recipe books by Rozanne Gold. Like the minimalist coconut soup contest that I’m sure you all remember as though it was yesterday, the point of the book is to extract a maximum of flavour from a minimum of ingredients. In addition to being significantly less taxing to your grocer, three-ingredient recipes really make you focus with an incisive, zen-like clarity on the food at hand. Note to Little, Brown and Ms. Gold: Mango Pudding Blues would love nothing more than to be very publicly Napsterized for its P2P sharing of this recipe. Please prosecute us at once!

Polenta “Lasagne” with Smoked Mozzarella

12 ounces smoked mozzarella cheese

Two cups bitchin’ stone-ground yellow cornmeal.

One big can of Tomatoes. Uh, 28 fl. oz.

Cut a third of the cheese into small pieces. Cut remainder into slices. Note that the Killer bought half smoked mozza, half smoked Jarlsberg by accident, but the thing was still stunning. Maybe it was even better, you know?

In a large, heavy saucepan, bring seven cups of water to boil. Add two teaspoons salt, 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper and cornmeal in a slow, steady stream. Stir jauntily with a wooden spoon until smooth. Break up lumps with back of spoon. Lower heat to medium.

Stir constantly until polenta begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. After 20 minutes, add the small pieces of cheese and stir until melted. Continue stirring for another 15 minutes, until polenta is very thick.

Spray an 11-by-14-inch baking pan with non-stick vegetable spray. Pour hot polenta into pan to make an even layer. Let cool at least two hours at room temperature. Polenta will harden.

Preheat broiler. Cut polenta, in pan, into 12 squares. Put under broiler for three minutes, or until tops are lightly browned and crisp. This took the Killer more than three minutes. Get impatient. Stamp your feet. Remove from broiler.

Preheat oven to 350?.

Meanwhile, puree tomatoes with their liquid in a food processor until fairly smooth. Ask yourself why she’s recommended pureeing whole tomatoes when she coulda just said buy a can of goddam pureed tomatoes in the first place. Shrug and put in a small heavy saucepan with lots of freshly ground black pepper. If you think pre-ground pepper will do, kindly close this window and then edit the URL of Mango Pudding Blues from your bookmarks, using the “edit favorites” command in the pull-down menu, and then never come back here again. Ever. The rest of you, bring the tomatoes to a boil, lower heat and simmer five minutes. Set aside.

To assemble, put six pieces of polenta, touching, side by side in a 10-by10-inch or 9-by-11-inch casserole. Spoon on half of the tomato sauce to cover. Cover tomato sauce with half the cheese. Top with another layer or polenta, sauce and cheese. Bake for ten to 15 minutes. Serve.

So there. Killer also made the side dish of blast-baked beans (Yes! Very hot and very fast, to sear in the flavours and blast out the moisture.) and niçoise olives, the appetizer of eggplant with roasted garlic and sundried tomatoes and the coffee/Frangelico granita dessert. It was a symphony.

Yes, a symphony. See, the prevailing mythology in the household has it that Killer is perhaps not quite the genius cook that Mango Pudding Blues is, but allow us to debunk that right now. Sure, MPB has a way with turning whatever the fridge contains into a credible omelette on Sunday mornings; yes, MPB can throw together a delightful pasta dish in moments with forgotten back-of-the-pantry ingredients; yes, MPB can stroll through the market and invent an astonishing dinner based on what’s looking good that day. Mango Pudding Blues is pure jazz in the kitchen. But Killer! Killer is classical. Killer is Pinchas Zucherman in the kitchen, boys and girls. Sure, she prefers someone else to write the score. But her performance delivers the goods.

Now, here’s the other thing. A bag of cornmeal costs about two bucks. A can of tomatoes? $1.29. The cheese, okay. Not cheap. It was from La Maison du Fromage, our favorite store in Ottawa. It was $8. Do you see where I’m going with this? You can live like a king for nothing. Nothing!

Let me spell this out for you: Cost, in Canadian dollars, of Big Macs, large fries, apple pies and large cokes for two, plus a six-pack of Michelob: $24.32.

Cost, in Canadian dollars, of the smoked mozzeralla polenta lasagne that Killer whipped up, including wine: $18.71.

The book recommends a Parallele 45 Côtes du Rhône, which we drank (like, $11.45 or so*. Very reasonable), but I would also recommend a dirt-cheap Portuguese, the Sogrape 99 Douro “Mateus Signature”**, which retails usually here for $7.90, but was on sale at our store for $6.90. Or, and don’t get me started on this, try a bottle of Citra or Rocca Vendosa, delightful but horrifyingly cheap reds from the Montepulciano D’abruzzo region of Italy. Here, they’re $6.50 a bottle. Do you see? You are rolling in luxury for less than 20 bucks. You can do this.


*Prices are LCBO-specific. Higher in Quebec, lower in good ol’ Alberta.

**Special thanks to Billy Munnely for the wine recommendations. Mr. Munnely will soon get his due here, we assure you.

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HAMISH

We have wronged a brother. Hamish can be read here, regardless of where we said he was earlier. Canadians who felt the earth move recently should note that he’s here, in the country, right now, briefly beating certain permissions out of the government before returning to Japan. We hear he ate with C last night. We adore him.