eat with your ears newsletter is a table of strangers and strange ideas linked together through quality food and music. thank’s for joining me at dinner.
late again, but my internal winter seemed to stretch long into spring and the seeds of my creativity stayed dormant too. plenty of eat with your ears work is being done below the surface, thank you for patiently awaiting its harvest.
amuse buche
“the chopped salad is ‘the perfect mid-day nutritional replenishment for the mid-level modern knowledge worker’ with ‘neither the time nor the inclination to eat a lunch… which would require more attention than the little needed for the automatic elliptical motion of the arm from bowl to face, jaw swinging open and then clamping shut over and over until the fork comes up empty and the vessel can be deposited in the garbage can under the desk.’” -matt buchannan via jia tolentino
pantry playlist #1 - bain-marie
there are is an ungodly amount of pantry “staples” and single-use-tools claiming useful counter space in kitchens around the world—do we really need a tool for cracking an egg? this series is a design guide to help cooks—veteran and beginner alike— build a scaffolding of tools and products to build flavor with. think of these lists as playlists for your pantry: you probably know most of the it already, but there are some sounds, some flavors, some tools hiding just out of earshot.
cooking begins long before the egg is scrambled and the pan is hot— it starts with a thoughtful toolbox. the first pantry playlist highlights the minimalist’s toolbox—also called a bain in the kitchen. a bain-marie is a tall saucepan repurposed as a countertop storage bin for knives, spatulas, etc. that can follow the cook as they move around the kitchen. a bain holds your daily drivers— the tools that do things your bare hands can’t. this month’s pantry playlist is the tracks i personally rinse most frequently—keep your bain simple. all killer, no filler.
for 90% of your work in the kitchen. a chef knife is very personal—it must feel like an extension of your body.
visit a knife shop, test knives, set a budget (~$100), choose a western style vs. japanese style ( durable vs. sharper + harder to sharpen)
wooden spoon - for stirring w/o scratching the pan.
rubber spatula - for scraping batters + sauces out of a pan.
metal spatula - for moving / flipping delicate items (fish, pancakes)
tongs - for moving / flipping hardier items (steak, carrots)
spider - for straining food from a hot liquid without dumping the pot
whisk - for mixing ingredients together smoothly or whipping air into a mixture
ladle - for serving soup / liquid dishes
microplane - for zesting citrus, pasting (garlic, ginger), grating cheese
peeler - for peeling vegetables
measuring spoons / cups - for following cookbook recipes
kitchen scale - for following baking instructions + cookbook recipes
instant meat thermometer - for knowing when your meat is cooked
rolling pin - for rolling out doughs
bench scraper / bowl scraper - for dough + cleaning work surfaces
bain marie - for holding all your tools. use a vintage flour vase, find a handmade ceramic bain, just make sure it’s beautiful
these links are what i currently use in my kitchen, if you have any questions about why i like each item, don’t hestitate to reach out. if you have better tools than me, send me your favorites so i can test them out.
pots, pans, appliances are coming in pantry playlist #2. keep your ears open.
what’s cooking?
devoted to foods i ate this month that i wish i shared with all of you. the what’s cooking column simulates a meal across space and time. the future is now, i’m emailing you flavor [some assembly required]
the endive is an elegant, but bitter fellow. crowned in gold, they invite the eye to to the plate, but upon first bite the endive bites back with astringency like eating a briar patch. i never cooked with endive before— until i feasted my eyes on a photo of nyc restaurant estella’s stunning endive salad. it’s simple. it’s drop dead gorgeous. the flavor must follow suit, so i made it at home on a budget.
after trying multiple interpretations of estela’s biting yet bright salad, i landed on one somewhere between recipe’s i found online. an orange zest vinaigrette baths the endives in sweetness to balance their bitterness while a nutty, umami, walnut crouton brings new texture to every bite. every endive is like a of fresh flavors, each one different from the last—a salad that is as fun to eat as it is to taste.
forewarning, endives are a fickle ingredient— every head’s flavor varies widely. dip an endive in the vinaigrette before mixing and add more orange juice if it’s still too bitter—i trust in your abilities to make it taste delicious.
tarts look like some decadent, victorian-era attempt to frame a whatever fruit happens to be in season so it can be hung on a wall of versailles. secretly, i really just love raw fruit, but dressing it up in an edible doily can transform even the ugliest plum the prettiest girl at the ball. impress your friends with edible aristocracy!
beauty takes a lot of work though—there are no shortcuts to flavor. prepare tart dough and frangipane early and in bulk so you can make tarts all summer long at your leisure (tart dough freezes for ~3 months, frangipane refrigerates for ~2 weeks). when sour cherries pop-off at the farmers market, chop them up like robespierre, bury them in frangipane, and serve a tart on a silver platter fit for the rising proletariate… oh… maybe too far.
this recipe is pretty involved, so give me a call at 425-999-1353 if you get stuck— i’ll be impressed you went for it.
in quiche you were wondering (...haha…) this dough recipe can also be used in a savory tart. if you wan’t a flakier crust use cold butter instead of tempered.
reply with the dishes you enjoyed making this month. inspiration begets inspiration and i’d love to hear from you.
morning stew
this month’s playlist was inspired into form somewhere between a cherry blossom and mr. roger’s neighborhood. as the spring trees begin to bud, i like to closely study trees on the same city blocks to watch their flowers emerge and dust away my seasonal depression. while i studied each tree and it’s own little character, i also studied my neighbors and their own little characters too.
greeting my neighborhood blossoms and neighborhood faces remindeed me of television icon mr. roger and his fictional neighborhood full of sock puppets. the show was benevolent and wholesome and mr. rogers embodied a sense of joy that is so rare it’s almost unbelievable and disorienting to watch. it turns out it’s genuine, mr. rogers was a pastor turned agnostic public television host—as spotlighted in the tear jerking documentary won’t you be my neighbor?
this month’s morning stew is full of leisurely and tongue-in-cheek tunes to make you grin from ear to ear, forget your worries, and wave hello to all all the beautiful neighbors in the neighborhood.
leftovers
the most notable thing to ever emerge from arkansas was the 1968 hit single “wichita lineman” by native arkansawyer glen campbell; the next most notable was a retail chain called walmart.
i hate country music as much as multi-national conglomorates, but wichita lineman is not the plastic music suburban white girls blast from their 1998 mustang convertibles… i hated country until i swam up river some ways. i hated country until i learned that bob dylan was country. and listened to patsy klein for the first time. and heard the black blues music that predates any of the white-washed country we know today (except lil nas x’s reclaimation). i was closed to country music for good reason, but glen campell’s wichita lineman opened a door to the rich, american culture hidden behind a flashy, buzzkill genre.
my first image of country star glen campbell was in an infomercial where he was dressed in a white fringe western getup covered from cowboy-hat-to-toe in rhinestones to advertise a re-issue of his greatest hits compilation. like i said: rich, american, culture. the commercial’s crusty narrator rapid fires off the releases hit titles from “rhinestone cowboy” to “southern nights” to the holy grail itself: wichita lineman.
after a wichita lineman clip played, i realized i’d already known it intimately—it plays in highway diners, truckstop bathrooms, and been covered relentlessly by lazy popstars. wichita lineman is the song you know all the lyrics for, but don’t remember hearing—it’s like the shadow of the idea of the american dream: it’s everywhere, but ever elusive.
upon its 1968 release, wichita lineman (title track of campbell’s album) topped both country charts and pop charts and eventually went double platinum selling over 2,000,000 copies. the insanely wide distribution meant that i would later find wichita lineman in every goodwill record bin for the rest of my life. as the infomercial correctly predicted “glen campbell was not country, not pop, but uniquely all american music for all time…” and capital records’ sales strategy made damn sure that would be the case. unfortunately, glen campbell passed away in 2017, but his legacy lives on
when i was 16, i finally caved and bought one of the records because glen campbell was the only artist besides jimi hendrix i recognized in record crate. unlike jimi, glen campbell wasn’t burning guitars and reassembling the star spangled banner into woodstock glory—no, he clung to the pop country formula. tightly. his composition of wichita lineman was so regular, so classically american, so simply poetic, that bob dylan called it “the greatest song ever written.” glen campbell understood the assignment.
written by jimmy webb and performed by campbell, wichita lineman depicts a telephone repairman working alone on the kansas border where webb recalls “the terrain absolutely flattens out… it goes for about fifty miles. in the heat of summer, the heat rises off the road in this shimmering mirage and the telephone poles gradually materialize out of this far distant perspective and they become large and rush towards you.” on one cross-kansas drive, webb looked “up at one of these telephone poles and there was a man on top talking on the telephone” almost teleporting himself, through the wire, far away from his desert post. webb “had another 25 miles of solitude to meditate on this apparition about an ordinary guy, a working-class type of dude” and he released a brief fragment of words about love and longing in the american west. honestly, neither the composition nor the narrative standout from country music’s repetitive lexicon—but campbell’s recording captures something untouchable, some vague mirage of feeling beyond country’s horizon.
for a while, wichita lineman was the song i guiltily played for myself on somber drives up and down empty highways. it felt like music for suburban dads and parentless vagabonds alike. glen swoons to the plains of kansas, the stereo seems to breath a cool desert breeze. the twanging guitar hook lassos the entire american west, tightens around its great expanse. for years, i silently wondered how this song could exist so dustlessly and full of air after all these years while so much country was gladly forgotten. eventually, i stumbled across dylan jones’ book documenting the song’s impact called wichita lineman: searching in the sun for the world's greatest unfinished song. i mean yeah, it’s a good song… but it’s not worth a 300 pages book… or even a 300 page read… so i read some online reviews instead and summarized them in this essay.
jones’ book dives deep into webb’s unfinished writing process and campbell’s unrepeatable recording session to hypothesize where the song’s story might have gone if jimmy webb could have just finished the lyrics. regardless, one legendary studio session led to a 2 minute song was dense enough to be covered by over 100 artists from johnny cash to james taylor. jones filtered through piles of garbage (like rem’s horrendous cover) to find the greatest rendition of the greatest song ever. it wasn’t the black puma’s icy 2021 cover and it sadly wasn’t kool & the gang’s wordless jam that oozes velvet sexuality. no, the greatest rendition of the greatest song ever written was by a disheveled slowcore band from 1990s los angeles called the dick slesig combo.
the dick slessig comob somehow stretched the 2 minute ballad into an expansive 42 minute universe—a universe i want to live in for all time. emotionally, they married the feeling of a tepid kansas sunset with the slow motion mood of a sunday morning’s golden light. the intro alone is chugs along for 8 minutes—4 times the length of the original track—before it crescendos and splashes into the timeless, blissful, melody that seems to contain the entirety of america’s ideals of freedom. sadly, dick slesig’s rendition was largely forgotten—it can only be found on youtube where ~20,000 devote listeners have developed somewhat of a cult.
in 2020, i developed an addiction for the dick slessig combo cover, but like all highs, it the sound began to dull with time. i needed more—a longer version or at least a richer one. i scoured the internet for a higher quality audio format to clean up youtube’s lo-fi distortions—a cd, a .wav, a vinyl, or fuck! i’d even settle for an .mp3. i scraped through old indie-label websites and defunct slowcore fan forums that praised the masterpiece without success. in a last ditch effort, i posted the first comment on the youtube video in over a year—like a fisherman casting their net one more time after a day of fruitless work, i needed a miracle. my miracle came by the name alex depompei—a devote rare country record box digger—who answered my prayers. i will never forget the miracles he conducted that day.
so, i messaged the dick slessig on instagram—who now seems to be a carpenter based in palmdale, ca? in response to my multi-paragraph over-enthused message, he simply replied “venmo @dick-slessing $15”. a purchase? a donation? an insanely clever scam targeting to hi-fi freaks like me? i sent the money and 3 weeks later, a cd arrived.
when i finally cued up the track on a sunday morning, i felt like i had finally arrived somewhere. with the drawl of those first heavy chords, i felt the walls of my new york apartment erode into the horizonless plains of wichita. 8 minutes in, i watched the cathedrals of yosemite grow from my floorboards, the fog of louisiana bayous of louisiana creep out of bathroom, the grasslands of montana flutter across the floor like dust across a highway in a wind storm. the american dream is alive in wichita lineman, even if it has long left the country.