Makes Mainers Mighty, Might Make Me Mighty

I have written about Moxie before. It's been a while since I've been up to the family cabin and stocked up on the stuff, which tastes like root beer with a bitter purple gentian root aftertaste. I drink the stuff mainly to be contrary, and to remember my paternal grandfather, who drank it unironically.

I was first drawn to the stuff by its distinctive logo, featuring a dapper fellow pointing in almost accusatory fashion, as if to say, "I dare you to drink this fierce stuff!" On first taste, the bitter edge is the defining characteristic, and this is where most people jump off the Moxie train. The tale goes, though, that if you can drink it three times, you are a lifer.

Here's the classic label which caught my eye as a child, with the accusatory Moxie Man:

The can sits, unopened, on a bookshelf as an example of classic Americana. The logo was changed to a more generic one, a tragic branding misstep in my view. Here is a more modern can, from the reserve supply I maintain, irregularly replenished by family and friends who have returned from New England:

I figure on picking up a couple of cases to bring back to New York with me. Moxie was originally marketed as a nerve tonic, formulated to prevent 'softening of the brain and loss of manhood', neither of which I fear I am subject to. Even though it's illegal to market as a patent medicine, the axiom 'Moxie Makes Mainers Mighty', which inspired the post title, is still in use. Oddly enough, while writing this post before heading up to a rural spot with no electricity, much less internet access, I found an article about the Coca-Cola Corporation's purchase of the Moxie brand. I know that Coca-Cola is based in Atlanta... maybe those southron boys still fear Mainers and want to render their Moxie ineffectual.

FOR SCIENCE!

This Saturday, I am planning on attending the NYC March for Science, so I registered tonight. My great and good friends at the Secret Science Club are planning on attending, though I imagine that any attempt to organize a group ahead of time would be like herding cats. Suffice it to say, the rally starts at 10:30AM at Central Park West and 62nd St, so any of the SSC regulars can rally there.

Longtime readers will know of my love for science, and my feeble layperson's attempts to promote it. It's time to put my moxie where my mouth is and to step up for evidence-based policy. If you are in the NY Metro Area, and are planning on attending, please let me know. I'll be the guy who looks a lot like the profile picture at the right, so I won't be that hard to find.

And on a lighter note, here's a whimsical number from nerd-approved They Might Be Giants:





That might be considered an unofficial theme song for the march.

Bastard's Beloved Boston

As I New Yorker, I don't know if I'm supposed to admit it, but I love Boston. My grandfather was born and raised in Framingham, Massachusetts and he never lost his New England accent, or his taste for Moxie (a taste that I have cultivated, largely out of contrariness), throughout all his years in the Bronx. As a small boy, I lived in Waltham, Massachusetts while my father was a graduate student. I have vivid memories of visiting Old Ironsides. One of my all-time favorite books is Make Way for Ducklings, which will always remind me of the beautiful Boston Public Gardens, with its Swan Boats... and of the amphibious Duck Tours, with their repurposed landing craft. Throughout high school and college, there were trips to Boston, where I'd invariably run into religious kooks in Faneuil Hall with whom I'd engage in weird discussions (my great and good friend J-Co, who now lives in the Boston Metropolitan Area, still likes to recount an incident in which a beret-wearing proselytizer, upon hearing me opine that a lot of people get caught up in dogma while ignoring basic precepts of ethics, dramatically intoned, "This man speaketh the truth!"). On occasion, I'd get into a drunken lip lock with a tipsy charmer at the Róisín Dubh. Yeah, Boston's a great town, and the Bostonians are wonderful people.

I was relieved to hear that this year's Boston Marathon finished without a hitch after last year's horror. The stories of bombing victims returning to finish the race, some in spite of grievous injuries, were heart-warming and tear-jerking.

Yeah, I'm a New Yorker, always has been, but Boston will always occupy a large space in my heart. Love Boston, love Bostonians.

My God, It's Full of Zardoz!

So, I get back from Maine, and I find a Zardoz infestation. What does one spray? Bullets? After all, the gun is good...

Beaver Shores Club is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. In 1926, while a high school student in Framingham, Massachusetts, my grandfather bought a share in the place, a cabin which had originally been built as the field office for a logging company. It's a two-room structure right on the shore of a "great pond" (current restrictions prevent new construction within 250 feet of the shore). As other partners in the camp grew older, they sold their shares to my uncles, so the camp is now in the family's hands.

I traveled up with one of my uncles and an old friend of his (who, scandalously, had never been to the place), and we met up with a bunch of family members (another uncle has been building a gorgeous cabin across the pond, and was up with my aunt, my two awesome college-age cousins, his sister-in-law, and her two awesome adolescent kids, yet another aunt came up a couple of days later with my little cousin, an extremely bright and articulate seven-year-old).

One of the first acts I performed was a symbolic ridding myself of the trappings of urban modernity... the keys, the cell phone, and the wallet were put away- the hands would be occupied by the paddle, the splitting maul, and the scythe (I had to clear the "leaching field" for the grey water). For the next week, a bath was a jump in the pond with a bar of Ivory soap (it floats), and the only calls came from the loons. I had a couple of wonderful kayak trips (for one, I ported the boat over a small dam and paddled around the marsh formed by the pond overflow), and chaperoned a solo paddle for my little cousin (he did a great job turning around a float, and then had a straightaway paddle until his arms tired, and he needed a tow). We did some minor chores (we hung a smoke detector and a couple of fire extinguishers, and felled a couple of dead trees- my college-aged cousin could probably perform gall bladder surgery with a chainsaw). A couple of the teenaged neighbors from two camps over (Framingham boys, grandchildren of a family friend) stopped by for an impromptu chess tournament. We had a number of big family dinners (my aunt's sister stocked up on Arthur Avenue before driving up). I drank Moxie, and had Spam with breakfast. All-in-all, it was a delightful pastoral interlude, just the right thing to make one appreciate hot running water and 'lectricity.

Lazy Vacation Day

A couple of years back, mom decided to sell the house she had bought twenty years ago, it being too big, with too big a yard, for her to maintain. She moved into a cute townhouse in a nice development, and has a postage-stamp sized lawn in the back. Unlike previous visits of mine, there's no grunt work for me to do. No tree stumps to dig out with a mattock, no bags of mulch to put down. It's a little weird not to have to break a sweat doing some task. Tomorrow, the only job I have is to start the lawnmower and make sure it is in good working order. Then it's off to my sister's house to hang out with the nephews and help out in the kitchen- basically a day of hanging out, three generations of the family goofing off.

We're also going to be celebrating the birthday of my nephew, Boy A, a day late. I spoke with him on the phone earlier today, interrupting him while he was watching the Boston Red Sox season opener- my sister is a diehard Yankees fan, so I think he roots for the Bosox just to needle her. His grandfather, a Framingham boy, would be proud of him. I bet the boy would drink Moxie if it were available in the DC metro area. He's planning to go to college somewhere in New England, so he might just cultivate a taste for the stuff.

Sleek, Elegant

While on the walkabout on the job this evening, I had the good fortune to see a sleek, elegant critter, resplendent in pinstripes:

The eastern garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) is one of the most common reptiles in the New York metro area, perhaps second to the diminutive brown snake (Storeria dekayi). The site where I ran across this beauty is a garter snake paradise- a nice mix of meadow and forest, with a small body of water. Eastern garter snakes operate as well in the water as they do on land, and take a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate prey. This particular snake is well situated.

The little critter was valiant- it coiled up as if to strike rather than fleeing when the hairless ape waved a camera in its face. I admire a little beast with moxie.

Big Bad Bald Bastard's Best Boston Brown Bread

If you're going to steal, steal from the best, I say. Posting a recipe, I decided I'd crib Laura's "best ever" schtick, leaving out the "E" word for the sake of alliteration.

I have to confess that, although I am a born and bred New York boy, New England looms large in my background. My paternal grandfather was born and raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, and our family would always spend a couple of weeks camping in Maine every summer. One does not readily get New England out of one's blood. Oddly enough, my New England past caught up to me recently (perhaps it's because of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, when everybody in the U.S. gets a little New England-y), and I had a strange craving for Boston brown bread.

Boston brown bread is a throwback to the early days of the settlement of New England, before decent stoves were developed. The multi-grain bread (equal parts rye, corn, and wheat flour) is sweetened with molasses, and steamed in a mold (nowadays, using an empty coffee can is typical). It's not the typical sort of thing I crave, but I inexplicably had a jones for it, and the commercially canned stuff, like Moxie, is not readily available outside of New England. If I wanted it, I'd have to make it myself.

I want to note now that I am, culinarily, strictly a stove-top operator. I am not a baker, in fact, my ability to kill yeast surpasses that of Monistat. Of course, Boston brown bread's not really baked, so I figured I'd be okay. To start my brown bread experiment, I needed a mold. One comment on a Food Network site suggested using the can in which Pepperidge Farm "Pirouette" wafer are packaged. My beautiful co-worker **REDACTED** had one of these on her desk, so I have confess, I had my eyes on her can for quite some time (I was joking with another co-worker, and when I mentioned that I was eyeing **REDACTED**'s can, she asked, "The cookie can? What for?" See, I'm no Herman Cain, so I can get away with such things). Not being a "can shark" (FUTURE BLOG POST?), I decided that I had to buy a can of Pirouette wafers- they are tasty, but a little too sweet, I had them with coffee, to cut down the sweetness factor.

Now that I had the can, I had to assemble the ingredients and get to work. The recipe I used was from Epicurious:

Equipment:
Empty can (I used a "Pirouette" wafer can, because it has a convenient cover)
Saucepan
Oven safe pot

Dry ingredients:

1/2 cup rye flour
1/2 cup wheat flour
1/2 cup yellow corn meal
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Wet ingredients:
1/3 cup dark molasses
1 cup milk

Add in:
1/2 cup raisins

Additional:
Butter for greasing the can

Start off by liberally greasing the can (heh heh), make sure the entire can is well lubed before you continue. Set the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Set saucepan full of water on stove to boil.

Mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, then mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients to form a batter. Add raisins and mix into batter. Pour batter into greased can to approximately 2/3 capacity. Cover can (if using coffee can, use aluminum foil, and tie foil into place) and place in oven safe pot. Fill pot with boiling water to the 2/3 of the can's height. Put pot into oven for two hours. After removing pot, let the whole shebang cool for an hour or so, and then "unmold" bread.

The bread itself is very moist, virtually crustless, with a pronounced molasses flavor... it's kinda like a massive muffin. While it goes well with butter, I imagine it would go really well paired with a mild cheddar cheese, kinda like a Bostonian take on the Jamaican classic bun and cheese. I imagine the recipe could be tweaked, substituting buttermilk for the milk, and playing with the flour proportions and amount of molasses. I think my next batch may have less molasses, as I really don't have much of a sweet tooth.

There you have it, an interesting quick-bread recipe for those of us cack-handed types who can't bake worth a damn.